Sitepins CMS is now open source

Sitepins is now open source under AGPL-3.0. You can read the code, self-host it for free, or keep using the managed cloud.

Here is what led to it.

The problem we had

In 2018 we built Hugo and Bootstrap themes as Themefisher and Gethugothemes. Our customers needed to edit their sites without touching code. We found a Git-based CMS that did the job well, and we integrated it across our themes, our client projects, and our own websites. In 2023, that CMS shut down.

We were supporting 100+ themes, with no editor to hand our customers. We tested every replacement we could find. One was priced for enterprise budgets and would not work with our themes. One had stopped receiving maintenance and carried hundreds of open bugs. We forked an open source option and abandoned the fork after the architecture proved too fragmented to build on.

Our own marketing team could not update our sites comfortably without a developer. Around the same time we started shipping Astro and Next.js themes, and the developers buying them kept asking the same question: what CMS should they give a non-technical client or teammate? We had nothing to suggest them.

What we built

Most Git-based CMS tools make you write the schema by hand. You declare every collection, every field, and every field type in a config file before the editor shows you anything. Get one path wrong and it renders nothing. That was true when we started in 2023, and it is still true for most of them today.

Sitepins detects the schema instead. Connect a GitHub or GitLab repo, and it reads the content files already there, reads the structure from your frontmatter, and builds the editing interface from what it finds. No config file to write first.

You can still change any of it. Field types, labels, default values, dropdowns, and required or hidden flags are all editable from the UI. Detection gives you a working editor on day one, and you refine it from there.

Every save becomes a Git commit. Your content stays in your repo the entire time.

We built it for our own sites first. Then we shared it with our existing audience. The beta launched July 7, 2025 with no major promotion, and 1,800+ people have signed up since. We shipped fixes and features from their feedback every month.

Why we waited

We could have opened the repo on day one. But handing developers a half-built codebase would have cost us more trust than it earned. We wanted the product stable before anyone read it or ran it.

It is stable now. Every site we own runs on Sitepins: Themefisher, Gethugothemes, UIHut, Statichunt, Zeon Studio, and Sitepins itself. We use it daily, which is why it improves daily.

What AGPL-3.0 gets you

Full source code, free to read and modify.
Free self-hosting for personal and commercial projects, with no usage limits.
One condition: if you modify Sitepins and run it as a service for other people, you publish your modified source too.

Self-hosting needs Node.js 22+, pnpm, MongoDB, and an S3-compatible bucket for media. Docker Compose brings up the stack in one command.

If you want to sell a hosted product built on Sitepins without publishing your modifications, we offer a commercial license under the Agency white label plan.

Why this matters for a CMS

Our old CMS shut down and left us stranded with 100+ themes. Anyone picking a CMS today is placing a bet on the company behind it lasting. AGPL removes the bet. If we disappear, the code is yours and your sites keep running.

Nothing changes for Cloud users

Your plan, your data, and your workflow stay exactly as they are. Open source adds a self-hosting path for people who want one.

What comes next

AI builders changed who can ship a website. Building is fast now. Maintaining what you built is still slow.

A website is not a one-time deliverable. It is a product you keep updating with new posts, changed pricing, new screenshots, and rewritten copy. Most AI-built sites are not structured for that work. Every small text change goes back through a prompt, burns tokens, and risks breaking something that already worked. That does not hold up over a year of ownership.

The framework choice matters here too. Most AI builders default to a React app. For a content site, Astro, Next.js, and Hugo produce better results: faster pages, stronger SEO, and content stored in files rather than buried inside components. We expect more people to move toward those frameworks as they hit the limits of app-shaped output.

None of those frameworks ship a CMS. So the next question is which kind of CMS to add.

API-based platforms like Sanity, Strapi, and Contentful solve a real problem when one content source has to feed several applications. Most websites do not have that problem. For a marketing site, a blog, a docs site, or a client project, keeping content in the repo as Markdown is simpler and cheaper, and it stays portable. That is the audience Sitepins is built for.

We plan to keep serving it. More frameworks supported, a sharper editing experience, and fewer steps between connecting a repo and handing the site to a client. Now that the code is public, we hope some of that work comes from you. Open an issue, send a pull request, or tell us what breaks.