Namecheap and Cloudflare are registrars, not registries. Amazon does have a registry, but it only seems to offer a few gTLDs and I don't think they're especially popular (I think the biggest is .bot and it has some slightly weird eligibility requirements).

Do you mind sharing more details? And did you go to transfer the domain before or after the redemption period?

Had the domain for a year and when it came time for renewal (1 month before expiry) it had been marked as premium and had a higher renewal price, so I tried to move it to several other providers only to be met with a “can’t move domain because it’s premium” error message everywhere I tried. So I paid the inflated price, moved everything to a different domain and setup redirects (obviously will not be renewing it again).

What TLD was it, if you don't mind me asking?

The domain is brrr.biz I was going to use it for small fast services. Only thing on it at the moment is a “what’s my IP” lookup for use in scripts (https://fossil.chillfox.com/echo_ip/home) which I will just be hosting under my primary .com instead going forward.

I think I am done getting cutesy domains for projects and will just use subdomains going forward to avoid this kind of headache.

edit: One of the things I wanted to put on that domain was an ngrok like service targeting regions where ngrog is high latency, because I could really use that myself.

Can you explain more? I have a bunch of domains on namecheap and I thought I was paying a premium for trust....

So did I, but after that experience I have been moving them to AWS instead.

So I had the domain for a year, I specifically went out of my way to find a domain that was not premium, but when it came time to renew it was marked as premium, and when I tried to move it I got error messages like “can’t move domain because it’s premium”.