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Honest question: Is it actually hard to implement (securely) custom domains? In the long term I want to offer custom domains for my product (which does not exist yet).
No. Caddy does this: https://laravel-news.com/unlimited-custom-domains-vapor Keyword you want is "on-demand TLS"
> To use custom domains, you’ll be charged a one-time $50 fee per publication. I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge. I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.
The alternative is a self-hosted or SaaS subscription to something like Ghost or Mailchimp. $50 seems like a better deal to me.
This is great news since it decreases the lockin / leverage that Substack has over individual writers on the platform. It's a creator-friendly choice and I respect that Substack is putting their money where their mouth is in that respect!
> To use custom domains, you’ll be charged a one-time $50 fee per publication. I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge. I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.
My guess is that they have a manual pipeline where it requires some effort from a physical person to setup SSL. This $50 is to offset their cost of setup.
For example, these days most wordpress hosts do this for you for free.
Not that I think it's unreasonable to charge for this, just saying it's probably not the reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1. Custom domains are (less than) table stakes in my book.
I took this approach in the e-commerce space a decade ago, and assumed that no serious merchant would ever dream of paying for an e-commerce solution that required them to link to a subdomain on another company's domain to take orders. I was wrong. In fact, a lot of merchants saw the third-party domain as a status thing. There were thousands of merchants in one tribe and thousands in another. They are still doing it…
An argument against custom domains being a "premium" feature, then? If you don't have a paid plan, then you have to bring your own domain. Paying gets you the *.example.com status symbol. Makes sense — a custom domain usually requires technical expertise and some amount of inconvenience for users (not unlike a services company that publishes their source code to GitHub, which you can always set up and maintain for yourself, but if you want to use the company's hosted services, then you have to pay). Another part of the value proposition would be, "You're gonna have to spend money one way or another — either to a registrar or to us — so why not let it be us?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then it's not available on free newsletters, even if the author would prefer to pay for it. Not sure what the problem is with this model. $50 isn't really meaningful hit -- it's not a recurring cost or anything. I also disagree that 10% of revenue is a "huge" chunk. Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial (not to mention acquiring readers in the first place).
$50 is a lot for a feature that most SaaS are offering for free. > Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial Regardless of whether this is trivial or not, Substack is a service, not a partner. If one day you decide to increase your prices and work your ass off to produce more valuable content to your readers, why should Substack get more money? If instead of sending newsletters we were talking about…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$50 is a lot for a feature that most SaaS are offering for free. > Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial Regardless of whether this is trivial or not, Substack is a service, not a partner. If one day you decide to increase your prices and work your ass off to produce more valuable content to your readers, why should Substack get more money? If instead of sending newsletters we were talking about…
What?? Most SaaS are absolutely not offering custom domains for free. What services are you looking at?
- Shopify
- Sendgrid
- Mailchimp
- Wordpress.com
- Firebase
- Vercel
- Netlify
- Surge
Even free blog platforms give you customs domains with HTTPS for free: https://hashnode.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took this approach in the e-commerce space a decade ago, and assumed that no serious merchant would ever dream of paying for an e-commerce solution that required them to link to a subdomain on another company's domain to take orders. I was wrong. In fact, a lot of merchants saw the third-party domain as a status thing. There were thousands of merchants in one tribe and thousands in another. They are still doing it…
> I was wrong. In fact, a lot of merchants saw the third-party domain as a status thing. An argument against custom domains being a "premium" feature, then? If you don't have a paid plan, then you have to bring your own domain. Paying gets you the *.example.com status symbol. Makes sense — a custom domain usually requires technical expertise and some amount of inconvenience for users (not unlike a services company th…