Use your own domain for passports

What this domain is for

Every passport you publish already has a working URL at passportcraft.com — nothing about this step is required. What it changes is whose name is on it: once your own domain is live, the pages your customers see and the codes you print carry dpp.yourbrand.com (or whatever you chose) instead of ours. It's a subdomain of a domain you already own, not a domain we sell you or host for you — you keep your own registration, at your own registrar, the whole time.

This is available regardless of what kind of product your passports cover, batteries included. It applies to one workspace at a time: if you manage more than one brand, each one sets up its own domain separately.

For a battery passport, there's a specific reason this matters. The law requires a battery passport to stay reachable even after the company responsible for it no longer exists — that's a legal requirement, not something PassportCraft decided. Once your passports carry your own domain, keeping that domain's registration current is part of meeting it.

Before you start

Two things are worth knowing before you type a domain in.

Adding your domain

1. Go to Settings > Brand and find the domain card.
2. Type your subdomain — for example dpp.yourbrand.com — and confirm.
3. The card shows a CNAME record: a host name and a value to add at whatever service manages your domain's DNS (your registrar, or wherever your domain's nameservers point). The exact value is read fresh each time, so always copy what's on screen rather than a value you saw before.
4. Above the CNAME, the card shows a TXT record at a host that starts with _passportcraft-verify. Only someone who can edit the domain's DNS can add it, which is how we confirm the domain is yours — every domain gets one, and yours cannot go live without it. Occasionally a second TXT record is listed alongside it; that one appears when the domain was already associated with a Vercel account elsewhere, and it is needed too.
5. Add every record the card shows at your DNS provider, then come back and press Check.

DNS changes are not instant — it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours for a new record to take effect everywhere. If Check doesn't succeed right away, wait and try again. The card also re-checks on its own when you open it, though not on every single visit — so once you've added a record, press Check rather than reloading the page.

What Check does

Check looks up your DNS records and confirms three things: that the CNAME points where it should, that the TXT record proving the domain is yours is in place, and that a security certificate can be issued for your domain. All three have to pass. If the TXT record isn't there yet, your domain stays at Waiting for DNS and the card asks you to add it and press Check again. None of this means passports are live yet — see the three states below. Once your domain is confirmed the card stops listing the records; leave them in place at your DNS provider.

The three states

Your domain always sits in one of three states, and the card names it plainly:

• Waiting for DNS — your records aren't confirmed yet. The card keeps showing what to add.
• Ready — DNS is confirmed and your certificate exists, but nothing is being served yet. On a trial, this is expected: the domain is fully set up and waiting for your plan to start. Your QR codes and passport pages keep using passportcraft.com until then.
• Live — your plan is active and your domain is serving your passports. Every QR code you download from this point carries it. Codes downloaded before this point keep working — at passportcraft.com — forever; nothing about going live moves them.

Once your domain is live, treat it as your passport's real home: it's what new codes carry, and it's the URL search engines are pointed toward for your published pages. The passportcraft.com copy of the same page doesn't disappear — it's still there for anyone holding an older code — but your own URL is the one to share and the one your printed materials should use going forward.

What Remove costs

Removing your domain is more than a settings change. Once it's gone:

• Any code already printed with that domain — on a label, a hang tag, packaging — stops resolving until you point the subdomain somewhere else. There's no automatic fallback to passportcraft.com for a code that was generated with your own domain.
• Some of your dealers or retailers may already hold digital copies of that code — on their own systems, in their own materials — and you have no way to recall those. They'll carry the same broken domain until whoever holds them is told to update it.

If you're changing to a different domain rather than dropping the feature entirely, the same rule applies to the old one: remove it, then add the new one. There's no direct swap.

One thing this does not do

Setting up your own domain is a portability safeguard — it means you, not only PassportCraft, control where your codes point — but it is not, on its own, a separate backup copy of your passport data. If your product category requires you to keep an independent way of making a passport's information available (for example, as your own record of the data, held outside PassportCraft), attaching your own domain does not satisfy that on its own — your passport is still hosted by PassportCraft either way, just reachable at a domain you control. Check what your product category's rules actually require.

Related

• Organization settings and team roles for the rest of what lives in Settings, including who can make changes as an owner or administrator.
• Downloading and printing QR codes for how the domain you set up here reaches the codes you actually print.