Your URL. Not ours.

Point a DNS record at us. Your URL stays your URL.

1. 01

   Hobby subdomain

   Shipped

   yourbrand.forumframe.com. Clean URL, free forever, permalinks survive forever. Our brand at the tail; everything else is yours.

2. 02

   Maker custom domain

   Maker tier

   community.yourbrand.com. Your URL, your branding, no mention of us. Add the domain in settings, point a CNAME, verify with a TXT record — we provision SSL in minutes.

3. 03

   SSL auto-provisioned + renewed

   Shipped

   Certs come from Let's Encrypt under the hood. Provisioned on verify, renewed 30 days before expiry. You never touch a cert file.

4. 04

   Cross-domain auth handoff

   Shipped

   Members sign in once on either domain and stay logged in across the swap. A 60-second JWT is minted on the platform, redeemed on the custom domain, and written as a host-only cookie. No third-party cookies, no opaque magic.

5. 05

   Migration path

   Shipped

   Add a custom domain to a forum that already has a subdomain — the old subdomain stays alive as a permanent alias. Existing links 301 to the new canonical domain. Nobody's bookmark breaks.

1. 01In /settings/domain, type your domain. We hand back a TXT verification record and a CNAME target.
2. 02Add both records at your registrar — typically a five-minute job.
3. 03We poll until both records resolve, then provision the SSL certificate automatically.
4. 04The forum starts answering on the new domain within minutes. The old subdomain stays as an alias.
5. 05Renewal happens automatically thirty days before expiry. You get a notification only if something fails.

• Maker tier only

  Hobby tier ships the subdomain free, forever. Custom domain costs us a per-cert overhead plus the JWT handoff infrastructure; it lives behind the Maker price.

• One custom domain per forum

  The subdomain stays as a permanent alias when you add a custom domain, but you can't have two custom domains pointing at one forum. We can revisit if real demand surfaces.

• HSTS is deliberately not set on custom domains

  Platform-owned hosts get HSTS (browsers stay on HTTPS for a year). Your domain doesn't, so you can migrate off us cleanly if you ever want to. The asymmetry is a feature — see /features/owning-your-community.