Hi Plasmic team,
Quick update - I worked around the domain issue by setting up a Cloudflare Worker proxy. For anyone else hitting this, here’s what I did:
- Created a Cloudflare Worker that proxies to
ensemble.plasmic.run
- Bound both
ensemble.ai and www.ensemble.ai to the worker
- Added handling for robots.txt, sitemap.xml, ai.txt, and favicon.ico in the worker
- Set up www → naked domain redirect in the worker code
It works perfectly now, but I wanted to share some feedback as a long-time, technical Plasmic user who absolutely loves the product:
This should have been trivial. I spent hours on what should be a 5-minute task. Basic website hosting needs have become table stakes:
- Naked domain support (ensemble.ai not just www.ensemble.ai)
- Custom robots.txt without code generation
- Basic sitemap.xml generation
- Favicon management
- ai.txt support (increasingly important for AI crawlers)
I’m technical enough to build a Worker proxy, but most of your potential users aren’t. They’ll just bounce to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress where these basics “just work.”
The irony is that Plasmic is so much more powerful than those tools for complex applications, but you’re losing adoption at step one: “I just want to publish my site to my domain.”
I plan to move to codegen eventually where I’ll have full control, but a simple marketing site or landing page should be dead simple to deploy. The fact that I need to either:
- Use codegen for basic SEO files, or
- Build a proxy layer for standard web hosting features
…makes Plasmic feel unnecessarily complex for what should be the easiest use case.
I’m sharing this because I want Plasmic to succeed. You’ve built something amazing for visual development, but these deployment friction points are real adoption barriers. My workaround took significant technical knowledge that your target audience (designers, marketers, no-code builders) simply won’t have.
Would love to see the hosting layer get some attention - it would unlock so much growth for you.
Still a huge fan and will keep building with Plasmic, just wanted to share the reality of the experience!
P.S. - The custom domain deployment errors with no clear troubleshooting steps are particularly frustrating. Even just better error messages would help!
