Godaddy is shitty, 1and1 is still giving free .com with no strings attached. All you have to do is set up a subscription to pay the $8.99 next year renewal. It is paypal, so you can just sign in your paypal and cancel the renewal anytime.
I did it last week and got my free .com domain
Also netfirms was selling .coms for $3.99 with the promo code dollardomain i bought like 50 domains that way one by one, but one day i forgot to enter promocode and ended up paying $7.99 and I asked them to refund the $4 and they did but told me the terms were for only 1 domain, but they still let me keep the 50 domains I paid $4 each for. Havnt bought a doimain since then but i suspect the code still works...
and here is the latest godaddy promocode (_)(_)llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllD:aargh4: