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.
I would not trust any of the registrars, not even Hover.