Somewhere in your onboarding flow, there's probably a step that says something like: “To use your own domain, add these DNS records at your registrar.”
To your engineering team, that's a reasonable instruction. To a salon owner setting up her account at 10pm after closing, it's where setup stops. She opens her registrar, finds a settings page full of record types and TTL values, and isn't sure which fields to change. Maybe she guesses. Maybe she emails support. Maybe she closes the tab and plans to deal with it later.
Each of those outcomes costs your company something, and most vertical SaaS teams have never added it up.
Cost 1: Customers who never go live
For many vertical SaaS products, a custom domain is part of going live. A contractor's website, a gym's booking page or a clinic's patient portal isn't launched until it's on the business's own domain.
That makes domain setup one of the most common places for new customers to stall. Customers who stall during onboarding don't see the value of what they're paying for, and they're the ones most likely to cancel in the first few months.
To measure this in your own product, look at:
The share of new customers who start domain setup, and the share who finish it.
The median time from signup to going live, for customers with and without a connected domain.
The LTV of customers who have a domain connected vs those who don’t
Churn in the first 90 days among customers who never connected a domain.
When Typeform first launched custom domains, only 1 in 5 customers finished setup on their first try, and setup could take up to 48 hours. After automating DNS with Entri, first-try success rose to 80% and setup dropped to about two minutes.
Cost 2: Support tickets
Every customer who gets stuck on DNS and asks for help creates a support ticket, and DNS tickets are rarely quick. An agent has to work out which registrar the customer uses, walk them through that registrar's settings, and often wait for the records to update before confirming it worked.
You can estimate the cost with a simple formula:
Monthly cost = new customers per month × share who need help with their domain × tickets per customer × hours per ticket × cost per support hour
Here's an example. These numbers are made up to show the math, so swap in your own:
500 new customers per month
40% need help connecting their domain
2 tickets per customer who needs help
30 minutes per ticket
$40 per support hour
That's 500 × 0.4 × 2 × 0.5 × $40 = $8,000 per month, or $96,000 a year, spent helping customers paste records into a settings page.
Cost 3: A guide for every registrar
To cut down on tickets, many teams write help articles: one for GoDaddy, one for Namecheap, one for Squarespace, one for Cloudflare, and so on. That helps until a registrar redesigns its dashboard and the screenshots no longer match.
Someone on your team owns those guides. Each registrar you support adds another article to write, test and update, and customers who use a registrar you didn't cover end up back in the support queue.
Why this matters now
Vertical SaaS leaders are under pressure to grow efficiently. Support cost per customer comes straight out of gross margin, and slow activation delays the point where a new customer pays back what it cost to acquire them. An onboarding step that pushes up both is worth fixing.
What good onboarding looks like
The fix is to stop asking customers to do DNS work at all. A domain step built for non-technical users:
Happens inside your onboarding flow, so customers never leave your product.
Detects which registrar the customer uses and adds the records for them.
Takes one click for most customers, with clear fallback instructions for the rest.
When domain setup works this way, more customers go live in their first session, and your support team gets those hours back.
Where Entri fits
Entri Connect turns the DNS step into a single click inside your app. It covers the registrars your customers use, so your team doesn't have to maintain a guide for each one or keep up with every dashboard change.
Webflow saw a 30% faster time to publish with their users after bringing on Entri. Typeform saw email domain setup time decrease from 48 hours to 2 minutes. Their users' first-attempt success rate increased from 20% to 80% and overall, their support tickets reduced significantly.
Estimate your own cost
Before your next planning cycle, pull these numbers:
How many new customers connect a custom domain each month.
How many domain-related tickets your team handles, and the average handle time.
How many customers start domain setup but never finish.
How many registrar help articles you maintain, and how often they need updating.
If the total is higher than you expected, Entri can help. Book a demo