Tools · June 2026

How I Use Spaceship

I register most of my domains on Spaceship — but the reason I keep them there isn't the price. It's that Spaceship gives me DNS as an API, which means my AI agent can manage records for me. "Add a CNAME for the new subdomain" is a sentence I say to Claude Code, not a dashboard I click through.

Why Spaceship

Three things keep me here. First, domains are cheap — consistently among the lowest registration and renewal prices, without the bait-and-switch where year two triples. Second, the dashboard is clean: registering a domain, pointing nameservers, and editing records takes seconds, not a fight with a 2009-era control panel. Third — and this is the one that actually changed how I work — there's a spaceship.dev REST API for DNS.

A lot of registrars technically have an API. Spaceship's is the first one I've found pleasant enough to wire straight into my tooling and forget about.

DNS as an API

Every domain I own exposes its records over a simple authenticated endpoint. List everything on a domain in one call:

curl -sf \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KEY" -H "X-API-Secret: $SECRET" \
  "https://spaceship.dev/api/v1/dns/records/example.com?take=500&skip=0"

Adding a record is a PUT — and it's additive, so I can drop a record onto a name without clobbering its siblings (important when a name like _vercel holds verification tokens for several subdomains at once):

# Point a subdomain at Vercel — PUT is additive, no clobbering siblings
curl -sf -X PUT \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KEY" -H "X-API-Secret: $SECRET" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"items":[{"type":"CNAME","name":"starter","cname":"cname.vercel-dns.com","ttl":1800}]}' \
  "https://spaceship.dev/api/v1/dns/records/example.com"

One gotcha worth saving you a 422: the value field is per record type. TXT uses value, A uses address, and CNAME uses cname — not value. I learned that the entertaining way.

Letting Claude Code drive it

Because it's just an API, I wrapped it in a small Claude Code skill. Now the whole interaction is: I say “add a TXT record to verify the new domain” or “point status.example.com at Vercel,” and the agent lists the current records, makes the change, and reads it back to confirm. No tab-switching, no copy-paste, no fat-fingered record that silently breaks email a week later.

The recurring jobs it handles for me:

• Subdomains → Vercel. A CNAME to cname.vercel-dns.com plus the _vercel verification TXT — the exact pair I added to stand up a live demo subdomain in about a minute.
• Email that lands. MX to Google Workspace, SPF via _spf.google.com, and the Workspace/Resend DKIM keys — the records that decide whether your mail hits the inbox or spam.
• Verification churn. The endless one-off TXT challenges every SaaS asks for. Pasted from a sentence, not a dashboard.

That's the real pitch: a registrar whose DNS is programmable turns a category of fiddly, error-prone chores into one-liners an agent can own.

Try it

If you're setting up the stack from my workshop setup guide, Spaceship is the registrar I point people to — buy the domain, point the nameservers at Vercel or keep DNS on Spaceship and let the API do the work. Take a look at Spaceship.

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