Alternative to Cloudflare for SaaS for more than 50k custom domains

vitobotta

I have an idea for a project I might actually build in 2026, which would offer users the ability to configure custom domains for their accounts.

Years ago I used to run a blogging platform that I built myself for a couple of years, and I had to do a lot of work to implement custom domains support, which is something I'd rather not have to do again.

I use Cloudflare for a lot of things and I know they now have a product called "Cloudflare for SaaS" which makes it ridiculously easy to add a custom domains feature to a SaaS product, but it supports max 50k domains per account. Beyond that, it's enterprise pricing so I don't know how expensive it would be. Perhaps it would be fine, since already 50k paying customers (the custom domains feature would be a paid only feature) would mean quite a good revenue already, but I am wondering about scalability in the event the product takes off. If it does, 50k is really not a lot of domains.

As an alternative I found https://saascustomdomains.com/ which I had never heard of before, but they claim to support unlimited domains. They cost twice as much as Cloudflare at $0.20 per domain per month, instead of $0.10 (with Cloudflare the first 100 domains are free also).

Have you used any of these or similar products?

For my old project I implemented custom domains with multiple ingress controllers in Kubernetes, and each custom domain had its own ingress resource. In theory I could do that again but scalability would be a problem, because of etcd and the number of objects that would have to be stored in etcd. I have read that Traefik for example can read routes from a relational database instead of using resources stored in etcd, but I don't think Traefik scales much anyway.

I have also read that Caddy can support losts of virtual hosts even on a single machine, but I don't have much experience with it.

In general, I would prefer using something like Cloudflare for SaaS for the simplicity of it, but I am open to suggestions.

Has any of you implemented custom domains support for a SaaS product?

legendary

Can you ELI5 what is "custom domain"?

vitobotta

@legendary said:
Can you ELI5 what is "custom domain"?

A domain the customer owns and can use to access the SaaS product with a vanity URL.

legendary

So it is like: iam.legendary ?

vitobotta

@legendary said:
So it is like: iam.legendary ?

Yeah if you use that domain with a third party SaaS product, it is the same kind of feature I am referring to.

nikhm2n

@vitobotta said: project I might actually build

@vitobotta said: in the event the product takes off

I am seeing two ifs in your post, and they both are difficult things. What you've posted about, worry about it once you've built the product, it's taken off, and is heading towards the 50k domain mark.
Focusing on building the project would be better management of time, imho.

vitobotta

@nikhm2n said:

@vitobotta said: project I might actually build

@vitobotta said: in the event the product takes off

I am seeing two ifs in your post, and they both are difficult things. What you've posted about, worry about it once you've built the product, it's taken off, and is heading towards the 50k domain mark.
Focusing on building the project would be better management of time, imho.

Fair enough, but I don't want to start a project with an architecture that might be challenging to scale.

Pichilu

Self promotion

vitobotta

@Pichilu said:
Self promotion

Are you for real? Promotion of what? Do you see any names of links of a product that as I mentioned I haven't built yet? Some people really have nothing better to do than to troll.

TheDP

@Pichilu said:
Self promotion

This, is self promotion.