Cloudflare for SaaS vs Custom Domain: an honest comparison

Entri earned its reputation by fixing one of the most painful moments in SaaS onboarding: the step where you ask a customer to update DNS records and a meaningful share of them give up. Its provider integrations write records at the customer's DNS host automatically, and for many platforms that turned bring your own domain from a support queue into a feature.

It is not the right fit for every team, though. As of July 2026, Entri's published pricing starts at $249 per month for 600 automatic domain connections per year, hosting and routing infrastructure arrives with the $749 per month tier, and no free tier appears on its pricing page (check their site for current pricing). If you run a platform with 40 customer domains, or 40,000, or you simply want the onboarding flow and the TLS edge from a single vendor, there are real alternatives worth weighing.

Below are six of them. One disclosure before anything else: we build Custom Domain, the first product on this list, and this article lives on our blog. Read it with that in mind. Every claim about the other products comes from their own public sites, every price is dated, and every vendor is linked so you can verify things yourself.

1. Custom Domain (that is us)

Custom Domain covers the whole journey rather than one segment of it. Your customer connects their domain in one click, we verify ownership, configure DNS, issue the certificate, and keep watching the domain after it goes live. We support 63 DNS and registrar providers through one-click provider authorization, API tokens, or a guided manual flow that verifies automatically, and a domain is typically live in about 30 seconds. Under the hood there is a control plane plus a reverse-proxy edge that terminates TLS with strict multi-tenant isolation, all fully managed. The full flow is on our how it works page.

You can integrate at whatever depth suits you: an embeddable "connect your domain" widget and SDK for the fastest path, a full REST API covering connections, records, TLS, monitoring, webhooks, and registrar search and purchase, and an MCP server so AI agents can provision and debug domains directly. Pricing starts at $0: the Starter tier includes 10 domain connections a year with the API, webhooks, and dashboard. Paid tiers are flat with included volume, from $249 per month, and the $749 per month Growth tier adds the managed edge with automatic HTTPS.

The honest tradeoffs: flat tiers mean you buy blocks of volume rather than paying cents per domain, which is simpler to budget but can cost more than metered billing at some in-between volumes. And if all you want is raw certificate plumbing on a network you already pay for, an infrastructure primitive like Cloudflare for SaaS may be cheaper, provided you are happy building the customer facing flow yourself.

2. Approximated

Approximated is a managed reverse proxy for custom domains. You make one API call to register a customer's hostname, their DNS points at your dedicated cluster, and Approximated handles certificate issuance, renewal, routing to your origin, and health monitoring. It advertises 99.993% average domain uptime and lists customers including Lemon Squeezy, Instantly, and Churnkey.

Pricing is metered and public: $0.20 per domain per month with a $20 monthly minimum, 400 GB of bandwidth included, $0.05 per GB beyond that, and volume discounts of 5% per 1,000 domains up to a 50% cap, as of July 2026 (check their site for current pricing). A 7 day trial is available.

Its strengths are maturity and depth: framework guides for Next.js, Rails, Laravel, and Phoenix, strong monitoring, and unusual edge capabilities such as request modification, WAF, and DDoS protection. The tradeoffs: your customers still create DNS records by hand (Approximated confirms them rather than writing them at the provider), you build the onboarding UI around the API, and bandwidth metering is worth modeling if your tenants serve heavy traffic.

3. Cloudflare for SaaS

Cloudflare for SaaS is the infrastructure primitive underneath many platforms: custom hostnames on Cloudflare's global network. Your customer points a CNAME at your zone, Cloudflare issues and renews the certificate, and traffic rides one of the largest edges on the internet.

Entry pricing is hard to beat: the first 100 custom hostnames are free, then $0.10 per hostname per month on the Free, Pro, and Business plans, as of July 2026 (check their site for current pricing). Standard plans cap at 50,000 hostnames, and advanced needs such as custom certificates, wildcard custom hostnames, and mTLS sit behind Enterprise contracts.

The tradeoff is that it is a primitive, not a product. There is no customer facing connection flow, no provider automation, and no guided verification. You build the DNS instructions, the ownership checks, the apex domain handling, the monitoring, and the support tooling yourself. For a team with infrastructure engineers and existing Cloudflare usage, that is a fine trade. For a team that wants domain onboarding to be someone else's job, it is the beginning of a project rather than the end of one.

4. SaaS Custom Domains

SaaS Custom Domains is a managed platform in a similar shape to Approximated. Your customers' hostnames terminate on its network, which advertises 119 locations, a 99.999% uptime guarantee, and average latency under 75 ms, with a CDN, WAF, and DDoS protection included. Integration is a REST API with webhooks and an analytics dashboard, and the company claims setups that go live in about five minutes.

Pricing as of July 2026 is $0.20 per domain per month, starting at $20 per month for the first 100 domains, with automatic discounts up to 50% as volume grows; enterprise arrangements go through sales (check their site for current pricing). The site lists more than 500 businesses as customers, including Memberstack and Val Town.

Strengths: a solid security and performance bundle for the price, and public metered pricing that gets cheaper per unit as you grow. The tradeoffs mirror the category: DNS setup is guided and verified rather than written at the customer's provider, and the connection experience inside your product is yours to design and build.

5. Domainee

Domainee is a newer, deliberately simple entry. One API call returns a CNAME target, your customer adds the record, and SSL provisions automatically through Let's Encrypt and renews indefinitely. It includes DNS health monitoring with webhooks, apex and subdomain routing, and, notably, an MCP server so AI agents can manage domains, plus domain registration at wholesale price plus a flat $1 fee.

Its pricing is among the most generous in the category as of July 2026: 50 domains and 100 GB of monthly bandwidth free forever with no card required, then $0.20 per domain per month tapering to $0.10 at 10,000 or more domains, with 400 GB of bandwidth included on paid plans and $0.05 per GB beyond (check their site for current pricing).

Strengths: the free tier alone covers many early stage platforms, every price is public with no sales gate, and the MCP server puts it ahead of most of the category on agent workflows. Tradeoffs: it is a smaller, younger product that positions itself for teams with roughly 50 to 5,000 customer hostnames, and DNS setup means CNAME instructions with automatic verification rather than records written at the provider.

6. SaaSKevin

SaaSKevin optimizes for one thing: the least integration work possible. You paste an embeddable widget into your app, your customer adds their domain through it, and your backend reads a single HTTP header to know which tenant a request belongs to. The company claims about three lines of backend code and roughly five minutes to a working setup, with proxying, certificates, and DNS verification handled for you.

Pricing as of July 2026 is a flat $0.15 per domain per month after 3 free domains, with no minimum spend and bandwidth included under a fair use policy (check their site for current pricing). That is the lowest metered rate on this list, with no separate bandwidth line to model.

Strengths: genuinely fast to adopt, a widget included by default, and simple billing. Tradeoffs: the free allowance is small, the widget-first approach can feel constraining for teams that want to own every pixel of onboarding, and it is a small vendor, which cuts both ways: focused and responsive, but worth the usual diligence for anything in your critical path.

Comparison at a glance

Product	Model	Starting price	Free tier	Writes DNS records at the provider	Managed TLS edge
Entri (reference)	Connection automation, infrastructure add on	$249/mo for 600 connections/yr	None listed	Yes, 50+ providers	On the $749/mo tier
Custom Domain	End to end platform	Free; paid from $249/mo	10 connections/yr	Yes, 63 providers	Yes, on Growth and above
Approximated	Managed proxy	$0.20/domain/mo ($20 minimum)	7 day trial	No; monitored manual records	Yes
Cloudflare for SaaS	Infrastructure primitive	$0.10/hostname/mo	First 100 hostnames	No	Yes
SaaS Custom Domains	Managed proxy	$0.20/domain/mo (from $20/mo)	None listed	No; guided and verified	Yes
Domainee	API platform	Free; then $0.20/domain/mo	50 domains + 100 GB	No; CNAME with automatic verification	Yes
SaaSKevin	Widget platform	Free; then $0.15/domain/mo	3 domains	Widget guided setup	Yes

Pricing was gathered from each vendor's public site in July 2026. Check each site for current pricing before you commit.

How to choose

By scale

Under 100 domains, free tiers decide it. Cloudflare's first 100 hostnames are free if you will build the flow, Domainee gives you 50 domains, Custom Domain's Starter tier gives you 10 connections a year with the full API, and SaaSKevin gives you 3. From hundreds to a few thousand domains, do the arithmetic: at 1,000 domains, the metered vendors land around $150 to $200 per month, while flat tiers trade a higher floor for predictable invoices and bundled connection automation. Past 10,000, everything becomes a conversation: Cloudflare Enterprise and the top tiers of Entri, Custom Domain, and the managed proxies all negotiate, and per unit prices fall sharply.

By budget

If the budget is zero, start free and defer the decision until customers force it. If the budget is real but modest, metered vendors keep spend proportional to adoption: SaaSKevin at $0.15 per domain, Approximated, SaaS Custom Domains, and Domainee at $0.20, all as of July 2026. If predictability matters more, or domain connections gate your revenue and you want the DNS step itself automated rather than explained, flat tiers from Entri or Custom Domain buy you fewer surprises and a smoother customer experience.

By build versus buy appetite

Be honest about how much of this you want to own. Cloudflare for SaaS is a build: excellent primitives, everything else on you. The managed proxies (Approximated, SaaS Custom Domains, Domainee) are a partial build: they run the edge and the certificates while you design the onboarding. Widget approaches, meaning SaaSKevin and our own widget and SDK, are closest to a pure buy. And the deepest automation, where records are written at the customer's DNS provider instead of pasted by hand, currently comes from Entri and Custom Domain. Our guide to adding custom domains to your SaaS walks through the decision in more depth, and automating TLS for customer domains covers the certificate half, including multi-tenant TLS.

The bottom line

Every product here is a credible way out of DNS support tickets, which is more than this category could say a few years ago. If you want raw primitives and have the team, take Cloudflare. If you want metered simplicity, look at Approximated, SaaS Custom Domains, Domainee, or SaaSKevin. If you want the connection flow itself automated across 63 providers, with TLS, monitoring, a widget, an API, and an MCP server from one vendor, that is what we built. You can start on the free tier in a few minutes, or book a demo and we will walk through it against your own stack.