Why we made these choices.

It is a ceiling, not a tier.

AWS bills us per domain we host, not per record inside it. Your twenty-fifth hostname costs us the same as your first: nothing measurable. So rationing them would be charging you for a limit we invented, and we would rather not.

The ceiling exists for a different reason. Someone registering thousands of names to send phishing mail is a real cost and a real risk to everyone else on the same domain — and a bound is the cheapest way to stop that. It is identical on every plan, because paying us does not make bulk registration less of a problem.

In practice the number matters less than it looks. One hostname is usually all a machine needs, and most people run one or two machines. If you do want several names pointing at the same machine, turn the wildcard on and invent them as you go — plex.mybox, nas.mybox, git.mybox — without coming back here each time.

If you genuinely need more than 25, email support@closetserver.com and we will look at it. That is not a sales conversation — raising it costs us nothing, and there is nothing to upsell you.

Monthly billing would cost you more.

Card processing costs a percentage plus a fixed fee per charge. The fixed part is what matters at small amounts: it is charged in full whether we bill you $15 once or $1.25 twelve times.

Those eleven extra fees have to come from somewhere. To take home the same amount, a monthly plan would have to be priced around 40% higher across the year — so offering it would mean charging you more for the privilege of paying in instalments. That is the sort of thing we said we would not do.

At $15 a year the question is mostly moot, which is why the trial is 30 days rather than seven: long enough to decide properly before committing anything.

30 days with a card, 14 without.

Both numbers deter abuse, by different means. A card is a real identity check, so we can afford to be generous with time. Without one, anybody can open unlimited accounts in minutes — and a shorter window is what makes that unattractive.

The card is not a trick to auto-charge you. We remind you before the trial ends, and if you do nothing your hostnames stop updating rather than disappearing.

Lower numbers are not actually delivered.

TTL is how long the rest of the internet is allowed to remember your address before asking again. A shorter one sounds better, but many resolvers quietly enforce a floor around 60 seconds and ignore anything below it — so advertising 10 would be advertising something you would not receive.

It is the same on every plan for the same reason as the hostname ceiling: it costs us nothing to serve, so selling it would mean inventing a limit first.

We already know when your hostname breaks.

We run the DNS for your name, so we can see your updater check in — and see when it stops. Passing that on costs us almost nothing, and holding it back to sell it later would be withholding something we already have.

Running the DNS is also what makes the alerts worth having. We can tell a record you deleted on purpose from a client that died, and both from a problem on our end — so when your phone buzzes it is because something needs you, not because our infrastructure had a bad morning.

Alerts are delivered by watch4.me, which we also build. Email goes to your account address by default; you choose whether to add Slack, Discord, Telegram, a webhook or SMS. Alerting you is not much use if it arrives somewhere you never look.

What the free options actually give you.

Free dynamic DNS is real and some of it is good. Here is where the differences sit, so you can decide whether paying is worth it for you.

Competitor terms checked against their published pricing in September 2026. They change; if you spot something out of date here, contact@closetserver.com and we will fix it.

If something here reads as a sales argument rather than a reason, that is a fault worth telling us about.

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