I thought Cloudflare had a deliberately manual (and therefore more secure but also more expensive and slower) process for registering domains. Has that changed?

I didn't have much issue with the process, it seemed like any other. A local business is a friend of mine, they were paying too much for too little from their previous web host/dev so I transferred the domain name to CF and ran their WordPress "business card" type site through a static site generator, placed all the files in GitHub, and pointed CF Pages at the repo. Whenever they want to make changes, they spin up the current state of WordPress in LocalWP, make the changes, I run it through the static site generator and push the files to GitHub. Takes them a few hours of messing around to get their content right and takes me 5-15 minutes to jamstack it to GitHub. Free hosting and cheap/simple DNS.

That sounds interesting. Which static site generator?

(Currently happy with the bitnami wordpress image, but wouldn't mind going 100% static!)

Not OP, but I just downloaded one such WordPress business card website with wget and put it into S3/CloudFront.

We offer a zero-markup registrar on self-service platform also - https://blog.cloudflare.com/registrar-for-everyone/

Ah, cool :)

Registering domains is very fast. To transfer a domain Cloudflare insists that you use them for DNS, but I already do that.

For the transfer it’s just like anywhere else. Initiate the transfer, get the code from the other registrar and wait for it to go through.

>> To transfer a domain Cloudflare insists that you use them for DNS

That feels… slimy…

I mean, 99% of the reason to have a domain with Cloudflare is their DNS/WAF/CDN and the options you get from having them at the edge. If CF isn’t handling your DNS they can’t provide those services without some very specific configurations that aren’t for the faint of heart.

You can use anybody as a registrar if you don’t want those tools though. CF sells domains at cost so it’s not something they aren’t making money on.