diff --git a/DEPLOYMENT_PROFILES.md b/DEPLOYMENT_PROFILES.md
index 4d40dba..3268f9a 100644
--- a/DEPLOYMENT_PROFILES.md
+++ b/DEPLOYMENT_PROFILES.md
@@ -249,6 +249,43 @@ racing on one service make deploy history impossible to read.
 > for roughly 100 days: the ritual below is easy to forget and nothing failed
 > loudly when it was. Prefer the workflow.
 
+### Moving the demo to a new service (cutover checklist)
+
+Standing up a replacement service and retiring the old one has ordering
+traps. Work through these in sequence; every step is verifiable before the
+next one starts.
+
+1. **Set `REGENGINE_CORS_ORIGINS` to the NEW service's own origin — change
+   it, never copy or reference it.** This value names the host, so a Railway
+   reference variable (`${{old-service.REGENGINE_CORS_ORIGINS}}`) carries the
+   *old* URL and fails in two ways at once: browser requests lose their CORS
+   headers, and every state-changing request is rejected as an untrusted
+   origin (`app/auth_middleware.py` gates writes on the same list).
+   Verify: `curl -sD - -o /dev/null -H "Origin: https://<new-domain>" https://<new-domain>/api/healthz`
+   must echo the origin back in `access-control-allow-origin`.
+2. **Replace secret reference variables with concrete values.**
+   `REGENGINE_BASIC_AUTH_USERNAME`, `REGENGINE_BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD`, and
+   `REGENGINE_WEBHOOK_HMAC_SECRET` may reference the old service. Deleting
+   the old service while references remain breaks auth on the new one.
+3. **Retarget every consumer of the old URL.** In this repo that is the
+   smoke workflows (`remote-smoke.yml`, `remote-browser-smoke.yml`,
+   `smoke-failure-issue.yml`) and the docs. Outside this repo, the RegEngine
+   dashboard reaches the demo through a Next.js proxy route **hosted on
+   Vercel**, so `INFLOW_LAB_SERVICE_URL` (fallback
+   `NEXT_PUBLIC_INFLOW_LAB_SERVICE_URL`) is a *Vercel* env var — it is not
+   on any Railway service, and Vercel bakes env at build, so the change is
+   inert until production is redeployed.
+   Verify: `https://<dashboard-host>/api/inflow-lab/api/healthz` reports the
+   new commit with `commit_source: RAILWAY_GIT_COMMIT_SHA`.
+4. **Only then retire the old service.** Until step 3 lands everywhere, the
+   old service is the live backend for whatever still points at it.
+
+> Steps 1–2 are exactly what the GitHub-connected cutover missed in August
+> 2026: the new service referenced the old one's variables, the URL-bearing
+> CORS value came across stale, and both nightly smokes stayed red for three
+> days after the cutover PR merged — with the failure attributed to the wrong
+> cause until the allowlist was probed directly.
+
 ### Manual CLI deploy (fallback)
 
 When deploying from the CLI, update the non-secret build variables before `railway up` so health checks can identify stale deployments: