The Missing Step: From Preview URL to Your Own Domain

The *.vercel.app lie

Every demo video in the last three years ends the same way: a screen recording of someone clicking through my-app-git-main-myteam.vercel.app. It looks shipped. It is not shipped. The URL belongs to the platform. The cert belongs to the platform. The DNS record will vanish the moment you delete the branch. None of it is yours.

The hard part of shipping — owning the domain, pointing DNS at it, getting a TLS cert the platform didn't issue for you, keeping the cert renewed — is the part nobody demos. Every "look what I built in a weekend" clip cuts away before that step. So it stays invisible, and the gap between "running on a preview URL" and "running on yourdomain.com" keeps catching people.

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This is an excerpt. Read the full post at otf-kit.dev/blog/custom-domain-one-command — full-stack kits your AI coding agent can actually ship to production. Browse the kits →