DoDomain with Approximated

The two meters are not substitutes: one counts the onboarding events you want to succeed, the other counts the hostnames you are serving. A product doing both pays for both, and neither replaces the other.

Per Approximated's DNS widget docs, the widget detects the customer's DNS provider, shows steps written for that provider, and then verifies the result. It can be embedded as plain JavaScript and CSS with no iframe, run headless as JSON, and there are React and Vue starters. It handles A, CNAME and TXT records, up to 25 records in one request. Where a supported provider integration exists it offers an automatic setup option, and Domain Connect is the only automation kind the docs describe. The widget returns complete, partial or failed.

That is a real answer to the question this page used to say Approximated did not address, and a team already on Approximated should try it before adding a vendor. We make no claim about which providers get automatic setup: the docs do not list them, and the Cloudflare screen on their homepage is labelled illustrative.

Where DoDomain is different, stated only from our own docs:

• A Cloudflare path that is not Domain Connect. For a Cloudflare-hosted zone the customer approves a scoped OAuth grant and DoDomain writes the records. That is the one-click on Pro and above.
• A session carries a records array of A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT or MX records, so a verification TXT and a routing record can be asked for together.
• Proof is read at the domain's authoritative nameservers before your server is told.
• The result arrives as an HMAC-signed, retried webhook with a dead-letter queue, and verifyWebhook ships in @dodomain/node. Approximated's webhooks authenticate with a shared webhook-key header instead, which is a simpler contract and a weaker one.
• The same session is reachable from the REST API, an OpenAPI 3.1 document, four SDKs and an MCP server with eight tools over OAuth 2.1, so the onboarding step can be driven by an AI assistant as well as a page.

None of that makes the widget a poor product. If your customers use a handful of providers and Domain Connect covers most of them, the gap is small. The State of Domain Connect page measures how many providers support one-click, which is the number that decides it.

Approximated bills per custom domain, every month, for as long as the domain is proxied. Per its pricing page the rate is $0.20 a domain with a $20 monthly minimum, and the discount grows by 5 percentage points for each full 1,000 domains, capped at 50% and applied to the whole bill. Their own worked examples are $190 for 1,000 domains and $1,000 for 10,000. Bandwidth beyond the 400 GB included each month is $0.05 per GB.

DoDomain meters a different thing. A connection counts once, in the month it first verifies. Re-checks and drift monitoring are free and uncapped, so a domain that has been live for a year adds nothing to the bill. The table prices three scenarios on each side's own meter: new domains per month for DoDomain, domains live at once for Approximated.

List prices, monthly billing. DoDomain counts a domain once, in the month it first verifies; re-checks and drift monitoring are free on every plan, so live domains add nothing. One-click setup starts on Pro — a cheaper plan above is the guided-records flow. Approximated's column is the cloud plan's custom-domain line only, from its published rate and volume discount. It leaves out bandwidth above 400 GB, and it does not price the Hybrid Self Hosted plan ($199 a month plus $0.10 per virtual host per month) or Full Self Hosted (starting at $4,999 a month). Their self-hosted page says there is no bandwidth charge on self-hosted instances. The DNS widget has no separate price on that page, and we cannot say from it whether the widget is included.

Read it as two bills that do not overlap. The proxy bill grows with the size of your customer base. The DoDomain bill grows with how fast you add customers. A product that adds domains slowly and keeps them for years pays Approximated far more than it pays DoDomain; a product that onboards in bursts and proxies little pays the other way round. See pricing for what each plan includes.

On this page DoDomain gets the record into the customer's DNS and proves it, and Approximated serves the traffic. So the record in the session points at Approximated's edge: per its docs, an A record at your cluster's IPv4 address, or a CNAME through an intermediary domain or subdomain you control. The cluster address is per account, so the sample uses a placeholder.

Create the virtual host in Approximated first, then mint the session with the same record. The three calls below are the whole DoDomain side. Approximated ignores a record pointed at your cluster without a matching virtual host, so order matters.

// 1. Your server: mint a connect session for the customer's domain.
import { DoDomain, verifyWebhook } from "@dodomain/node";
import { env } from "./env"; // your validated server env

const dodomain = new DoDomain({ secretKey: env.DODOMAIN_SECRET_KEY });
const session = await dodomain.sessions.create({
  domain: "customer.com",
  records: [
    { type: "A", host: "app", value: "<your Approximated cluster's dedicated IPv4 address>" },
  ],
  returnUrl: "https://yourapp.com/settings/domains",
});

// 2. Your page: open the connect sheet with session.token.
import { showDoDomain } from "@dodomain/connect";

showDoDomain({ token, onVerified: ({ domain }) => markDomainLive(domain) });

// 3. Your webhook route: DoDomain calls it once the record is live at the
//    domain's authoritative nameservers, and again if it ever breaks.
if (!verifyWebhook(env.DODOMAIN_WEBHOOK_SECRET, rawBody, signatureHeader)) {
  return new Response("bad signature", { status: 400 });
}

From Pro up, the session picks the path on its own: a Cloudflare-hosted domain gets the OAuth one-click, a provider that has enabled DoDomain's Domain Connect templates gets a signed apply, and every other provider gets step-by-step records for that provider's dashboard. On the free plan every provider gets the step-by-step records. The full walkthrough is in the quickstart.

Register the customer domain with Approximated exactly as you do today. Take the record values it tells you the customer must create, and pass those same records to POST /api/v1/sessions. Hand your user the returned connectUrl — a hosted page, or the @dodomain/connect widget embedded in your own onboarding, or the @dodomain/react hook around it.

Your customer gets a path instead of a record to copy: a scoped OAuth approval on Cloudflare's own page when their domain is there, a signed Domain Connect apply where their provider has enabled our templates, and otherwise their provider's dashboard link with its host-field quirks and a live status per record.

When the signed connection.verified webhook lands, the records are confirmed at the domain's authoritative nameservers — activate the tenant. Nothing about your proxy configuration changes. You can also keep Approximated's widget for the customers it serves well and send the rest through DoDomain, because the two share no state.

A green check is not the last time anyone should look. Approximated says it is always monitoring SSL status, DNS resolution and proxy hit status for every domain, and its Virtual Host Monitor Updated webhook carries fields such as dns_details, wrong_ips and a changes field with old and new values. That is monitoring of the proxied hostname from the proxy's side.

DoDomain re-checks every verified connection against authoritative DNS — every 10 minutes for its first day, then hourly for a week, then every 6 hours — and confirms suspected drift on three consecutive checks before alerting you. When a customer edits or deletes the record months later, connection.failed arrives naming the exact failing records; when they put it back, connection.verified fires with a recovery signal. That is on every plan, Free included.

Running both is not redundant: one tells you what the proxy sees, the other tells you which record the customer changed. You would pick one signal per workflow and wire the other as a second opinion.

Pick by who your customers are and what you already run, not by feature count.

• You do not have a proxy yet and want one vendor for traffic and basic DNS guidance: Approximated alone is a coherent choice. Start with its widget and add DoDomain only if the DNS step is still where customers stall.
• You already run Approximated and customers drop off at the DNS step: add DoDomain for the Cloudflare one-click path, the five record types and the authoritative proof. Your proxy setup does not change.
• You self-host Approximated (hybrid or full): DoDomain works the same, because it needs the record value and never access to your edge.
• Your customers are technical and on one or two providers: a clear instructions page and Approximated's own checks may be all you need. Do not add a vendor for a problem you do not have.

Moving the other way is as light. If you leave Approximated, you change the record values in your session payload and DoDomain guides the same customers through the new ones.

Start with the obvious one: it serves traffic and manages certificates, which DoDomain never will. Per its own pages that comes with a dedicated cluster, a dedicated IPv4 address, WAF and DDoS protection, and edge rules, across 18 published proxy regions. If your problem is getting HTTPS in front of customer hostnames, DoDomain does not solve it.

It also has a published self-hosted path with prices: hybrid at $199 a month plus $0.10 per virtual host, and full from $4,999 a month with custom SLAs available. DoDomain has nothing to host, so there is no comparable option.

The DNS widget bundles provider detection, provider-labelled instructions, Domain Connect automation where supported, exact-match verification, a headless mode and framework starters into the same account as the proxy. One vendor, one invoice, one webhook family. A smaller team can reasonably decide that is worth more than DoDomain's extra paths.

Its monitoring and webhooks are included in the product you already pay for. It publishes a machine-readable facts file, an OpenAPI file and a DPA with EU standard contractual clauses, which makes procurement and AI-assisted evaluation easier. Its API contract is open and its limits are published.

Honest flip side. If your customers are technical and their domains are concentrated on one or two providers, a well-written instructions page plus Approximated's own widget and resolution checks may be all you need. If you onboard a handful of customers a year, an engineer on a call is cheaper than any vendor. And DoDomain is genuinely useless for the traffic half: it issues no certificates, serves no requests, and offers no origin routing — that is what a proxy is for, and Approximated is one.

Where it earns its place is self-serve onboarding across many registrars, a Cloudflare path that does not depend on Domain Connect, and the long tail after go-live.

No card, no sales call — create an app, mint a session, and watch the first domain verify.

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