Why we built Domainee

At Common Ninja, we've been building a platform that lets businesses add powerful, no-code functionality to their websites. 200+ widgets, hundreds of integrations, and over 500,000 businesses using us across Shopify, Wix, WordPress, and dozens of other platforms.

Over the years, that work spun out two newer products. Embeddable, our AI-powered builder for custom widgets and landing pages. Vidocu, our AI platform that turns product videos into help articles and documentation. Same team, different problems.

What kept showing up underneath all three was the same request, phrased a hundred different ways: “Can my customer use their own domain?”

The first version of “support custom domains” is always a weekend. A CNAME, a reverse proxy, a self-signed cert in dev. Demo to the team on Friday, ship Monday.

The issue was everything that came after.

Each domain needed a Let's Encrypt cert that renewed itself forever. Each cert needed an ACME-compliant challenge that didn't fall over when DNS propagated slowly. Each customer needed a DNS monitor so we'd know when their record went live, and another monitor for when it broke months later. Each request needed an edge that could SNI-route at scale without choking on a new hostname.

Then came webhooks. Retries. Idempotency. A rate-limited public API. A dashboard to manage it. Support tickets at 2am when a cert failed to renew and a customer's storefront went dark.

What looked like a weekend feature was actually a quarter of platform engineering. Multiplied by three products.

At some point we stopped trying to bolt custom-domain logic into each product separately and asked a different question: what if one service handled it for all of them?

A single edge. A single REST API. A single set of webhooks. Common Ninja, Vidocu, and Embeddable would all just call it, and they do, in production, today. New internal products could call it too. Customers would only ever see one CNAME instruction in the UI.

That internal experiment became Domainee.

The impact was immediate. What used to take a quarter took an afternoon. Cert renewals stopped being something we tracked manually. Edge cases (Cloudflare-proxied customer DNS, CAA records that block Let's Encrypt, idle domains that expire) became codified handlers instead of folklore in a Slack channel. Our support volume for “my custom domain is broken” dropped to near zero.

We started telling other SaaS founders about it, expecting nods. Instead, we got the same response from every single one: “You should just sell that.”

Every product team we spoke to had hit the exact same wall. Custom domains felt like an afternoon, then turned into a quarter, then turned into a permanent on-call rotation. Existing options either started at $20/mo from day one, or hid pricing behind a sales call, or capped on monthly requests in a way that punished traffic spikes.

So we turned Domainee into a standalone product. Same engine that runs custom domains for Common Ninja, Embeddable, and Vidocu, offered as a public API with a real free tier and a published price.

To make “support custom domains” the boring part of your roadmap. The line item that takes an afternoon, not a quarter. The integration you ship without thinking about cert renewals at 2am or negotiating an enterprise contract.

Having shipped this for ourselves across three products, we know where the edges hurt. Domainee is the version that comes with those edges already filed down.