Approximated VS LapseZero

Approximated's answer

Approximated makes it extremely easy to add a custom domains feature to any web app, SAAS, marketplace, or platform.

Often, companies can be integrated and live within a few days or less. It's very cost effective, making use of economies of scale and expertise to offer a complete solution at a tiny fraction of the cost to build the same features in house.

LapseZero's answer:

LapseZero doesn't stop at renewal. It issues and renews Let's Encrypt certificates, then installs them where they are actually served:

• Nginx servers, over SSH or through a small open-source agent that only makes outbound connections
• AWS CloudFront and load balancers, plus Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and other cloud CDNs
• Existing Certbot and acme.sh sites, which the agent discovers so you can choose which ones LapseZero takes over

Your DNS credentials stay with you: a one-time CNAME when you add a domain is all LapseZero needs for every later renewal.

Approximated's answer

Approximated is both easier to integrate, and more cost effective than competitors.

It offers all of the features you care about without building in the cost of those that you don't:

• Hours or days to integrate, instead of weeks or months
• You can start small, at a very low price
• You can scale up to any size without any extra steps
• You get automatic volume discounts as you scale up, instead of being forced into various enterprise agreements
• Talk to real developers on staff instead of sales people, if you want
• Your cluster is dedicated only to you, instead of shared with everyone else like competitors

LapseZero's answer:

Certbot and acme.sh renew certificates well, but each server renews on its own and every CDN or load balancer needs its own deploy hook script. LapseZero renews once and pushes the certificate to every target from one dashboard, checks that the new certificate is live, and notifies you when something needs attention.

With Let's Encrypt's default lifetime dropping to 64 days in 2027 and 45 days in 2028, renewals and deployments happen far more often, so fewer scripts to maintain matters more. You can start free with 3 domains, 5 deployment targets and 5 certificate monitors, no credit card required.

Approximated's answer

Startups, Scale-ups, dev teams, and devops teams who want to get a custom domains feature launched this week, with rock solid reliability and genuine developer support.

LapseZero's answer:

Developers, sysadmins and small DevOps teams who run their own Nginx servers or serve sites through AWS CloudFront, load balancers or cloud CDNs, and who would rather not maintain renewal and deploy scripts across all of them.

LapseZero's answer:

• TypeScript, Next.js and React for the web app
• Fastify, PostgreSQL (Prisma), Redis and BullMQ for the API and job queues
• Go for the open-source deployment agent
• ACME protocol with Let's Encrypt for certificate issuance

LapseZero's answer:

LapseZero started with my own day-to-day work. I manage a lot of domains at my company, along with their production and test servers, and more and more of them need certificates. As certificate lifetimes kept getting shorter, renewing and reinstalling them turned into constant maintenance, and it was easy to forget one.

So the first thing I built was SSL certificate expiry monitoring, to make sure nothing slipped through. Monitoring only tells you something needs doing, though, so the next step was to renew certificates automatically and deploy them to every server that uses them. That became the core of LapseZero.