I have no love for GoDaddy, but honestly, it sounds like you failed to renew your domain because your credit card was expired and their renewal warnings probably went into your spam folder the same way their most recent one did.
Sucks to say, but this is kind of on you. In general with any company, having a secondary payment method on file doesn't matter because autopay is only enabled for one (this is a feature, not a bug). And if their e-mails went to your spam, that's ultimately your problem as well (domain registrar e-mails are critical, you need to whitelist those).
I find it extremely unlikely that there were "no further emails or announcements" -- registrars are generally desperate to have you keep renewing, and will repeatedly send you e-mails if autopay fails. (Intentionally allowing GoDaddy domains of mine to expire in the past probably sent me 10-20 warning e-mails each, often daily.) But if your spam folder autodeletes messages after X days you can't find those either.
In any case, GoDaddy didn't cancel your domain -- you let it expire. And the €150 isn't a fine, it's a redemption fee which is standard with any registrar to recover a cancelled domain. With any registrar if you let your domain expire, it's going to get expensive.
This happened to me on Hover. The fishy part is if you say you won’t pay it and bargain it magically goes down to 50-90 usd.
That makes me think they have control over the price and take a hit just to secure the lower amount.
I would not trust any of the registrars, not even Hover.
As far as I can tell from Googling, the €150 fee is something Verisign charges GoDaddy for domain redemption -- €150 is the rate for .com names, other TLD's have different rates.
So no, it doesn't appear to be a GoDaddy fee at all. It appears they could charge a premium on top of that, but they don't appear to be doing so in this case (assuming it's a .com).
(But correct that's it's not a government fee either.)
Redemption fees are set by the registry, not the registrar. Of course the registrars apply their standard markup but I don't know of a registrar that will add an unreasonable markup to the already prohibitive restore prices.
> That makes me think they have control over the price
Well yeah, registrar is a business, of course you have some say on the price you sell your domains... But there's a base price that is set by the registry behind the registrars
As an example, the .com is sold by Verisign (the registry) around 9 USD for the create/renew, but around 50 USD for the restore, depending on the negotiated price between the registrar and Verisign. So basically no registrar will allow you to restore a domain in redemption period for less than 50 USD.
Sucks to say, but this is kind of on you. In general with any company, having a secondary payment method on file doesn't matter because autopay is only enabled for one (this is a feature, not a bug). And if their e-mails went to your spam, that's ultimately your problem as well (domain registrar e-mails are critical, you need to whitelist those).
I find it extremely unlikely that there were "no further emails or announcements" -- registrars are generally desperate to have you keep renewing, and will repeatedly send you e-mails if autopay fails. (Intentionally allowing GoDaddy domains of mine to expire in the past probably sent me 10-20 warning e-mails each, often daily.) But if your spam folder autodeletes messages after X days you can't find those either.
In any case, GoDaddy didn't cancel your domain -- you let it expire. And the €150 isn't a fine, it's a redemption fee which is standard with any registrar to recover a cancelled domain. With any registrar if you let your domain expire, it's going to get expensive.