The Story Behind Sitepins

We built Sitepins to solve our own problem. Now we’re sharing it with you.

In 2018, our world was perfect.
As the founder of Themefisher and Gethugothemes, we were early adopters of the Jamstack concept. We were building high-performance static site themes with Hugo and Bootstrap.

For content management, we had found a Git-based CMS that was a game-changer. It allowed us and our customers to edit sites visually without ever touching code.

We were so all-in that we created tutorials showing developers how to use it with our themes. One video exploded 60,000+ views on YouTube, proving just how desperately developers needed this solution.

Then everything changed.

In 2023, the CMS we relied on announced it was shutting down!!! (RIP Forestry)
The market was left in chaos. We were left supporting 100+ themes (Now 180+) with no good way forward.

We searched desperately for alternatives:

• Forestry team’s new product was focused on enterprise clients. Still, we tried to use and integrate it with our websites and themes, but it didn’t work out like Forestry did.
• CloudCannon was fully commercial and too expensive. It also wasn’t compatible to work with our themes out of the box.
• DecapCMS (formerly Netlify CMS) was not actively maintained, and Netlify announced they would no longer work on it. There were hundreds of unaddressed bugs and a UX that made simple tasks feel like a struggle.
• We even tried to clone and modify Decap CMS since it was open source, but found a fragmented architecture that was beyond saving.

Meanwhile, our own team was stuck in a loop of manual updates. Our marketing team couldn’t manage content on our own sites without developer time. We couldn’t scale. It wasn’t sustainable.

The problem got bigger…

At the same time, we expanded our offering.
We found Astro and Next.js were also great for creating modern websites. We started releasing themes for them, and developers loved our products just like they loved our HTML and Hugo themes.

But then developers started asking: “We work with non-technical clients and teammates. When we hand off sites to them, they need a CMS. What do you suggest?”
We couldn’t suggest anything. No CMS we found was perfect.

Those developers were frustrated with existing solutions. They knew static sites were great, but couldn’t use them for their non-technical clients and teammates because of the missing “CMS” piece.

That’s when it hit us.

If we wanted a tool that actually worked for Astro, Hugo, and Next.js (one that met the standard we’d once had), we would have to build it ourselves.

The birth of Sitepins

Our idea was simple: You don’t need to set up anything extra to use the CMS.
You can build the site as you like. You can connect your repository and start editing visually.

No custom schema creation needed. The CMS should do it for you or make it easy for you.

We found a web-based solution would be best for this.
After months of working, we found it works for our own use case! Though it wasn’t perfect, it served our needs.

Then we opened it to the world.

When we launched the beta, something unexpected happened.
Over 600 people (and counting) registered without any heavy promotion so far.
We realized we weren’t alone in our struggle. We had built something others desperately needed.

Why we’re bootstrapped (and why that matters)

We’re building Sitepins without outside funding. No investors. No venture capital. Just a small team solving a real, niche problem.
This gives us freedom. We answer to our users, not shareholders.
We can focus on what actually matters: building a tool that works, consistently, for developers and their teams.

SITEPINS IS NOT A SIDE PROJECT OR An EXPERIMENT

We’ve been building products for the modern web development industry for over 8 years. Today, all our websites (Themefisher, Gethugothemes, UIHut, Statichunt, Zeon Studio, Sitepins Itself and more) managed via Sitepins. That’s why we improve the product every single day. We live on it. We’re committed to making it better continuously.

As long as our businesses are live, Sitepins will be here to support yours. And if we ever run out of business (we hope that never happens), we’ll open-source the entire codebase so you can continue using Sitepins on your own.

As an early adopter, you’re part of building something meaningful. And we’re grateful to have you here.

Thank you.

Mehedi
On behalf of the Sitepins team