Should you build custom-domain infrastructure or buy it? The sticker prices make buying look expensive and building look free. The total cost of ownership tells a different story, because the real cost of building is not servers — it is engineering and on-call time. Use the calculator, then read the honest breakdown.
| Provider | Est. monthly | Per domain | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| cnames.dev | $49 | $0.049 | $49/mo per 1,000 domains |
| Cloudflare for SaaS | $115 | $0.115 | $90 hostnames + $25 base plan (100 free) |
| SaaSKevin | $150 | $0.150 | 0.15/domain/mo, scales linearly |
| Entri | $249+ | — | Published entry price; higher tiers sales-led |
| Self-host (Caddy) | $60+ | — | Infra floor only — excludes engineering + on-call |
Estimates for comparison only, using publicly listed pricing as of July 2026. Cloudflare figures assume a $25/mo base plan and exclude bandwidth, WAF, and Enterprise features; Entri and self-host are floors, not per-domain rates. Re-verify each vendor's live pricing before making a decision.
What the calculator does and doesn't include
The numbers above are directional, using publicly listed pricing as of July 2026. They cover the vendor cost. What they deliberately leave out is the expensive part of building: your team's time. That is the whole point of a TCO comparison.
The DIY cost that is not on the invoice
A single-node Caddy setup with on-demand TLS genuinely works in a weekend. Then production arrives and you build, and maintain:
- Rate-limit-aware issuance — DNS pre-checks, backoff, negative caching, queueing, a fallback CA. See Let's Encrypt rate limits at scale.
- Multi-node certificate storage — a shared store so any node can serve any host without re-issuing, plus warm-up on cold nodes.
- Anycast — for handshake latency that does not depend on where the visitor is.
- Real client IP + fail-closed routing — see the real client IP post and the proxy anatomy.
- On-call — you are now in the TLS path for other people's production traffic. That pager is the real cost.
Put a conservative number on it: a few engineer-weeks to build, then a slice of an engineer's time indefinitely to maintain. At a loaded cost of, say, $12k/month for an engineer, even 15% of their time is $1,800/month — more than the managed fee for thousands of domains. The infra line ($60/mo of servers) is a rounding error next to it.
When building is the right call
Building genuinely wins when custom domains are so central to your product that you need to own edge behavior others can't give you, or your scale is large enough that per-domain fees would exceed a dedicated team. That is a real place to be — it is just further out than most teams think. The honest self-host trade-off is in cnames.dev vs self-hosting Caddy on-demand TLS.
When buying wins
For nearly everyone else, a managed per-domain fee is cheaper than the engineering it replaces and ships in an afternoon. That is the case for cnames.dev: $49/mo per 1,000 domains, free for 25, SSL and edge routing and real client IP included, one API call per domain. Compare the managed options in Cloudflare for SaaS pricing and Entri pricing explained, and see the full architecture you would otherwise be building in the complete guide.