Your Custom CMS is a big mistake that needs fixing

Building a custom CMS is the most reliable way to waste $100K - $200k in tech. I've watched dozens of companies do this. "Our needs are unique," they say. Two years later, their content team is stuck with a broken image uploader and their developers hate their lives. I know this intimately - as a co-founder of BCMS, I help companies escape their custom CMS nightmares every month.

Look, I love indie software. I've built and sold several products. But a custom CMS isn't scrappy engineering - it's organizational masochism.

Every custom CMS dies the same way:

I just talked to a CTO who spent $80K building a CMS that couldn't handle “draft” posts - a feature his marketing team needed on day one. Another built one where uploading a 10MB video would crash the server. Guess what? They're both switching to headless CMSs now.

Custom CMS costs:

Headless CMS costs:

But money isn't the real cost. The real cost is time spent not building your actual product.

Only three reasons:

If you ignore this advice:

I've seen this movie. It always ends the same way.

The best CMS is the one your team forgets exists. The worst is the one you're still debugging two years later.

Every hour spent building a custom CMS is an hour your competitors spend building features their customers want. Choose wisely.