If you've searched for a journal app with its own subdomain, the results you find are mostly workarounds: point a custom domain at a WordPress blog, wire up a static site generator, or self-host something and manage the DNS yourself. All of that works, and all of it is a project.
Storyie's version is smaller than that on purpose. If your account is on Pro, your account name doubles as a subdomain — yourname.storyie.com — and it's already live. No DNS record to create, no certificate to request, nothing to configure. Here's exactly what that address shows, what it costs, and where it stops.
What's actually at yourname.storyie.com
The root of your subdomain is your public profile: avatar, @account-name, a Pro badge, your bio/location/website if you've added them, tabs for public diaries and public notes (12 per page), your public tags, your writing and streak stats, and a monthly archive. From there:
yourname.storyie.com/diary/{slug}— a public diary entryyourname.storyie.com/note/{slug}— a public noteyourname.storyie.com/tag/{tag}— everything filed under one tag
That's the whole surface. Paths like /d/…, /n/…, /pricing, /blog, and /login don't resolve on a subdomain — it serves only that one person's space, nothing else on storyie.com.
Only public content ever shows up here. Storyie's visibility model is per entry, not per account — see how private/public sharing actually works — so anything you haven't explicitly made public stays exactly where you wrote it, invisible to anyone visiting your subdomain.
Choosing it — and why you can't change it later
The subdomain isn't a separate setting you pick when you upgrade. It's your account name, and you choose that once, on the account-name-setup step right after you sign up. It's pre-filled from your name or email, but you can edit it — 4 to 30 characters, letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores.
There's no screen to change it after that. Treat it the way you'd treat picking a username you intend to keep: think for a minute before you submit it, rather than something you'll fix later.
No DNS, no certificate — but no custom domain either
The reason there's nothing to configure is that *.storyie.com is already a wildcard alias on Storyie's CloudFront distribution, with a certificate provisioned for the whole domain in advance. There's no per-user DNS record and no per-user certificate request — your subdomain simply starts working the moment your account is Pro. Without Pro it doesn't serve your profile — it redirects to storyie.com instead.
The trade-off: what you get is yourname.storyie.com, not a domain you own. Storyie doesn't offer bring-your-own custom domains. If owning the actual domain name matters to you more than the setup, this isn't that product.
What it costs
The subdomain is one line in Storyie Pro, which is $2/month or $20/year — billed through the App Store or Play Store on mobile, or Stripe on the web. The rest of what Pro includes:
- Unlimited diaries and notes (free accounts are capped at 31 private diaries a month, and 100 private notes in total)
- Up to 10 images per entry, instead of 1
- Your subdomain,
yourname.storyie.com - A Pro badge on your profile
- A full export of your account as Markdown plus images
There's no separate charge for the subdomain on top of that — it's part of the plan, not an add-on.
What it doesn't do
Two things worth being upfront about, since they're the kind of claim a reader can quietly check and hold against you if it's wrong:
- No theming or a custom site title. Customization is limited to your profile fields — name, avatar, bio, location, website — and, as of today, those are edited in the mobile app; there's no web profile editor yet. The page heading is always
@account-name, not a title you set. - It's not a separate SEO property. Pages on your subdomain declare a canonical URL back to the main domain (
storyie.com/u/yourname/…), so search engines index the two as one thing, not two. That's an honest limitation, but it's also a fair comparison point against a self-hosted setup: you get a memorable address without the SEO risk of running a second, thinner site.
If you're not on Pro
A free account isn't locked out of any of this — it keeps storyie.com/u/yourname, with the identical profile, diaries, notes, and tags. What Pro adds is the shorter address on top, not the ability to publish. If you're deciding whether to upgrade, it's worth thinking of it as paying for the address, not for the feature of being public at all.
One live example
dev.storyie.com is a real account — the Storyie team's own — not a demo environment. It's modest — a handful of public diaries — and it's there to show the shape of a profile page, not as a showcase of an active publishing habit.
For a wider set of published entries to read through, diary examples groups them by theme. Those are written by Storyie's AI writing personas rather than by users, so treat them as a sense of what the pages look like, not as profiles to compare yours against.
Who reaches for this
In practice it's writers who want one clean link for a portfolio of public entries, professionals who'd rather hand someone yourname.storyie.com than storyie.com/u/jane-doe-2891, and people who want family and friends to have one address to check back on instead of a stream of individual links. If none of that is you, five ways people actually use Storyie covers the more common, non-subdomain uses.
Getting started
- Sign up or grab the app for iOS or Android and pick your account name carefully — it's also your subdomain.
- Write and publish a few public entries; your subdomain will have something on it.
- If you want the address, upgrade to Pro — $2/month or $20/year — and yourname.storyie.com goes live immediately.
