Custom domains with SSL for SAAS:
DIY vs Approximated

Compare Approximated as an alternative to building it all yourself.

Advantages

An easier, more reliable, and less expensive solution.
Approximated

We all want to build things in-house, we get it - we're engineers too. But before you do, hear us out. You can build the fun parts while we handle the stressful stuff for a fraction of the cost of building it in-house.

Creating and maintaining a reliable system for custom domains is a difficult challenge, where issues can prove critical and cause downtime. Here are a few advantages you'll find with Approximated that will help you and the rest of your engineering team sleep at night.

Battle tested in production.
Approximated hasn't just been tested in a staging environment with a few domains for a few weeks or months. It's been around for years, reliably serving millions of custom domains with terabytes of traffic, and handling thousands of concurrent connections per customer.
Scale up with peace of mind.
What it takes to scale 100 custom domains is much different than what it takes to scale to 10,000. Scaling issues can crop up without warning at the worst time - when you're growing quickly. We've solved scaling up to millions of domains so that you don't need to think about it.
Zero new dev-ops obligations.
With Approximated you can avoid adding potentially a huge amount of complexity to your dev-ops. Building a reliable custom domains system typically requires many moving pieces and entirely new sets of technology that need to be introduced to your dev-ops system. With us, you won't have to worry about any of that.
24 hour support, real engineers.
If you need help getting integrated, we're here. If something unexpected happens, we're here. When it's urgent and you need it most, you can get help from a real engineer no matter the time of day. It's our job to make sure that you're up and running, so that you can focus on what your product does best.
Hard earned, world class expertise.
Custom domains and SSL certficates naturally have a wide variety of obscure and intermittent issues that can crop up at the worst times due to outside factors like certificate authorities, DNS, and more.
We've built up knowledge and expertise over time that helps to prevent problems before they happen. You'll be getting a world class team of custom domain specialists maintaining your custom domain solution 24 hours a day, at a tiny fraction of the cost of a single developer.
Powerful global infrastructure.
Whether you're running your application on one server or globally distributed across the world, Approximated is setup to give you the best performance possible out of the box Requests will automatically travel through the shortest path to your appliccation.
We've created a globally distributed service with fleets of machines, networks, monitoring, and more. This saves your team months of effort and resources, while freeing up a tremendous amount of time that would otherwise need to be devoted to maintenance.
A fraction of the cost and effort.
Our singular purpose is automating custom domains and their certificates at scale, so we're far more optimized towards that goal than any company with a different focus is ever likely to be.
Combining this with economies of scale, we can provide an extremely high quality of service at prices that are most likely far below what it will cost to build and maintain a solution in-house. We start at just $20/month and the cost per domain can be as low as $0.05/month after automatic volume discounts.
Launch faster with ease.
Using Approximated, companies are able to integrate custom domains into their applications within days or weeks. In many cases, we've seen a usable MVP integrated in the same day because our API is so easy to work with.
Gain a competitive advantage by spending less time building and more time focusing on the things that make your products amazing. If you need assistance getting started, our engineers will be happy to help you out no matter what your tech stack is.

Questions you won't have to worry about.

Building your own solution will require answering many questions like the ones below, usually at the most inopportune time. With Approximated, we've already dealt with these and many more so that you'll never need to think about them.

Revoked Certificates
"How do we recover when a certificate authority suddenly revokes millions of certificates?"
Approximated uses a variety of monitoring and management techniques to ensure that new certificates are provisioned quickly and early.
OCSP Stapling
"What is OCSP stapling and why is there controversy about it? What do we do about it?"
Approximated handles OCSP stapling for you, improving security and performance without any effort on your part.
CA Rate Limits
"We're hitting rate limits with Lets Encrypt and there's no recourse - now what?"
Approximated works with many certificate authorities under the hood, so that you won't be rate limited during a spike in growth.
CA Outages
"We've stopped getting any responses from the certificate authority, and we can't secure or renew any certificates. What do we do now?"
Approximated intelligently uses multiple certificate authorities, so that your certificates will still be provisioned if one has an outage.
Monitoring
"There's so many variables and potential states for a custom domain, how do we build something that can monitor it all properly?"
Sophisticated monitoring, both active and passive, is built into Approximated and included for free. Fetch the most up to date status any time.
Regional Outages
"The region that hosts our custom domains server is down, and all of our customers have pointed their DNS there - now what?"
Every Approximated cluster is distributed globally in many regions, with traffic automatically rerouted to the nearest working region during any downtime.

Predictably priced at
20 cents per custom domain

With a minimum of $20/month for less than 100 domains

Automatic discounts as you grow

Get 5% off of your domain costs for every 1000 domains, up to 50%

400 GB of bandwidth included

400 GB of monthly bandwidth. Extra bandwidth billed at $0.05/GB.

Try it out with a free 7 day trial

Estimate your costs
See how your pricing and discounts will scale as you grow
Estimate your DIY costs
Compare what it might cost you to build it in-house vs with Approximated. This calculator factors in scale, developer rate, and how many servers you want to run.
As the number of custom domains increases, new technical challenges surface, which we've also factored in to give you a rough estimate for the first year of DIY costs.
The build complexity, maintenance, and server costs all go up with domain count.
The hourly cost you pay for development, or your contracting rate if you're the developer.
Approximated clusters always include globally distributed regions for performance and redundancy.
More regions means higher build, maintenance, and server costs.
Here's a real world example of a company building it themselves with 4,000 domains:
How many developer hours we think it would take to build an MVP based on your entries.
Monthly effort we estimate for maintaining servers, tier 3 support, etc. according to domain count.
How much we think you'll need to spend on a server (one region) each month.
How much we think you'll need to spend in total on servers each month.
The total costs for the first year. Build costs + monthly maintenance costs + total server costs.
The total costs for the first year divided by twelve to give you the monthly cost.

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