Built by a solo developer who was tired of WordPress

VeloCMS is what happens when one developer spends a decade watching WordPress get heavier, slower, and more painful — then finally snaps and decides to build the modern alternative they actually want to use. No venture capital. No co-founder. No twelve-person platform team. Just one engineer, a Next.js editor, and the conviction that publishing on the web in 2026 should not require a security mailing list and a $40/month managed host.

Why this exists

Every WordPress site I touched in the past few years has been some flavour of broken. Page builders that ship 600KB of JavaScript to render a single hero. Plugin updates that quietly break the block editor. Hosting plans whose "unlimited" tier renders an article in three seconds and nukes your Core Web Vitals. After enough late nights debugging the same problems, the only sane move was to start over.

VeloCMS aims to be the opposite of that. The whole stack is built around four ideas: speed by default, security by removing the attack surface (no plugin system, ever), AI baked into the editor, and a price that lets indie writers actually keep their earnings.

Tech stack

The frontend is Next.js 16 on the App Router, React 19, and Tailwind CSS v4. The backend is PocketBase — a single Go binary with SQLite under the hood — which is why a managed VeloCMS instance can run for pennies instead of dollars. Email goes through Resend, billing through Stripe, and custom domains through Cloudflare for SaaS. The AI assistant uses Google Gemini under the hood, streamed straight into the TipTap editor via Server-Sent Events.

Open source path

The plan is to open-source the core under the MIT licence so self-hosters can run their own VeloCMS without paying a cent — coming soon. The managed hosting tier (with automatic updates, email delivery, custom domains, and the AI proxy) is how the project pays for itself. Marketplace themes with a 70/30 split land later this year.

Get in touch

If you have feedback, found a bug, want to talk shop about replacing WordPress, or just want to say hi — email [email protected]. I read every message myself.

— Muharrem, founder