Customer-facing surfaces

Custom portal domain.

Serve your customer self-service portal — cancel flow, manage subscription, update payment, and invoices — from portal.yourcompany.com instead of trybackstop.com. A branded, DNS-verified replacement for Stripe's Customer Portal; Vercel issues + auto-renews the TLS cert, so there are no SSL headaches.

Add a hostname

  1. Go to Settings → Portal domain in the workspace dashboard.
  2. In the Hostname field, enter the subdomain you want to use (e.g., portal.yourcompany.com). Just the hostname — no https://, paths, or trailing slashes. Apex domains aren't supported.
  3. Click Add domain. We generate a one-time verification token and the page switches to a status view showing the two DNS records.

Add the DNS records

The status view lists two records, both at your DNS provider:

  • CNAME at portal.yourcompany.com → cname.vercel-dns.com. Points the hostname at Vercel, which serves the pages and issues the SSL cert.
  • TXT at _backstop-verify.portal.yourcompany.com → the verification token shown on the settings page (it looks like backstop-verify-…). Proves you control the hostname.

Verify

DNS propagation usually takes 5–30 minutes. Once both records resolve, click Verify DNS. We resolve the TXT token server-side; if it matches, we register the hostname with Vercel and Vercel issues the certificate — usually a minute or two later. The status line under the hostname progresses through these states:

  • Not yet verified — add the DNS records, then verify.
  • Verified · provisioning SSL — ownership confirmed, Vercel is issuing the cert. Click Re-verify (DNS check) in a minute to refresh.
  • Live · serving your portal over SSL — the cert is deployed and the hostname is serving traffic.
  • Verified, but SSL setup failed — rare; the page surfaces the exact error below the button. Re-verify, and if it persists, hit reply on any Backstop email.

If the TXT record isn't resolving yet, Verify DNS tells you exactly which name it looked up (_backstop-verify.<hostname>) and what it saw — usually it just needs more propagation time.

What you get on the custom domain

Once live, the hostname serves your whole hosted surface — not just the cancel page:

  • portal.yourcompany.com/<token> — the cancel flow.
  • portal.yourcompany.com/portal/<token> — manage subscription (pause, resume, switch plan, cancel) + invoices.
  • portal.yourcompany.com/update-card/<token> — update payment method.

The customer sees your subdomain in their address bar the whole way through — never a Backstop URL.

Removing

From the same settings page, click Remove domain. The workspace immediately reverts to the default trybackstop.com URLs, and we release the hostname from Vercel. Old emails with the custom-domain link will stop working until you re-add the host (the app only serves verified, currently-active hostnames).

Related

  • Custom send domain — the email equivalent (EasyDKIM CNAMEs for outgoing dunning).
  • Troubleshooting — a custom portal domain is also the fix when a customer's DNS filter blocks trybackstop.com.