Competitive by what metric? My site lives more or less entirely within the AWS free tier. I think my total AWS bill is around $20/mo, and 80% of that is for the stupid number of domain names I’m hosting zones for.

Quick question: Why wouldn't I use my free tier registrar DNS? Are there really that man DNS queries serviced cause you pay based off the number of responses? Especially if they are stupid domains.

As far as I can tell, there’s only 2 upsides I’m getting by using AWS as a registrar:

1. I’m lazy, and I already manage a bunch of other stuff in AWS, so it’s convenient for me to have the domains in the same place

2. For some of the domains, I’m serving records that point to other AWS resources (like Cloudfront and S3). AWS’s Route53 has clever helper features when you’re pointing records at other AWS services).

Otherwise, you’re right that there’s plenty of registrars that’ll do perfectly solid DNS

For me my static sites are small enough that it all falls within the free tier and I can deploy everything using the CDK.

If you're ok with using Cloudflare's free plan for your DNS, you can stop paying for each hosted zone.