What “we'll just build it” turns into.
Day one is a reverse proxy and a certificate. Month three looks like the left column, and it never stops needing someone.
Building it yourself
- An on-demand TLS server, plus an endpoint that decides which hostnames may get a certificate
- Shared certificate storage with locks, so two servers never renew the same cert
- Let's Encrypt rate limits, a fallback CA, and alerts before anything expires
- DNS checks that don't trust one stale resolver, for CNAMEs and apex domains
- Instructions for every DNS provider your customers use, and the tickets when they get it wrong
- Phishing screening, because your servers will issue certificates for strangers
With Apexly
- One API call per domain, a signed webhook for every change
- A connect page your customers finish on their own
- Certificates issued, stored, renewed and monitored
- A reason and a fix for every state, in the API and the dashboard
- Abuse screening on every hostname and origin
Six reasons teams pick Apexly.
Your customers do it themselves.
The connect page detects their DNS provider and shows the one record to add, in plain words. They don't need you, and you don't need a call.
Every failure explains itself.
A wrong record, a blocking CAA, a domain that moved: each comes with what we expected, what we found and how to fix it. You can forward it to your customer as is.
Certificates stop being your problem.
Issued only after we verify the domain, renewed 30 days early, with a second certificate authority as a fallback. No 2 am pages.
Your stack stays yours.
No zone to move, no proxy in front of your main app, no SDK to adopt. Point the domain at us and read the Host header. Leaving is deleting the records.
Safe by default.
We screen hostnames and origins against Google Safe Browsing, hold lookalikes of well-known brands, and sign every request so nobody can reach your origin pretending to be us.
You pay for live domains only.
A domain that never connects costs nothing. Pricing is per active domain per day, from $39 a month, and the first 20 customers get 20 domains free.
Made for products your customers put their name on.
If your customers send their own visitors to a page you host, they want it on their own domain.