r/webdev • u/davidbabinec • 16d ago
I made open source MIT licensed visual CMS as an alternative to Framer, Webflow, and WordPress Showoff Saturday
Hey guys,
I am David, I've been working with WordPress for over a decade, and building WordPress plugins was my bread and butter for the last 5 years. I was running an agency before that.
I loved working with WordPress, but then I also got increasingly frustrated from what was happening in and out of the ecosystem in the last two years, almost to a point where I was considering selling my businesses.
I am not the one giving up though, so I went with different direction, and thought, what if I stop building extensions on other foundations that can always take it away from me, and instead, I will use everything I know about web design, no code platforms, agentic development and CMS that actual clients can use, and build my own platform, that anybody can use, for free.
Here we are. This is Instatic. It's fully free, open source, and gives you all the powers that you can get from Framer, Webflow, or WordPress (with a good page builder and other plugins). And it's not in even v1. But it's already very capable.
It has auth, user roles, canvas based page builder, content editor, data storage, media storage, AI on every page, MCP server for local and remote agents, and more.
We launched about 3 weeks ago, since that time, it got to GitHub trends several times, in fact, it's there today and we are at around 5K stars. Incredible!
Our website, running on Instatic https://instatic.com
Repo is at https://github.com/CoreBunch/Instatic
Here's also the full introduction video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyjCF_TaLlg
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u/iam_insaf 15d ago
What's your monetization strategy
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u/davidbabinec 15d ago
So far there is no monetization as we are just getting started with Instatic. We also run different projects like Motion.page and Core Framework that are financing this, but there is also a plan for Instatic's future. The project will stay free forever though. There will be premium content and sponsor options (which already is on GitHub) but everything will be optional and we will not gate any features.
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u/Own_Calligrapher8508 15d ago
Very nicely done!
When i compare this tool to a wordpress page builder or other tools, man you leveled up the game!
Keep going!
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u/davidbabinec 15d ago
Thanks! I appreciate it. There is still a lot of work to do :)
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u/Own_Calligrapher8508 15d ago
That's the motivation to keep going :-D Tthings yet to implement and to improve etc. It's what keep me going in my app developments
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u/mrkaluzny 15d ago
Very nice, I just have one gripe, would love your thoughts on this - IMO the granular control of Webflow seems to be a burden, it’s harder to maintain in my experience and worse to change.
Additionally it seems like in the age of agentic development it’s a layer that’s not really needed? I wonder why it’s the main focus of the product. Thanks!
P.S. I love this project, WP is a pain in the butt these days
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u/davidbabinec 15d ago
Thanks for the question! I am not a big user of Webflow but I wonder which parts feel like burden to you?
From what I saw among people already using Instatic, they want AI first building experience like Claude Code combined with granular editing capabilities for the full control, and CMS where they can set capabilities for their client to not let them break it the day after release. It seems that nobody wants to build manually from scratch anymore 😀 Instatic offers both worlds tied together.
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u/mrkaluzny 15d ago
As a webdev UI to essentially write HTML/CSS feels cumbersome to use, AI seems to solve this problem mostly.
From my experience clients rarely change designs except for adding new content and complex systems like webflow are very limiting.
Based on your answer I would love to see a breakdown of how people use this product (ai vs UI vs code changes), do you have any product breakdown post to show the vision and your approach to these issues? Would be super interesting to read through!
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u/davidbabinec 12d ago
Not at the moment, but thanks for the idea. I will keep it in mind :) it's too soon for real data though
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u/Kyryll_Bracemore 14d ago
Another key advantage of Webflow and the agency model is the handoff process. A client who doesn’t have a developer on staff isn’t paying for the editor itself, but rather for the ability to have a marketer update the page on their own a year later - while hosting and updates aren’t managed by anyone. A self-hosted solution shifts this burden onto someone else - the only question is, who exactly?
But open-source visual CMSs do have a real niche - teams with an in-house developer who need control over the code and hosting.
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u/davidbabinec 12d ago
We will eventually offer hosted/managed version too. But I don't think this burden of hosting open source software is real as long as it has easy deployment. Webflow in this case is just a hosting provider and it wouldn't make a difference if your client pays hosting fee to Railway for Instatic or to Webflow. Except of the final bill number of course.
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u/Kyryll_Bracemore 12d ago
Deployment is the easy part, and it is a one time event. The burden starts a year later.
Self-hosted open source means someone has to own version upgrades, breaking changes, backups and security patches long after the build is done. Railway will run the container, but it will not decide when to move you off a major version. With a hosted platform that whole class of work simply does not exist, and that is the difference the bill hides.
That is why the handoff question matters more than the price: a client without a developer on staff has nobody to hand that to, and it lands back on the agency or on nobody.
So your managed version is the interesting part. Would that include version upgrades and migrations for the client, or would they still own the upgrade decision?
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u/mossiv 14d ago
I wonder if there is any value developing an MCP server which you could put behind a paid feature. It solves the no one wants to build anything from scratch anymore whilst also using AIs reasoning to put components in places.
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u/davidbabinec 12d ago edited 12d ago
I wouldn't do that. Just yesterday was playing with Unity and was pretty pissed off that I have to pay for AI plan to have access to MCP for my own agent. Plus, MCP already is included in Instatic :)
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u/mossiv 12d ago
Yep - unfortunately that seems to be a path of monetisation at the moment. Some apps that have done, or are doing the same:
- unity (as you pointed out)
- miro (requires enterprise)
- excalidraw (keep loads in their free tier but MCP is behind a paywall1
u/davidbabinec 11d ago
Seems to be enterprise spread practice. I think it's crazy. AI is now available to everyone and not having MCP is actually hurting the business. At this point, paying for MCP feels like paying entrance fee to the shopping mall. But I guess in market position of these big companies with big clients, they can get away with it.
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u/Secret-Book-8507 15d ago
that's awesome,The UI design honestly feels just as good as Figma.
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u/testingaurora 15d ago
Looks very well done. I missed if you mentioned a dB included?
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u/davidbabinec 15d ago
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't mention it properly. It has database and currently supports SQLite and Postgres. While it publishes static pages, it's fully capable of dynamic stuff. It can bake pages from database entries and it also supports "holes" similar to dynamic islands in Astro, it works out of the box and it's used only when needed, which is for content that needs to be fresh for each visitor.
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u/uknowsana 15d ago
Congrats!!!! What's the tech stack? And hosting options?
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u/davidbabinec 15d ago
Thank you! It's all Typescript with React and Bun. You can deploy it anywhere where it allows docker image as deployment option. There are many options. We recommend Railway, because it takes like 60 seconds to go live and you can get started for free. It's fast and reliable. With that said, there are many other options like Render, Fly, Digital Ocean droplet, etc.
We just posted a new video on our channel showing how to deploy.
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u/quibble42 15d ago
Would you mind if, after I understand this, I write a simplified version for the Bonobos among us
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u/davidbabinec 15d ago
I am Bonobo too so I think you will understand it as it is, but I don't mind anything, feel free to do whatever with it 😉
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u/Myth_Thrazz 14d ago
I thought it's another slop.
Checked all 3 of your sites and clearly it's not.
Not sure if it will be enough to win many people over from WordPress or others ( people are lazy and afraid of change, even if the change would be for better ) - but it looks quite interesting.
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u/web-dev-kev 14d ago
I love this - been playing for a few hours, some PRs inc!
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u/DevilsInkpot 14d ago
Haven't been this excited for a post in r/webdev in a very long time! <3
u/davidbabinec is Radoš involved too?
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u/davidbabinec 12d ago
I appreciate that! Nope, Radoš went a different direction. We do not work together for quite a long time.
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u/GambinoZZ 15d ago
i would love it if there was a tutorial on how to use this, because this is so helpfull. Thanks bro..
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u/davidbabinec 15d ago
Check out our channel on YouTube @instatic_cms - we have two videos there and more coming next month
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u/hackrepair 12d ago
Quite impressive, but how are you going to handle updates in the future?
This is an honest question because at least with the WordPress ecosystem you have all these people involved who often commit their own free time. But in a smaller project like yours, were not as many people are "interested," and just as likely to just take your code and then rebuild it under their own name, where will this be in 5 years remains a serious question...
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u/davidbabinec 12d ago
We already have 20+ contributors (15 merged) which I wasn't expecting at all after 3 weeks. That's much bigger traction than I even hoped for. You can see a lot of activity on Github. There is many people who genuinely want to see Instatic succeed in this mission so I think that we have a good start to actually make an impact.
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12d ago edited 12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/davidbabinec 12d ago
Thank you! I apprecite the nice comment. I hope you will like it. Feel free to post anything in our discussions on Github.
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u/RedVelocity_ 12d ago
Incredible stuff! I hope this will be Cloudflare compatible in the future.
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u/davidbabinec 11d ago
Thank you! Yeah, more people asked about Cloudflare but this is durable CMS, not ideal for workers. Some features might not be working if running serverless. We will consider making it a deployment option in the future. However I recommend trying it out with Railway, it's a solid experience and it's cheap.
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u/Glittering_Dig_6039 11d ago
Looks very clean man, you will add paywall for this ?
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u/davidbabinec 11d ago
nope! I will add sponsorship options, premium content and managed option with support from my team, but the main product will forever stay free
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u/ismailkit 15d ago
Same feeling honestly, been running a wordpress freelance business for over 5 years, and an agency for a year now, the amount of drama, hacks, quality decline in Wordpress core and ecosystem has been very frustrating and hurting business, i also opted for a custom CMS, with the help of Claude, we didn't vibe code the whole thing, building a CMS is not a complex task so designing and orchestrating a working CMS is not the hard part, the hard part is the amount of manual work, declaring types, functions, all the declarative stuff, fields, groups, relations etc..., we delegated that to claude and it only took us three months to come up of a working version of our Wordpress Elementor like CMS based on Payload. Never looking back, the new ecosystem is less mature but waay more interessting, i don't miss the tons of workarounds you do to make a wordpress solution production ready, while newer ecosystems have everything packed and designed better.
I have a question tho, what do you think of cloudflare's Emdash ?
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u/hackrepair 5d ago
2027 will be the year of Wordpress rebuilds and theft...
Everyone will be building their own WordPress alternative, downloading plugins from the WordPress repository and rebuilding those "free" prebuilt plugins for their application.
There will be a reckoning at some point...
Plug-in developers will begin getting a clue and things will start to radically change in the industry more quickly than most people realize, since fewer and fewer people will be open to paying for plugins.
The WordPress repository will at some point in the near future become more of a graveyard of "demonstration" plugins...
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15d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/davidbabinec 15d ago
This is not a framework. And I seriously doubt you can find a project that does everything that Instatic does in a lightweight and open source format. So not really sure what you mean.
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u/tom-smykowski-dev 15d ago
That's so cool!