I'm building a SaaS that automatically registers domains for Swiss SMEs immediately after checkout, without any manual intervention. I'm testing Openprovider, but I've run into problems with its sandbox, API behavior, and domain registration flow, so I'm evaluating other providers.
The main requirements are a REST API for availability checks and registration, a usable sandbox, registrar-only services, the ability to set nameservers during or immediately after registration, and no significant upfront deposit or monthly minimum. Webhooks for domain status would also be helpful. DNS will be managed through Cloudflare and hosting through Vercel.
Which registrar or reseller are you using in production for automated .ch registrations, and how reliable has the API been? I'm especially interested in providers with explicit support for .ch registration, renewal, and transfer operations.
3 Answers
INWX may be worth investigating for this use case. CrazyDomains was also suggested, although providers like that may require a deposit. Before committing, confirm their exact .ch registration support, API coverage, sandbox availability, and commercial requirements.
Before blaming the client library, inspect the raw request and response with curl or your browser’s network tools. Verify the HTTP status, response body, authentication headers, and whether the sandbox actually supports the .ch operation you’re testing. That usually reveals whether the issue is in the integration or the provider’s test environment.
Design the integration as an asynchronous workflow even if registration starts with a synchronous API call. Persist an idempotency key and track states such as pending, registered, and failed. Then reconcile using webhooks or scheduled polling, because registration and nameserver updates may complete separately and retries can otherwise create duplicate or inconsistent operations.
A clean sequence is availability check, registration, and then nameserver reconciliation. Keeping those steps idempotent makes retries and webhook delays much easier to handle.