We ship products at Inithouse, a studio running a growing portfolio of tools and apps in parallel. One of them is Tarotas, a tarot card app with 78 cards and interpretations across five languages: Czech, English, Polish, Slovak, and German. All on a single domain.
When we started building the multilingual version, we had a decision to make. Subdomains, subdirectories, or separate country-code TLDs? We went with subdirectories. Here is what we learned, what broke, and what we would do differently.
The three options (and why most advice is wrong)
Every SEO guide gives you the same comparison table. Subdomains like cs.example.com, subdirectories like example.com/cs/, or country-code TLDs like example.cz. They list pros and cons and leave you to decide. The problem is that the decision depends heavily on your stack, team size, and how you deploy.
Country-code TLDs give the strongest geo-targeting signal. Google treats tarotas.cz as inherently Czech. But you end up managing multiple domains, multiple SSL certificates, multiple DNS records, and (often) multiple deployments. We actually run this setup for another product in our portfolio, Ziva Fotka, which has separate domains for Czech, Slovak, Polish, and German markets. It works, but the operational overhead is real. Every DNS change, every certificate renewal, every deployment happens N times.
