Entri Alternative 2026: The Real Price vs 50 Free

Entri publishes exactly one price: $249 a month, for 600 domain connections a year. What it does not publish is the price of Power, the custom-domain and SSL infrastructure you actually need to ship the feature. Domainee is the self-serve alternative: 50 domains and 100 GB free, then $0.20 per domain, no annual cap and no sales call. If you came for the price, that's the answer; the rest of this post is the detail.

Entri's DNS-configuration widget is genuinely one of the best onboarding components in the market. The iframe that pops up, detects the customer's registrar, and writes the right records on their behalf is real, lovely engineering. I'd want it for my product too.

What I would not want is the bill.

Entri starts at $249 a month for 600 automatic domain connections per year, which is $2,988 a year before you have onboarded a single customer. The three tiers above it are all "Talk to Sales." And Power, the custom-domain infrastructure with automatic SSL that is the part you actually need, sits on its own product page whose only call to action is "See plans" or "Book a demo."

That last point is a change, and it is worth stating plainly because we had it wrong here until we re-checked on 19 August 2026.

What changed in Entri's pricing this year

Entri used to publish two numbers. "Connect" was $249 a month for the DNS widget, and "Connect + Power" was $749 a month for the widget plus the custom-domain and SSL infrastructure. You could add them up and know what shipping the feature cost.

As of 19 August 2026 that split is gone. entri.com/pricing now shows a single Activate product with four tiers, and only the first one carries a number:

Tier	Price	Domain connections/yr	Monitored domains
Startup	$249/mo	600	1,200
Growth	Talk to Sales	2,400	4,800
Premium	Talk to Sales	12,000	24,000
Enterprise	Talk to Sales	12,000+	50,000

Power moved to its own product page. It still promises "SSL by default" and fully managed DNS for custom domains. It carries no price, and the page routes you to "See plans" or "Book a demo."

So the transparency went backwards. A year ago you could compute your bill for shipping customer custom domains on Entri. Today the only published number is the widget tier, and the infrastructure tier is a conversation. That is a reasonable thing for an enterprise vendor to do. It is also the single most common reason people end up on a page like this one.

If you typed "Entri alternative" into Google, the conversation in your head is probably some version of: the product is great, the price doesn't fit. Maybe you're an indie SaaS with 12 customers and the per-month sticker is the entire feature budget. Maybe you're a Series A and the $9K/yr is fine but the 600-domain annual cap is going to bite by month 6. Maybe you just don't want to commit to a six-figure ARR product before you've validated the feature.

This post is the full walkthrough of Domainee, the alternative I build, written the way I'd want a competitor to write about it. What it is, who it's for, how it works under the hood, and the 5-minute tutorial.

Why people search for an Entri alternative

Four reasons keep showing up in DMs and Reddit threads:

The $249 entry sticker. Entri's lowest paid tier is $249 a month, or $2,988 a year. There's no free tier and no trial tier with real limits. For most indie and small SaaS teams, that's a feature budget for the whole quarter, not a single integration.
You can't price the part you need. Startup buys the DNS widget and 600 connections. Power, the custom-domain and SSL infrastructure, has no published price. You cannot put a number in a budget without a sales call, which means you cannot decide whether to build or buy without one either.
The annual domain cap. Startup is 600 domain connections per year. That's a hard ceiling, not a soft one. If your SaaS does 60 new customer hostnames a month you are capped by month ten, and the next tier up (Growth, 2,400/yr) isn't publicly priced either.
Three of four tiers are a sales call. Growth, Premium and Enterprise are all "Talk to Sales." If you need more than 600 domains a year, which is 50 a month, you are on a call.

If any of those got you to Google, the rest of this is for you.

What Entri actually charges, plan by plan

To make the comparison honest, the published numbers:

Plan	Price/mo	Domain connections/yr	Monitored domains
Startup	$249	600	1,200
Growth	Talk to Sales	2,400	4,800
Premium	Talk to Sales	12,000	24,000
Enterprise	Talk to Sales	12,000+	50,000
Power (custom domains + SSL)	Not published	—	—

Take the one number that exists. $249 a month is $2,988 a year, and if you fill the 600-domain annual cap exactly, that's $4.98 per domain per year, or about $0.42 per domain per month. That is a genuinely fine rate at full utilisation, and almost nobody hits full utilisation in year one.

Run it at the scale most teams are actually at. Fifty customer domains against a $2,988 annual floor is $59.76 per domain per year. A hundred is $29.88. The cap is the denominator, and early on you are paying for a denominator you aren't using.

To put $249/mo in perspective from the other side: at Domainee's pay-as-you-go rate of $0.20 per domain per month, $249 covers roughly 1,245 custom domains, and the first 50 are free. And none of the above includes Power, because Power has no published price to include.

The fuller side-by-side breakdown is at /alternatives/entri.

OK. The alternative.

Meet Domainee

Domainee is a developer API that lets your SaaS users connect their own domain to your product. Their customer types shop.acme.com and lands on your app, with first-class TLS, real HTTP, and your origin invisible behind the edge.

Three things ship together:

Connect API. Bring your own domain. One POST per customer hostname, one CNAME at their registrar, cert provisions on first request and renews forever.
Buy-a-Domain API. Your user doesn't own a domain yet. Live availability check, one purchase call, auto-connect, the user is the legal registrant. Flat $1 fee on top of the TLD price.
Masking and Forwarding APIs. Reverse-proxy at the edge (mode: "proxy") or HTTP 301/302 (mode: "redirect"). Same API, different intent.

Public REST surface plus a first-class MCP server so AI agents can drive the exact same key. HMAC-signed webhooks fire on every plan, including the free one. Stripe-shaped developer experience: Bearer auth, idempotency keys, signed webhooks, every endpoint documented at /docs/api.

Where Entri still wins

Two things, in fairness:

The DNS-configuration widget. Entri's iframe widget that pops up, detects the customer's registrar, and writes the records on the customer's behalf via Domain Connect partnerships is genuinely best-in-class. If your customers are non-technical (think marketing teams at SMBs configuring their own custom domain), that widget is worth real money.

Wider Domain Connect coverage. Entri has direct integrations with 50+ DNS providers via the Domain Connect protocol, including some smaller registrars that nobody else has integrations with. For most teams this doesn't matter; for some it does.

One more Entri product worth knowing about: Entri Sell, which lets your users buy domains in-app and pays you an unpublished commission on top of the platform subscription. Domainee's equivalent is the flat-fee Buy-a-Domain API. The two models are compared route by route in how to sell domains in your app.

Where Domainee wins: everything else, especially the price, and the fact that there is a price at all. Below 600 domains a year, by an order of magnitude.

Who Domainee is for

Five fits where Domainee is the obvious pick:

SaaS founders shipping their first custom-domain feature. You're 1 to 200 customers in. You don't have the budget for a $9K/yr commitment and you don't have engineering bandwidth for a roll-your-own ACME loop. The free tier covers the entire pilot phase.
Indie / small SaaS that already validated the feature. You've got hundreds of customers, custom domains is delivering, but a four-figure annual floor plus an unpriced infrastructure add-on for something that costs your provider pennies feels wrong. At Domainee's rates, the same scale costs you a fraction of one Entri month.
Multi-tenant teams ready to white-label. You're already running tenants on acme.yourapp.com subdomains. The customer wants app.acme.com. Domainee plugs in behind your existing tenant lookup.
Agencies and platform builders. You manage dozens of client brands. One Domainee workspace, one Bearer key, every client hostname tagged with metadata.clientId, webhooks fan out to one handler.
AI builders shipping with MCP. You're letting an agent provision tenants inside a chat. Domainee's MCP server exposes the API surface as tools with the same auth.

Who Domainee is NOT for: teams whose customers genuinely need the white-glove DNS widget UX, where Domain Connect partnerships with smaller registrars are non-negotiable, and where the budget for that experience is already approved. In that narrow band, Entri's widget is the right tool.

How Domainee works under the hood

If you've built a multi-tenant SaaS before, the architecture will read familiar. If not, here's the path a request walks.

Step 1. The customer adds a CNAME. They go to their registrar (Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare DNS, name dot com, etc.), open the DNS panel, paste one record: CNAME shop edge.domainee.dev. That's the only thing they ever touch.

Step 2. Domainee's edge picks up the resolver propagation. As Cloudflare, Google, Quad9, and OpenDNS catch up, Domainee verifies the CNAME and fires a domain.pending then domain.verified webhook to your backend.

Step 3. Let's Encrypt issues a cert on first request. ACME validation runs over HTTP-01 against Domainee's edge, no customer action required. The cert lands, marked ssl: "active" in the API. Renewals run every 60 days, forever.

Step 4. A visitor hits shop.acme.com over HTTPS. Domainee's edge terminates TLS using the customer's hostname cert, then proxies to your origin with two headers your origin reads to figure out the tenant:

X-Forwarded-Host:        shop.acme.com
X-Domainee-Original-Host: shop.acme.com

Step 5. Your origin reads the header, looks up the tenant, returns HTML. Same Next.js app, same Rails app, same Phoenix app. Nothing else changes.

Step 6. Drift detection runs in the background. Domainee polls each customer's DNS on a deterministic schedule. If a customer removes the CNAME, points it elsewhere, or flips on Cloudflare orange-cloud, you get a domain.drift webhook within minutes with the exact diagnosis.

The whole thing is one box drawing:

Visitor → shop.acme.com (TLS) → Domainee edge → X-Forwarded-Host → your origin
                                      ↓
                              Let's Encrypt cert
                              DNS health monitor
                              Webhook fanout

Tutorial: Connect your first customer domain in 5 minutes

End-to-end, from API key to a live customer hostname.

Step 1. Mint an API key

Sign up at /sign-up. Free, no card. Open /developers, click Create API key, copy the sk_live_… string. It's shown once.

Step 2. Register a customer hostname

From your app's backend, when a customer adds a domain:

curl https://api.domainee.dev/v1/domains \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DOMAINEE_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "hostname": "shop.acme.com",
    "originUrl": "https://acme-prod.fly.dev",
    "mode": "proxy",
    "metadata": { "tenantId": "tnt_77721" }
  }'

Response:

{
  "domain": {
    "id": "8f09b47c-b42f-4d14-9e10-...",
    "hostname": "shop.acme.com",
    "status": "pending",
    "ssl": "pending",
    "dnsRecords": [
      { "type": "CNAME",
        "name": "shop.acme.com",
        "value": "edge.domainee.dev" }
    ]
  }
}

metadata is yours. Stick your tenant ID, client ID, plan tier, whatever. It comes back on every webhook so your handler doesn't need a second lookup.

Step 3. Tell the customer the CNAME

Render the dnsRecords array in your UI. Copy button on the value, a registrar hint ("On Cloudflare DNS? Make sure the proxy is OFF."), a live status pill.

Type   Name           Value
CNAME  shop.acme.com  edge.domainee.dev

This is the part Entri's widget automates. You can write a decent version of it in an afternoon with a registrar detection table; the DNS-instructions UI pattern is covered at /blog/dns-instructions-ux-for-saas.

Step 4. Handle the webhook when DNS lands

import crypto from "node:crypto";
import express from "express";

const app = express();

app.post(
  "/webhooks/domainee",
  express.raw({ type: "application/json" }),
  async (req, res) => {
    const sig = req.header("x-domainee-signature");
    const expected =
      "sha256=" +
      crypto.createHmac("sha256", process.env.WHSEC)
        .update(req.body)
        .digest("hex");
    if (!crypto.timingSafeEqual(Buffer.from(sig), Buffer.from(expected))) {
      return res.status(401).end();
    }
    const event = JSON.parse(req.body.toString());
    if (event.type === "domain.verified") {
      await db.tenants.update({
        where: { id: event.data.metadata.tenantId },
        data: { customDomain: event.data.hostname, status: "live" },
      });
    }
    res.json({ ok: true });
  },
);

Step 5. Read the host header at your origin

// middleware.ts
import { NextRequest, NextResponse } from "next/server";

export function middleware(req: NextRequest) {
  const host =
    req.headers.get("x-domainee-original-host") ??
    req.headers.get("x-forwarded-host") ??
    req.headers.get("host") ??
    "";

  if (host === "yoursaas.com" || host.endsWith(".yoursaas.com")) {
    return NextResponse.next();
  }

  const tenant = lookupTenantByHost(host);
  if (!tenant) return NextResponse.next();

  const url = req.nextUrl.clone();
  url.pathname = `/_tenants/${tenant.id}${url.pathname}`;
  return NextResponse.rewrite(url);
}

Full multi-tenant pattern (including dynamic OG tags and per-tenant favicons) at /blog/nextjs-multi-tenant-custom-domains.

Side-by-side: Entri vs Domainee at three scales

At the scales most SaaS products actually operate at:

Customers on custom domains	Entri (Startup + unpriced Power)	Domainee
50	$249/mo floor · 600/yr cap · plus Power	$0/mo (free tier)
500	$249/mo floor · 600/yr cap · plus Power	~$90/mo
5,000	Growth tier (sales call)	~$700/mo (with PAYG graduation)
50,000	Premium tier (sales call)	~$5,000/mo (with PAYG graduation)

At 50 customers, Entri's published floor alone is $2,988 a year you don't need to spend, and Power is on top of it. At 500 you are still inside the 600/yr cap, and Domainee is roughly a third of the published floor with nothing unpriced attached. At 5,000 you are on a sales call either way, except Domainee publishes its number.

Every Entri figure here was read off entri.com on 19 August 2026. Vendors reprice; if you are making a decision on this, check it yourself, and if you find it has moved again, tell us and we'll correct the page.

What's included on every Domainee tier

Yes, including free:

Connect API (BYO domain)
Buy-a-Domain API (your user purchases inside your app, $1 flat fee, user is legal registrant)
Masking + Forwarding APIs
HMAC-signed webhooks with retries
MCP server for AI agents
Drift detection + orange-cloud warnings
Dashboard with per-customer telemetry

What's NOT included on Domainee: Entri's Domain Connect iframe widget. If your customers genuinely need a one-click registrar-detection experience and you can't ship the DIY version, that's the trade.

Operational realities you should know about

Five things every SaaS shipping custom domains hits in production. Useful whether you pick Domainee or anything else.

Cloudflare orange-cloud. Your customer's domain is on Cloudflare DNS, they click the orange cloud, and Cloudflare gets between the visitor and your edge. TLS handshakes fail. Domainee inspects A records on registration and flags it with the fix pre-drafted. Full runbook at /blog/debug-customer-custom-domain-runbook.

Apex domains. Customer wants acme.com, not shop.acme.com. CNAME at the apex is technically against spec; most registrars support ALIAS / ANAME / Cloudflare CNAME-flattening. Where they don't, A records work. Domainee returns BOTH options in dnsRecords. Full breakdown at /blog/apex-domain-support-for-saas.

Cert renewal. Let's Encrypt's limits are 50 certificates per registered domain per week, 300 new orders per account per 3 hours, and 5 failed validations per identifier per hour. For customer custom domains the first limit rarely binds, because each customer domain has its own budget; the failed-validation limit is the one that turns a bad retry loop into an outage. Domainee handles pool routing and backoff internally, so you never trip either.

DNS drift. Customer accidentally removes the CNAME six months in. Domainee polls deterministically, fires domain.drift within minutes, the dashboard shows the diagnosis. Wider story at /blog/monitor-customer-ssl-certificates-at-scale.

Masking vs forwarding. Two intents people conflate. Masking keeps the customer's URL in the address bar and proxies under it. Forwarding sends a 301. Both work, different use cases. Long version at /blog/domain-masking-without-iframe.

FAQ

How much does Entri cost? Entri publishes one price: $249 a month for the Startup tier, which includes 600 automatic domain connections per year and 1,200 monitored domains. That is $2,988 a year. Growth, Premium and Enterprise are all "Talk to Sales," and Power, the custom-domain and SSL infrastructure, has no published price at all. Figures read off entri.com on 19 August 2026.

Does Entri have a free tier? No. The lowest paid tier is $249 a month and there is no free or trial tier with usable limits. That is the most common reason teams look for an alternative, since it is a whole quarter's feature budget for most indie and small SaaS products.

What is Entri Power, and is it included? Power is Entri's custom-domain infrastructure, the part that actually serves your customers' domains with SSL. It used to be a $500/mo add-on on top of the $249 Connect plan. As of August 2026 it has its own product page with no price on it, and the only calls to action are "See plans" and "Book a demo."

What is the cheapest Entri alternative? Domainee starts at $0: 50 customer domains and 100 GB of bandwidth free, then $0.20 per domain per month with no annual cap. For the price of one month of Entri's Startup tier you would run roughly 1,245 customer domains on Domainee.

Does Entri cap how many domains I can connect? Yes, and the cap is annual rather than concurrent. Startup allows 600 domain connections per year, which is 50 a month. Growth raises it to 2,400 and Premium to 12,000, but neither is publicly priced.

Is Entri worth it? For one specific case, yes. Entri's Domain Connect widget detects your customer's registrar and writes the DNS records for them, and it is the best implementation of that in the market. If your customers are non-technical and cannot be asked to paste a CNAME, and the budget is approved, that widget is worth paying for. Outside that band you are paying enterprise pricing for infrastructure you can get self-serve.

What to do next

If you came in pre-shortlisted on Entri and the price is the only thing stopping you: start with Domainee's free tier (/sign-up). Fifty customer hostnames is enough to cover the entire pilot and early-paid phase of most SaaS products. No card, no contract.

If you genuinely need Entri's DNS widget UX and the budget is approved, Entri is the right tool for that narrow band. The widget is real engineering and it's worth what it costs IF your customers can't handle a copy-paste CNAME.

If you want the deeper how-to first, the multi-tenant Next.js pattern is at /blog/nextjs-multi-tenant-custom-domains. And if Entri isn't the only provider on your shortlist, the same pricing-math treatment of CoAlias is at /blog/coalias-alternatives-2026, Approximated's is at /blog/approximated-alternative-2026, and SaaSKevin's is at /blog/saaskevin-alternatives-2026.