Can I really skip the CMS?

If you build websites, you've likely not just created free-form pages, but also blog posts that appear chronologically at /blog, perhaps organized into categories, or /products that people can filter by color.

But let me ask you: what would you really lose if you left those features out?

The internet is full of blog categories with one article and filters that nobody clicks. So for many sites out there, the answer may be: very little.

In a traditional CMS setup, when you navigate to the /blog page, the title, teaser and image of each entry are not owned by that page. That means you can’t just put a cursor there and edit the title or teaser text. You have to find the post somewhere in an admin panel to change how it appears in the blog index.

To me that’s not an acceptable user experience for Editable. Whenever you see text or an image, I want you to be able to click it and change it in place, without having to go somewhere else.

That's why in Editable each blog post and each product is simply a page you can edit like any other.

There’s no strict structure you need to follow. Write up the first product page and publish it. Then duplicate it and fill in the details of the next product. Finally, link to those products from the places where it makes sense. There are no content types to define and no categories, tags, authors, or post dates to manage.

This doesn't replace a real catalog with hundreds of products, faceted search, and filtering. But for many smaller sites, it may be enough. And it’s much simpler.

In the sense that I spent hundreds of hours hunting for edge cases and polishing the experience and documentation? Yes.

In the sense that thousands of Editable sites have already been deployed? Nope. Not yet.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m aware it’s a crazy idea in 2026 to introduce a new tool to challenge established CMSs. Many systems have been deployed millions of times, and already form the backbone of the internet. Developers and agencies picked their tech stack long time ago and invested time and money in them. They’re unlikely to switch just because a new, interesting tool comes along. And they shouldn’t, just for the sake of using something different, slightly better.

Editable is not here to compete with the CMS of your choice.

It’s here to give you a new path when clients are suffering under the weight of a feature-rich CMS.

I created Editable to become the easiest way for clients to edit their website. My mission is to distill what modern CMSs are capable of and see how far I can get by keeping the experience on the page, without an admin panel.

User accounts and permission systems create not just friction, but also a larger security attack surface.

In the pursuit of simplicity, Editable has just one admin login, protected by a strong password.

If more than one person needs to edit the site, you need to trust them enough to share the password with them. There are no per-account permissions, no roles, and no user-management panel.

This may make Editable unsuitable for some teams. But for a small group of people that trust each other, it removes an entire system that they otherwise have to configure, maintain, and explain.

I’ve spent about two thirds of my career writing and releasing free, MIT-licensed open source software. I’m a fan of open source, but I’ve also realized its weak spot: In order to make free software sustainable you have to either “build a business around it” or find a sponsor. The list of projects that have struggled to remain independent is long, with Tailwind joining Shopify being the latest prominent example.

I don’t want to build an additional business around Editable. I want Editable to be sustained directly by its users, so I can stay laser-focused on making it better.

And because I’m not in the business of hosting websites, unlike WordPress.com and similar platforms, I can keep it extremely simple and dirt cheap.

Fly.io waives invoices under $5, so you can essentially host your Editable website for free. I’m convinced your initial investment into Editable will pay for itself quickly.

Other than asking for a fee when you launch a site, I want to keep the open-source spirit. The hard parts of Editable are solved in a separate library called Svedit, which is completely free and MIT-licensed. So you can choose to build on top of that directly.