Decide: acquire ferrvault.io for CRD API group?

[BryanFRD]

Context

Kubernetes CRD API groups should be on a DNS domain the publisher owns, to avoid collisions on shared clusters (cf. k8s API conventions).

Today we ship under ferrvault.com (the domain FerrLabs owns). That is correct and works fine — but *.io is the de-facto industry convention for K8s tooling (cert-manager.io, traefik.io, kyverno.io, postgres-operator.crunchydata.com…). Some users may expect ferrvault.io and be surprised by .com.

Question

Do we acquire ferrvault.io and migrate the API group?

Trade-offs

Stay on ferrvault.com	Acquire ferrvault.io
€0 cost	~€30-€60/yr for a .io TLD
Already shipping, no migration	One more breaking CRD migration (or additive alias)
Slight UX friction for K8s-fluent users	Aligns with K8s tooling convention
Fine for paid SaaS where users discover us via app, not random clusters	Better for OSS distribution / cluster-wide install scenarios

Recommendation

Defer until we ship at scale. No real users on the operator yet beyond our own cluster — moving the group is mechanically the same effort whether we do it now or in 6 months, but the cost is real today and the benefit is hypothetical. Re-evaluate when:

• We have ≥ 5 external paying customers on FerrVault, OR
• Someone else publishes a CRD on ferrvault.io (unlikely — ferrvault is not a generic term), OR
• We OSS the operator and users complain about the .com group string.

If we proceed

1. Buy ferrvault.io (registrar of choice; Cloudflare Registrar is the cheapest at ~$30/yr renewal).
2. Add ferrvault.io/v1alpha1 aliased CRDs alongside ferrvault.com/v1alpha1 (same additive pattern we used to add ferrvault.* alongside ferrflow.io).
3. Update the FerrVault app's ConnectClusterWizard YAML template + docs.
4. Deprecate ferrvault.com/v1alpha1 after one minor release of overlap.