The obvious go-to choice was Cloudflare for us too, but then it turned out you can't use CF just as a registrar (at least on the basic plan or equivalent), you need to use Cloudflare's nameservers as well... But we use Google's Cloud DNS for everything, so that was a showstopper. In the end we went with AWS Route 53.
CF could probably get a lot more customers if they would allow you to use custom nameservers for your domain.
> CF could probably get a lot more customers if they would allow you to use custom nameservers for your domain.
Why would they want that? The whole point of CF as a registrar was so you could use the other services. The registrar is sold at cost. It's a way to lock you in.
It would lower the barrier to switch to Cloudflare for new customers, and once they are inside with a credit card on file it’s arguably easier to explore their product offerings
I don’t think it’s the case even on a paid tier, if it is I can’t find any reference to it. There are a lot of posts on their community support form where the recommendation is to use another registrar. https://community.cloudflare.com/t/use-cloudflare-registrar-...
That option means "your nameservers are now ns1/ns2 on your domain but they still map to Cloudflare", not "you get to pick your own third-party nameservers".
CF could probably get a lot more customers if they would allow you to use custom nameservers for your domain.