The short version
A vanity URL — discord.gg/yourname instead of a string of random characters — arrives at Level 3, which takes fourteen boosts. It is the only Level 3 perk that does anything for people who have not joined yet, which is why it tends to be the one people are really buying boosts for.
Every other boost perk improves the experience of people already inside your server: better audio quality, larger uploads, more emoji slots, a higher streaming resolution. Useful, but invisible from outside. The vanity URL is the exception.
boosts held at once for Level 3 — it is a live total, not a lifetime one
What it takes
Fourteen boosts, held simultaneously. Level 1 is two, Level 2 is seven, Level 3 is fourteen, and the count is a running total rather than a cumulative one. Lose boosts and you drop a level, and the vanity URL is released back into the pool.
That last part matters more than people expect. A vanity link you lose is a link anybody else can claim, and every place you have posted it now points at somebody else's server or at nothing.
Choosing the name
Short, sayable, and the same as your name everywhere else. The whole value is that somebody can hear it once and type it correctly later, which rules out numbers, hyphens and anything with an ambiguous spelling.
Check availability before you commit to it publicly. The desirable short names went years ago, and having to settle for a variant after you have announced the first one is an avoidable embarrassment.
When it is worth it
It earns its cost wherever the link gets spoken aloud or typed from memory: a video outro, a stream overlay, a printed card, a description people retype rather than click. In those places a random invite code quietly loses you everyone who mistypes it.
It earns nothing if your invite is only ever a clickable link. A hyperlink behaves identically whatever text sits behind it, and those fourteen boosts would do more work as members.
Keeping it
Boosts end when the subscription behind them lapses, so a level held up by a handful of individuals is fragile — two people cancelling in the same week drops you below the threshold and takes the URL with it.
If the link is load-bearing for your marketing, hold a boost or two above the minimum instead of sitting exactly on fourteen. The margin costs less than losing the name does. Server boosts are the usual way to keep that buffer without relying on individual members remembering to renew.
Setting it up
Once you are at Level 3 the option appears in Server Settings under the invites area. Set it, then update every place the old invite is published — pinned messages, your site, video descriptions, other servers' partner channels. Old invite codes keep working, so nothing breaks if you miss one.
Every service is delivered without admin access — a public invite or link is all we ever ask for.