Substack Custom Domain: Cost, DNS Setup and SEO

A custom domain swaps yourname.substack.com for an address you own, such as www.yourname.com. It's one of the few setup decisions on Substack that costs money, and one of the few that affects what you keep if you ever leave. This guide covers the fee, the exact DNS records, the root-domain rule, troubleshooting, and what a domain does and doesn't do for search, all as of October 2026.

How much does a Substack custom domain cost?

Substack charges a one-time $50 USD fee to connect a custom domain, and no sales tax or VAT is added. The fee is listed alongside Substack's other charges on its pricing help page, where publishing itself is free and the 10% fee applies only to paid subscriptions.

Two things the fee does not cover:

• The domain. "Substack doesn't sell domains, and the $50 fee doesn't cover registering one." You buy and renew it with a registrar such as Namecheap, GoDaddy or Cloudflare.
• Repeat setups. If something goes wrong and you delete and re-add the domain, Substack says "You won't be charged again."

You must be the publication's owner or an admin to connect a domain. Your receipt is under Domain → View receipt.

How do I set up a custom domain on Substack?

The order matters. Substack's tip is that you "must complete this step and set up your domain on Substack before adding the CNAME alias in your DNS provider" (setup guide).

1. In your dashboard, go to Settings → Domain and click Add next to "Add a custom domain".
2. Pay the fee and click Submit.
3. Enter your domain with a subdomain, for example www.yourdomain.com. Tick Enable root domain redirects if you want yourdomain.com to forward too.
4. At your DNS provider, create the records Substack shows:

Record	Name / Host	Target / Value	When
CNAME	your subdomain, e.g. www	target.substack-custom-domains.com	Always
A	@ (root domain)	3.231.35.217	Only with root domain redirects

5. Go back to Domain on Substack and click Check status.

Your registrar may call the fields "Host", "Subdomain", "Points to" or "Value". Leave TTL at its default. Substack links registrar-specific guides from its CNAME help page. Verification "can take up to 36 hours", and Substack emails you when the domain is live; the button then changes to View configuration.

Cloudflare users: set the CNAME's proxy status to "DNS only". Substack says the cloud icon "should be grey, not orange."

Can I use my root domain without www?

Not as the main address. Substack says it requires "that your Substack publication be hosted by a subdomain such as 'www'" (root domain help), partly because some registrars, including GoDaddy, only allow CNAME records on subdomains.

Works	Doesn't work
www.example.com	example.com
newsletter.example.com

The bare domain can still forward to your publication. Turn on root domain redirects and add the A record above. If you used a forwarding service such as redirect.pizza before, remove its other A records first. Redirects can also take up to 36 hours to start working.

If you already run a website on example.com, a subdomain such as newsletter.example.com keeps your site where it is and puts Substack alongside it.

Does a custom domain help Substack SEO?

Be cautious with any promise here. Neither Substack nor Google says a custom domain improves rankings on its own.

• Substack's SEO help says ranking is "determined by Google's concept of creator credibility and the number of links that direct to your website" and that "the best way to improve your SEO ranking is to get more inbound links to your Substack publication." It doesn't mention custom domains.
• Google's SEO Starter Guide says "the keywords in the name of the domain (or URL path) alone have hardly any effect," and that Google "doesn't care which TLD you're using" unless you're targeting one country.

So what does a domain do for search? The links you earn point at an address you control. If you later move platforms, you can point the same domain at the new host and keep those links working, instead of leaving them on a substack.com subdomain you can't redirect.

Switching an existing publication. Changing domains is a URL move. Google's site move guide recommends permanent (301 or 308) redirects and says to "expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move"; a small or medium site "can take a few weeks for most pages to move". Substack's help centre doesn't document how old *.substack.com links behave after a switch. In a spot check on 22 October 2026, an old substack.com post URL from a publication on a custom domain returned a 301 to the custom domain. Check your own with curl -I on an old post URL after you go live.

The things you control on-page still matter more: Substack recommends using your name in your publication URL, linking it from your site and social bios, and editing each post's URL slug under Settings → SEO Options (post URL help).

What changes after the domain goes live, and what doesn't?

Thing	After the switch
Web address	Your domain, e.g. www.yourdomain.com
Sender address	Still your-subdomain@substack.com (setup guide)
Dashboard	Always reachable at your-subdomain.substack.com/publish/settings
RSS feed	/feed on your publication (RSS help); see our Substack RSS guide
Subscribe link	yourdomain.com/subscribe works too (subscribe help)

How do I fix a custom domain that isn't working?

Per Substack's troubleshooting notes:

• Check the CNAME's Name/Host is your subdomain (e.g. www) and its target is exactly target.substack-custom-domains.com.
• Remove any AAAA record on your root domain.
• On Cloudflare, turn the proxy off.
• Still broken? Delete the domain under Domain and add it again (no second charge).

If the domain locks you out, go to your-subdomain.substack.com/publish/settings and choose Disable Custom Domain, or ask for a human in Substack's support chat (lockout help).

Is a domain enough to own your publication?

A domain protects your address, not your content or list. Substack says "anything you publish on Substack is yours to own" and lets you download posts and subscribers from Settings → Exports (export help). Pair your domain with regular exports; our guide to backing up your Substack walks through it.

If you want your posts on your own site as well, newsletterapi's Posts API serves your archive as JSON and its automatic backups copy every post, with images, to GitHub, Google Drive, Dropbox or S3. For what Substack itself offers developers, see the Substack API guide. To get access, email hello@newsletterapi.io.