A free custom domain for your Vercel app
Vercel gives every project a free your-project.vercel.app address. If you’d rather send people to yourname.portfilio.live, you can do it without buying a domain. Here are the two ways, and which one you can use when.
Your two options
| Way | What visitors see | Who can use it |
|---|---|---|
| Redirect | They type your name and land on your-project.vercel.app | Everyone, from the first sign-in |
| Direct DNS (CNAME) | Your name stays in the address bar; Vercel serves the site on it | Resolver tier and up |
Vercel’s own offer of a free domain comes with a paid Pro plan. A Namestead name costs nothing on any Vercel plan, Hobby included.
Today: a redirect to your .vercel.app address
- Sign in on namestead.dev and claim a name.
- Set it to Redirect and paste your project’s address, for example https://your-project.vercel.app.
- Save. The name now forwards to your project over HTTPS.
This is the quickest way to put a short, readable link on a résumé or profile. The address bar changes to the .vercel.app address once the visitor arrives.
At Resolver: connect the name with a CNAME
- In Vercel, open your project, go to Settings → Domains and add your Namestead name, such as yourname.portfilio.live.
- Vercel shows a CNAME record for it. In your Namestead dashboard, switch the name to Direct DNS and add that CNAME.
- If Vercel also asks for a TXT record at _vercel, add it too. Names can hold up to three TXT records for verification.
- Wait for Vercel to verify the domain. It issues the HTTPS certificate on its own.
Namestead accepts CNAMEs only to the hosts it knows. Vercel sometimes hands out a new per-project target; if the dashboard turns yours down, tell us through the Contact page and we add it.
Vercel looks for its ownership TXT record on the parent domain. Until a catalog domain is on the Public Suffix List, a project on a Vercel team other than the one that first used that domain may not pass that check. Proxy mode will cover that case once it opens.
How to reach Resolver
Resolver needs 150 Trust Points and a Namestead account at least 7 days old.
Trust Points come from time on Namestead, connecting GitHub (its account age, public repositories and followers count), linking other accounts, keeping a name healthy, helping the project (a domain you asked for going live, an abuse report that was acted on) and contributing money. They have no cash value.
Common questions
- Does it work on the Hobby plan? Yes. Adding a custom domain is free on every Vercel plan.
- Is HTTPS included? Yes. Redirects use Namestead’s certificate; with a CNAME, Vercel issues one for your name.
- Can I move the name to another host later? Yes. Change the CNAME in your dashboard and keep the same name.