Disclosure first. We build CustomDomain, which competes directly with SaaS Custom Domains, and this page is on our site. Read it with that in mind. Every claim we make about them here was taken from their own live public pages on 19 August 2026: their homepage, /features, /faq, /sla, their CoAlias and Cloudflare comparison pages, their documentation at docs.saascustomdomains.com, their help center at help.saascustomdomains.com, their status page, their legal pages, and their signed out product pages at app.saascustomdomains.com, where their pricing page and terms of service live. Where we could not verify something from those pages, we say we could not verify it rather than guessing. Prices and features move, so check their site before you decide anything.

One thing to say at the top, because a comparison page that cannot name where it loses is not worth reading: at low volume they are much cheaper than us, and it is not close. At 100 domains their published rate is $29 a month. Our cheapest paid tier is $149 a month. The section on pricing below works out where that stops being true.

What each product is

SaaS Custom Domains is a proxy and edge platform for branded customer hostnames, operated by White Shores Tech d.o.o., a Croatian company, per the party list in their data processing agreement. Your customer points a record at their network, they issue and renew the certificate through ACME using Let's Encrypt or ZeroSSL, and they serve the traffic to your origin. Around that they sell a security and performance bundle: a WAF, DDoS protection, a CDN, rate limiting their pages describe as by IP, path, HTTP header, cookie and other conditions, a redirects and rules engine, custom certificate upload, and web and proxy analytics. They also sell an on premises package. Their documentation, help center and status page are all live on subdomains and are genuinely good. As of August 2026.

CustomDomain is the managed layer that gets a customer's domain configured, verified, secured and watched. We write DNS records at the customer's provider where an automated rail exists, verify ownership, and on our Growth tier and above run a reverse proxy edge that issues and renews TLS and serves the traffic. We watch for DNS drift after launch on every tier including the free one. We also search and register domains. You reach all of it through a 67 endpoint REST API, an embeddable connect widget, webhooks, and a hosted MCP server for AI agents. How it works has the full flow.

Side by side

Their column is what their own pages said on 19 August 2026. Ours is what our pricing page, our plan catalog API and our provider census said the same day.

Pricing, and where the crossover actually falls

The two bills are not measured in the same unit, which is the thing that makes this comparison awkward and also the thing worth understanding. They charge for every domain that is live in a given month. Their marketing copy on 19 August 2026 read "Start with 100 domains at $0.29 per domain. Get automatic discounts up to 50% as you scale", and their in app pricing page said the same with a 100 domain minimum. We charge for every new hostname you connect, against a block of volume you buy for the year. Our pricing page puts it this way: each hostname counts once, so theirbrand.com and app.theirbrand.com are two connections, and retrying a failed setup never counts twice.

So their bill tracks the size of your fleet and ours tracks how fast it grows. If your domains churn heavily, ours is the harsher unit. If your domains are long lived and you add few new ones, theirs is.

Holding the fleet steady so the two can be compared at all, here is what the published numbers support, checked 19 August 2026 against our $149 Startup and $649 Growth tiers:

• Under about 514 live domains, they are cheaper. Their slider prices the first 100 domains at $29 and each domain after that at $0.29, so 514 domains is about $149, which is our Startup price. Below that they win on price, and at the bottom of the range they win enormously: 100 domains costs $348 a year with them against $1,788 a year with us.
• Between roughly 514 and 600 domain connections a year, our Startup tier is the cheaper of the two. Startup is $149 a month and includes 600 domain connections a year, so that band is the only one where a like for like comparison needs no assumptions about either side's unpublished rates.
• Above 600 connections a year the two price lists stop being comparable on published numbers. Growth is $649 a month and includes the same 600 connections a year, with further volume sold in flat 1,000 domain blocks whose price we quote rather than publish. Their discounts above 1,000 domains are likewise a curve they describe rather than itemise. At that scale both sides are quoting, so get numbers from both rather than trusting anyone's arithmetic, including ours.

Some honest caveats on those figures. They are our arithmetic, not quotes from them. Only the $0.29 rate and the "up to 50%" ceiling appear in their published copy: the shape of the discount curve, which starts at 5% at 1,000 domains and reaches the 50% cap at 10,000, we read out of the pricing slider in their homepage JavaScript on 19 August 2026, so treat it as our reading rather than a published table. The figures also assume a stable fleet, where the number of live domains is what you are paying us for too. And their billing terms are not fully public: their marketing site has no /pricing page, and we could not find any published annual commitment, overage rate or contractual minimum, so we are not going to assert one.

One detail from their documentation that matters if you sell wildcards: they note that when using wildcard custom domains, every subdomain used to reach the wildcard counts toward the plan limit for the month. Wildcards are not free volume on either side.

On the free path, their own pages disagree with each other and we could not reconcile them. Their homepage and their CoAlias comparison page both say "No credit card required." Their FAQ says "You can start a 7-day free trial with your credit card." Both were live at the same time on 19 August 2026. Their terms describe a 7 day free trial after which the account is charged for the chosen subscription. Our Starter tier is a tier rather than a trial, at $0 for 10 connections a year. Our pricing page is explicit that Starter is the only tier capped at its allowance: past ten connections in a year, new connections are blocked rather than billed. That is enough to integrate and test and not enough to launch on.

Where the two products differ in kind, not degree

Who writes the DNS record

This is the real axis, and it can be stated without any argument about who is better, because both companies describe their own behavior clearly.

Their features page describes their automation as "Automated DNS configuration emails and validation for your customers." Their CoAlias comparison page names the same feature "Automated DNS Instruction Emails." Their API exposes fields called instructions_recipient and instructions_email_sent_at, documented as the recipient of the instructions email and when it was sent. And their documentation on domain types, in the wildcard section, offers per subdomain CNAME records as an alternative to a single wildcard record and tells you to "use this approach if you are adding custom domains for your users and you don't have access to their DNS management and they have to create the CNAME records themselves." That sentence is scoped to the wildcard choice rather than to their product as a whole, but it is the only place we found them describing who ends up typing the record. All checked 19 August 2026. So the instruction is automated and the verification is automated, and the record itself is typed by a human into their own DNS provider.

We do that too, for 38 of the 63 providers in our census. For the other 25 we sign in to the provider on the customer's behalf and write the record: 17 through API tokens, 6 through one click OAuth, and 2 through provider hosted Domain Connect. We publish the split rather than a single coverage total, because a single number would hide which half of it does the work. Nobody, us included, automates every provider, and every vendor in this category can claim complete coverage by falling back to showing the record and asking someone to type it.

Whether that difference is worth anything to you depends entirely on who your customers are. If they are developers who already have a DNS dashboard open, an instruction email is a fine experience and the automation buys you very little. If they are marketers, agencies or small business owners for whom the DNS panel is the point where onboarding stalls, it is the whole game. Our Domain Connect comparison goes through the same tradeoff from the protocol side.

Domains you do not own yet

We search availability, generate name suggestions and place registration orders, so a customer with no domain at all can get one and connect it in the same flow. We could find no registration, availability search or purchase capability anywhere on their site or documentation as of 19 August 2026. If you need that, we could not verify that they offer it, and you should ask them directly.

Agents

Our MCP server is public at mcp.customdomain.ai/mcp, exposes 12 tools, and has been listed in the official Model Context Protocol registry as ai.customdomain/mcp since 12 July 2026. We searched their homepage, features, FAQ, documentation and help center on 19 August 2026 and found no mention of MCP or any agent facing interface. That is not evidence that they will never ship one.

Edge security and traffic features

This is the direction that runs against us. CustomDomain is not a CDN and it is not a WAF. It is the managed layer for customer domains: DNS configuration, ownership verification, TLS issuance and renewal, and drift monitoring. Whatever caching and security you run in front of your origin today, you keep running. They ship a WAF, DDoS protection, a CDN, L7 rate limiting, a rules and redirects engine, response compression, multiple upstreams and analytics dashboards, and they state in their FAQ that they do not charge extra for bandwidth. If you want one vendor for the hostname and the edge security, they have it and we do not. As of August 2026.

When SaaS Custom Domains is the better choice

These are real cases, not a rhetorical gesture. If you are in one of them, buy from them. Every claim about them in this list was checked against their own public pages on 19 August 2026, and you should recheck it before you buy.

• You are under roughly 500 live domains and price decides it. $29 a month against $149 a month is a five fold gap at 100 domains, and no feature argument survives that if budget is the constraint.
• You want a WAF, a CDN or L7 rate limiting bundled at the customer hostname. We do not sell those and are not planning to become a CDN. They sell them as part of the same product.
• You need a self hosted, on premises or VPC deployment. Their FAQ says they offer an on premises package and have extensive experience running it for companies in their own cloud, and their enterprise section describes full deployment control, custom TLS termination, data sovereignty and private network integration. We have no self hosted product a reader can obtain today. This one is theirs outright.
• You are an EU controller who wants an EU established processor. They are a Croatian entity with Croatian governing law and EU standard contractual clauses. We are a United States company in Minneapolis.
• You build on Bubble.io. They publish a native integration and a dedicated page for it. We do not have one.
• You need to upload your own certificates, or to choose your certificate authority. Their features page documents custom certificate support including wildcard certificates with automatic renewal, and their Cloudflare comparison page lists "Selectable CA", described there as choosing your preferred certificate authority, with Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL as the defaults. We found no certificate authority option in their API reference, so if picking the CA is decisive, confirm the mechanics with them.
• Your customers are technical and self manage their DNS. If adding one CNAME is not a support burden for you, the provider automation that is our main advantage is worth close to nothing, and you are paying for something you will not use.

Several of their marketing claims we deliberately did not put in that list, because we could not verify them: "TRUSTED BY 500+ BUSINESSES", "119 locations", average latency under 75ms, and the SOC 2 and HIPAA references on their enterprise tier all appear as assertions on marketing pages with no audit report, methodology or trust page behind them that we could find. They may all be true. We just cannot confirm them, so we are not going to repeat them as facts or dismiss them as false.

On uptime, the honest thing is to state the numbers with their sources and stop. Their marketing says 99.999%, and their homepage carries 99.99% in one place and 99.999% in another. Their published SLA commits to 99.9% per calendar month, with service credits below that. Their status page on 19 August 2026 showed 99.926% for the proxy fleet over the trailing 90 days, alongside 99.968% for the API and 99.965% for the web app. The proxy figure clears their 99.9% commitment by about 0.026 of a percentage point, though the two are not measured the same way: the SLA commits per calendar month and the status page figure is a trailing 90 day average. We publish no uptime figure at all, so we have nothing to put beside those. Our pricing page says contractual SLAs come with Enterprise agreements, and that we would rather show you the two plane architecture than sell you a number.

Where our pricing is the wrong shape

We sell blocks of included volume by the year, not cents per domain by the month. That makes the bill predictable and easy to approve, and it means a block you only half use is a block you paid for in full. It also means volume is not what separates our two self serve paid tiers: Startup at $149 a month and Growth at $649 a month both include 600 domain connections a year, and the four fold difference buys the proxy edge, not more domains. If your volume sits in the gap between two of our tiers, or if your fleet is small and stable, a metered vendor will usually cost you less, and SaaS Custom Domains is a metered vendor. Price it both ways before you commit. Our comparisons of Approximated and Cloudflare for SaaS carry their published rates and the dates we checked them, so you can put three metered bills next to ours.

Three more limits worth knowing before you talk to us. Our reverse proxy edge starts on the Growth tier at $649 a month, and certificate issuance and renewal ride on that edge, so Starter and Startup configure and verify domains without terminating TLS or serving traffic on them. Our monitoring is DNS drift detection, with fleet scale monitoring policies and alerting reserved for Premium and above: it compares live public DNS against what the connection stored, and on no tier does it probe your origin for reachability, status codes or latency. And we do not ship SSO or SCIM on any tier, including Enterprise, which is a real gap if your security review requires them.

The short version

If you want an edge with security features attached, or a deployment inside your own infrastructure, or you have a few hundred domains and a tight budget, they are the better buy and the pricing gap at the bottom of the range is not something we can argue away. If the expensive part of your custom domain feature is getting non technical customers through their DNS provider, or you need to sell the domain as well as connect it, or you want agents driving the flow, that is what we built. Our feature list and our pricing are both public, and you can book a walkthrough against your own provider mix and volume.