Domainee vs Vercel Platforms Starter Kit
Domainee and Vercel Platforms Starter Kit both let SaaS apps connect their customers' custom domains. The interesting differences are in pricing, free tiers, and how much you can do without a sales call.
Domainee
Custom Domains API for SaaS
Custom-domain-as-a-service for SaaS apps. 50 domains and 100 GB bandwidth free forever. Public REST API + MCP server so AI agents can drive it too.
Vercel Platforms Starter Kit
Build your own custom-domain product on Vercel
An open-source Next.js template Vercel publishes. Great if you want to roll your own custom-domain feature — but you maintain the infrastructure, the certs, and the API yourself.
| Feature | Domainee | Vercel Platforms Starter Kit |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 50 domains + 100 GB, forever | No |
| Credit card required to start | No | Yes |
| Monthly minimum | $0 | Vercel hosting + your engineering time |
| Per-domain pricing | $0.20 → $0.10 (graduated) | — |
| Bandwidth pricing | 100 GB free tier · 400 GB on paid · $0.05/GB after | — |
| Public REST API | Yes | No |
| MCP server (AI agents) | Yes | No |
| Self-serve signup | Yes | Yes |
About Vercel Platforms Starter Kit's pricing
The starter kit itself is free and open-source. The real cost is engineering: you'll be on the hook for cert issuance edge cases, monitoring, multi-tenant routing, ratelimiting, billing logic, support tickets, and ongoing Vercel hosting fees that scale with your traffic.
Where Vercel Platforms Starter Kit is strong
- Maximum control — it's your codebase
- No vendor lock-in beyond Vercel itself
- Free to start, if you ignore the engineering cost
Where Domainee pulls ahead
- You build and maintain everything: cert pipelines, monitoring, retry, billing
- No drop-in API for downstream customers — you'd build that too
- No MCP / agent surface
- Vercel bandwidth + function execution costs scale with your customers' traffic
The big difference
It's a starter kit, not a product
Vercel's template gets you to a working demo in an afternoon. Production-readiness — graceful cert renewals, observability, rate limits, an external-facing API your customers can call — is months of engineering work on top.
Domainee's answer
Skip the platform-engineering project
Domainee is the production product the starter kit gestures at. Cert lifecycle, edge proxy, monitoring, public API, MCP, billing — all already shipped. Wire up our API in an afternoon and ship custom domains the same day.
Ship custom domains for free.
50 domains and 100 GB bandwidth free, forever. No credit card. The only custom-domain API with first-class MCP support for AI agents.