Experiment: Can you run a business on a .tk domain in 2024?

So I got this idea, right? Everyone says free domains are trash, nobody trusts them, email filters eat them alive. But I wanted to see with my own eyes, caramba! Set up a little dropshipping test on a .tk, nothing fancy, just a Shopify clone on a cheap VPS from Contabo.

Week 1: Facebook ad account flagged immediately. Not banned, just "under review" for 5 days. Nossa! Payment processor (Stripe clone) asked extra verification on second transaction. Conversion rate? 0.3% vs 2.1% on my .com control store. Same product, same creative.

Week 2: Gmail started putting my order confirmations in spam. Not Yahoo, not Outlook, just Gmail. Weird. Tried SPF, DKIM, DMARC, no difference. Customer support emails had like 40% "not delivered" bounce rate.

Week 3: Woke up to "domain suspended - terms of service violation." No email, no appeal link, no explanation in the registry panel. Just poof. Three weeks of data, gone. Kkkkk what a joke.

TL;DR: Don't. Not even for testing. The trust penalty is real and the registry can kill you without warning.

Tried .tk back in 2019 for a debian mirror lol. Same story tbh suspended after 11 days with zero warning. Moved to a .ml and that lasted almost a year before same thing. Free tlds are basically landlord that evicts you for looking at them wrong lol

RTFM on registry policies

- `suspension_reason: null`
- `appeal_process: undefined`
- `business_continuity: false`

Yaml
Free_domain:
Hidden_costs:
- reputation
- email deliverability
- sleep
Uptime: "lol"

RTFM doesn't help when the manual is blank. /s