GoDaddy Domain Connect in 2026: closed to new templates
GoDaddy is not onboarding new Domain Connect templates. We asked it to enable ours in September 2026, and its DNS product team replied that it is "not currently accepting new templates for direct onboarding," with no timeline, and pointed us to Entri. Templates GoDaddy enabled in earlier years still work, but of the 1,014 templates merged since its June 2025 deal with Entri, GoDaddy has enabled 36.
Below: what we sent, what came back, the three-year fight that explains it, a check of every public template against GoDaddy, Cloudflare and IONOS, and what to build instead.
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What we sent, and what GoDaddy said
Domain Connect is the open protocol GoDaddy created so a SaaS app can write DNS records at the customer's provider through a consent screen. No copying records by hand.
The process has two halves. You publish a template describing your records and get it merged into the shared Domain-Connect/Templates repository. Then each DNS provider decides, separately, whether to switch it on.
We did the first half by the book:
- Two templates,
edge-apex(two A records plus awwwCNAME) andedge-subdomain(one CNAME at a host the customer picks). - Apply URLs signed with a key published in DNS, which the repository treats as required.
- Merged upstream in pull request #1805 on 10 September 2026, after passing the linter and the online editor test.
- An onboarding email to GoDaddy's Domain Connect address on 13 September with the template links, the provider ID, the public key location and a logo.
The reply came the next day from a Senior Product Manager for DNS:
We are not currently accepting new templates for direct onboarding. There is no defined timeline for onboarding new templates, however, Entri Connect offers a fully supported, immediate alternative that gets your users connected to GoDaddy domains without any wait. It's free to try for the first month, and no long term commitment. (Just mention Domain Connect to their support team and they'll refund your first month after sign up)
Read that again. The company that wrote the protocol, asked to enable a signed template its own community repository had already accepted, sends you to a paid third party. And tells you how to get the first month refunded.
We replied that we'd rather not route our customers' DNS changes through a third party, and asked to be listed if direct onboarding reopens. As of 14 September 2026 both templates still return 404 at GoDaddy's Domain Connect API.
How it got here
None of this is new. It's where a dispute that went public in 2024 ended up. Most of what's known about the early part comes from Entri's first amended complaint, filed 11 July 2024 in the Eastern District of Virginia (case 1:24-cv-00569). Those are Entri's allegations, not findings, and the case settled before trial.
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| April 2022 | Entri and GoDaddy sign an agreement; Entri starts configuring GoDaddy domains through Domain Connect | Complaint ¶102 |
| August 2023 | A GoDaddy representative tells Entri over Slack: "All Domain Connect asks are currently on hold. Resources are at a premium and the DNS team is extremely busy." | Complaint ¶92 |
| 31 August 2023 | GoDaddy's business development director proposes Entri pay a "license fee" to keep using Domain Connect | Complaint ¶94 |
| December 2023 | GoDaddy tells SaaS companies using Entri: "We are not working with any aggregator services, like Entri, and the only way to have GoDaddy Domain Connect is via direct integration." | Complaint ¶100, ¶101 |
| Late 2023 to early 2024 | GoDaddy tells service providers it will charge for Domain Connect: "Due to various factors, we have made the difficult decision to introduce a pricing structure for our services." | Complaint ¶133 |
| 11 January 2024 | GoDaddy terminates the 2022 agreement; Entri alleges GoDaddy also deleted the templates it had onboarded for Entri's customers | Complaint ¶102, ¶106 |
| July 2024 | Entri files its amended antitrust complaint | Domain Name Wire |
| February 2025 | The parties settle and ask the court to dismiss, terms undisclosed | Domain Name Wire |
| 18 June 2025 | Entri and GoDaddy announce a multi-year agreement integrating GoDaddy's Domain Connect into Entri Connect | Domain Name Wire |
| February 2026 | The founder of a Ghost hosting platform writes that multiple service providers in the Domain Connect Slack were "explicitly turned away," and that one was told by both GoDaddy and IONOS to go through Entri | Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki |
| 14 September 2026 | GoDaddy tells us it is not accepting new templates and refers us to Entri | Our inbox |
In 2023 GoDaddy said the only way in was a direct relationship. Since the 2025 agreement, the direct door is closed for almost everyone and the referral points to Entri.
The protocol is still MIT-licensed. The repository still merges pull requests. What changed is who GoDaddy will actually switch templates on for.
What the numbers say
A merged template means nothing until a provider enables it, so we checked. On 14 September 2026 we requested every template in the Domain-Connect/Templates repository, 1,385 of them, from the public template endpoint at GoDaddy, Cloudflare and IONOS. A 200 means the provider has that template enabled. A 404 means it does not. A control template that all three providers support returned 200 at each of them, so the 404s are real.
| Templates merged | Count | Enabled at GoDaddy | Enabled at Cloudflare | Enabled at IONOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before August 2023, when GoDaddy put requests on hold | 225 | 88 (39%) | 44 (20%) | 96 (43%) |
| August 2023 to the June 2025 Entri agreement | 98 | 12 (12%) | 54 (55%) | 10 (10%) |
| Since the June 2025 Entri agreement | 1,014 | 36 (3.6%) | 465 (46%) | 28 (2.8%) |
A further 48 templates were left out because their merge date couldn't be recovered from the repository history, usually after a file rename.
GoDaddy's rate falls at exactly the dates in the timeline. About four in ten templates merged before the August 2023 hold are enabled there. One in eight from the dispute years. Fewer than four in a hundred since the Entri deal.
Meanwhile the repository has never been busier. 957 of the 1,385 templates were merged in 2026 alone. GoDaddy enabled 34 of them.
It isn't zero, though. The 36 post-agreement templates GoDaddy did enable include Shopify, Resend, Replit and three of GoDaddy's own, plus a handful of small email and site-builder services. From outside we can't tell how those got through: an existing relationship, Entri, or something else. If your template has none of those routes, expect to land in the other 96%.
IONOS looks like GoDaddy: 2.8% of templates merged since June 2025, which fits the Slack report that IONOS also sends providers to Entri. Cloudflare is the outlier at 46%, and it's the only one of the three that publishes a step-by-step onboarding process.
What this means if you are adding custom domains to a SaaS
GoDaddy is still the largest registrar, and plenty of your customers' domains will have their DNS there. For those customers, one-click setup through your own Domain Connect template is almost certainly off the table. You have four realistic options.
| Option | What your GoDaddy customers get | Cost | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider-specific manual steps | Copy-paste instructions written for GoDaddy's DNS screen | Build once | Some customers still get it wrong |
| Pay Entri | One-click at GoDaddy through Entri's modal | $249/mo for 600 connections a year on the entry tier | A per-connection bill, and a third party in every customer's DNS change |
| Domain Connect at the providers that onboard | One-click at Cloudflare and others, not GoDaddy | Free | Coverage depends on each provider enabling you |
| Sell the domain inside your app | No DNS step at all | Registration margin, often positive | Only helps customers who don't own a domain yet |
You don't have to pick one. Stack the free ones.
Check who runs the DNS, not who sold the domain
Domain Connect support depends on who hosts the zone. A domain registered at GoDaddy with nameservers at Cloudflare gets Cloudflare's behaviour, and that customer can still get one-click setup. Resolve the NS records first. The Domain Connect checker does this for any domain if you want to see it happen.
Write GoDaddy-specific steps
Two things break GoDaddy connections more than anything else. GoDaddy has no ALIAS or ANAME record, so an apex domain has to use A records. And new GoDaddy domains come with a parked A record at @ that keeps answering alongside the one the customer adds, unless they delete it. Generic "add a CNAME" instructions mention neither.
Show one-click only where it actually works
Cloudflare enables templates when you email them after the merge. So check, per customer, whether their provider has enabled your template. Show the button if it has. Show the provider-specific steps if it hasn't. Nobody ever clicks a button that 404s.
Skip DNS entirely for new domains
A customer who buys the domain inside your app never visits GoDaddy at all.
What Domainee does about it
Domainee's connect instructions endpoint fingerprints the DNS provider from the zone's NS records and returns steps written for that provider, including both GoDaddy quirks above. When the provider has enabled our Domain Connect template, the same response carries a signed one-click link. At GoDaddy it doesn't, and the response says why (template_not_adopted) instead of pretending. For Cloudflare and DigitalOcean zones, a customer can also paste a scoped API token and have the records written directly.
That's not one-click at GoDaddy, and we're not going to pretend it is. It's the most you can do without paying a toll on every connection. The full walkthrough of connecting customer domains covers the rest of the flow, and the custom domain debugging runbook covers what to do when a GoDaddy customer says they did everything and it still isn't working.
FAQ
Does GoDaddy still support Domain Connect? Yes, for templates it enabled in the past. Those still resolve and apply. What it has mostly stopped doing is enabling new ones: as of September 2026 GoDaddy says it is not accepting new templates for direct onboarding, and it has enabled 36 of the 1,014 templates merged since June 2025.
Can I pay GoDaddy directly to enable my template? GoDaddy's reply to us offered no direct option, paid or otherwise. It referred us to Entri. According to Entri's complaint, in late 2023 GoDaddy was telling SaaS companies that direct integration was the only way and that it would start charging for it. Since the 2025 Entri agreement, that direct door appears to be closed.
Is Entri the only way to get one-click DNS setup at GoDaddy? For a SaaS whose template isn't already enabled, it is the only route GoDaddy currently points to. The free alternative is provider-specific manual steps that account for GoDaddy's quirks.
Does this affect customers who registered at GoDaddy but use other nameservers? No. Domain Connect follows the DNS operator. If the zone is hosted at Cloudflare, Cloudflare's decision applies, whatever the registrar.
Should I still submit a Domain Connect template? Yes, if you already need signed apply URLs and a template for other providers. Cloudflare enables merged templates on request, and the work is the same. Just don't plan your onboarding around GoDaddy switching it on.