Are they really free though if the price is higher than alternatives? Also the renewal costs look like they're mostly regcost + $2 for some reason

The higher renewal charge is odd, I hadn't noticed that before. It's nothing like most of the TLDs, but it is nearly half of what they list [1] as trending.

That aside, I'm still glad to pay a little more for the overall better service. If they were charging anything like the old Network Solutions prices, that'd be a different matter.

[1] https://www.hover.com/domain-pricing

Yeah in all honestly a couple extra $ wouldn't put me off using them, I was more wondering if there was a decent reason behind it. Having said that I'm paying almost $20/year less for my io domains at Namecheap, that one's a bit of a steep difference

Once a domain is registered all they need to do really is process auto-renew payments, notify me if my card was declined for any reason, and make sure it's kept registered at the registry.

Unfortunately in any case though I've stopped at the gate, they don't appear to have an API

Whois privacy included in the price is still much better than having to remember to buy and renew the service per domain.

Any registrar making money on whois privacy has an option and motive to autorenew the privacy with the domain. If anything Namecheap bugs me with it because I don't want whois privacy on my domains!

If you don't want it, then you can use pretty much every other registrar that doesn't build it in.

But an issue with whois privacy is that if you ever don't have it for a period (like you forget to renew/autorenew), then it's now saved in a number of DNS/whois history services.

Those services are probably also in breach of GDPR. :-)