In the underlying system there is no difference. A renewal is just a transfer/registration leaving the data unchanged.
All cost the same and add 1 year of lifetime to the domain.
Any other pricing is invented by that specific registrar and doesn’t reflect actual costs.
There’s definitely some upcharge in there. .coms at cloudflare are $10.46 for instance.
Since transfers are usually cheaper than renewals, I’ll often do that to keep costs down.
In the underlying system there is no difference. A renewal is just a transfer/registration leaving the data unchanged.
All cost the same and add 1 year of lifetime to the domain.
Any other pricing is invented by that specific registrar and doesn’t reflect actual costs.