CUSTOM DOMAIN
Ask a founder what it costs to let customers bring their own domain and you will hear a number that only ever goes up. The closed, per-domain platforms make that math the whole business. You pay a floor of hundreds a month before a single customer has connected anything, and then a metered fee stacks on top of every domain after that. The pricing is designed to grow with your success in the most literal way: the better you do, the more the bill punishes you for it.
That is the per-domain tax. It is easy to miss when you are shopping, because the sticker price looks like a normal SaaS line item. It is hard to ignore two years later, when custom domains are a core feature and the invoice has quietly become one of your largest fixed costs.
What the per-domain tax really covers
Here is the uncomfortable part. Most of what you are paying for is not compute. It is documentation and support. When a platform hands DNS setup back to the customer, someone has to explain how to do it, and someone has to rescue the roughly half of customers who get stuck. The vendor absorbs that cost, prices it into the per-domain fee, and passes it straight to you.
The tax is not one line. It is a bundle of small charges that hide inside a single monthly number. Once you break it apart, you can see exactly what you are being billed for and why so much of it should not exist at all.
| Hidden cost | Where it comes from | With one-click setup |
|---|---|---|
| Per-registrar docs | Every DNS provider has a different UI, so support writes and maintains a guide for each | The provider is detected and its records are written for you, so the guide is unnecessary |
| Failed onboardings | Half of customers mistype a record or give up before the domain resolves | The user never types a value, so the common failure modes cannot occur |
| Support tickets | Wrong MX priority, a missing trailing dot, propagation confusion | Records are applied by template and verified automatically |
| Per-domain platform fee | The vendor's margin on all of the above, metered on every domain | flat-tier pricing at all |
Why manual setup is the expensive path
Line the two flows up side by side and the tax becomes obvious. The manual path is not just slower for the customer. It is the thing that generates every downstream cost you end up paying for.
- Send the customer to find their zone editor
- Ask them to add records by hand across an unfamiliar UI
- Wait for propagation, then field the tickets when it breaks
- Absorb the churn from everyone who quits at this step
- The customer types their domain
- We detect the DNS provider automatically
- They approve one plain-language screen
- Records are written, ownership verified, HTTPS issued
The right column is the whole point. When customers connect their domain in one click, the per-registrar docs, the failed onboardings, and the ticket queue simply stop being your problem. There is nothing to translate, so there is nothing to break.
What you actually get
Custom Domain does the same job the closed platforms do, without the metered fee sitting on top of it. We auto-configure more than 25 DNS providers, or hand off a signed, provider-hosted one-click flow where that is the cleaner route. We issue and renew certificates automatically at the edge, reverse-proxy traffic to your origin, and fire webhooks the moment anything changes. One REST API, one embeddable widget, one console.
- Detect the provider. The customer types a domain and we identify where its DNS lives.
- Write the records with consent. They approve one screen and we apply the exact records the service needs.
- Verify and secure. We confirm ownership, issue HTTPS, and keep the certificate renewed.
The real saving
You are not just cutting a line item. You are removing the support burden that the per-domain fee was pricing in, and recovering the customers who used to disappear at the DNS step. Start free and see how a one-click connection works.
Custom domains should be a feature you ship, not a tax you pay every month for the privilege of growing. Price it once, pass none of it on, and let the connection just work.
Custom domains, on autopilot
Let your customers connect their own domain in one click, with flat-tier pricing. We detect their DNS provider, write the records, verify ownership, and issue HTTPS, while they just approve one screen.
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