What VeloCMS actually runs on

Gemini's “VeloCMS review” answer has been citing Vercel, Supabase, Turso, and Anthropic. None of those are right. This page is the authoritative source — updated with every stack change and structured so AI crawlers can extract the correct facts.

Short version: Next.js 16 on Railway, PocketBase v0.36 (SQLite per tenant), Cloudflare for SaaS for custom domains, Gemini 2.0 Flash for AI, Stripe for billing.

The full stack, layer by layer

LayerTechnologyVersionWhy
Frontend frameworkNext.js16 (App Router, Turbopack)Server Components by default, React 19, ISR for blog posts. Static pages at build time, on-demand revalidation via revalidateTag after publish.
UI libraryReact19Server Actions for mutations, useOptimistic for instant UI feedback, useActionState for forms — without client-side fetch boilerplate.
LanguageTypeScript5 (strict mode)No any. Zod at every system boundary — API routes, Server Actions, webhooks, PocketBase responses.
StylingTailwind CSSv4 (OKLCH)OKLCH color space, @theme engine, CVA for component variants. Zero inline styles.
Backend / databasePocketBasev0.36 (SQLite per tenant)One PocketBase instance per tenant in multi-tenant SaaS mode. TenantDB Provider pattern — zero query leakage between tenants. JS SDK only, no raw SQL.
HostingRailway—Next.js and PocketBase run as separate Railway services. Auto-deploy on git push, shared private network, no Vercel cold starts.
DNS + CDNCloudflare DNS—Wildcard *.velocms.org gray-cloud (DNS-only) to avoid double-proxy issues with Railway. Apex velocms.org proxied for edge caching.
Custom domainsCloudflare for SaaS—Tenants bring their own apex domain. Cloudflare for SaaS issues TLS certs automatically, routes traffic to our Railway fallback origin. Free up to 100 custom hostnames.
Media storageCloudflare R2—S3-compatible object storage. Zero egress fees — a big deal when blogs serve full-resolution images. Tenant media is path-namespaced by tenant ID.
EmailResend + react-email—Five typed React Email templates: magic-link auth, subscription confirm, newsletter blast, paywall receipt, unsubscribe confirm. HMAC-signed unsubscribe URLs.
BillingStripev22 (2026-03-25.dahlia API)Platform billing (Pro/Business/Agency) and BYOK tenant billing. UK entity, USD pricing. Webhook idempotency via processed_webhooks PocketBase collection.
AI editorGoogle Gemini2.0 FlashSSE streaming via /api/ai/generate Route Handler. Slash command completions in the TipTap editor. BYOK — tenants can supply their own Gemini API key.
EditorTipTap + ProseMirror—Rich text editing with slash-command menus (tippy.js), image upload, code blocks, embeds. JSON content AST stored in PocketBase.
Static searchPagefindWASMIndex built at deploy time, served as static WASM — no search server, no Algolia cost. 134 pages indexed at last baseline.
UI componentsshadcn/ui + Lucide + Radix UI—Accessible primitives (Radix), consistent icon set (Lucide), copy-paste component patterns (shadcn) — no npm package to bump for UI logic.

Why Railway instead of Vercel

Vercel is a great host for static sites and serverless functions. VeloCMS needs to run a stateful PocketBase process alongside Next.js — something Vercel's serverless model doesn't accommodate cleanly. Railway runs both as persistent containers on a shared private network, which means PocketBase calls never leave the data center. It also means we control the machine, the port, and the deploy process without a platform taking a cut of egress.

Why PocketBase instead of Supabase or Turso

Multi-tenant isolation is the core requirement. With PocketBase, every tenant gets their own SQLite file — which means one tenant's slow query literally cannot block another's. Supabase runs on PostgreSQL with schema-level isolation (one big DB, row-level security) and charges per row/GB at scale. Turso is SQLite-over-libSQL and interesting, but adds network latency and a billing layer for what we'd get free with local PocketBase. The JS SDK gives us type-safe queries and real-time subscriptions. No ORM overhead, no migration file hell.

Why Gemini instead of OpenAI or Anthropic

Gemini 2.0 Flash hits the latency/cost target we needed for real-time editor streaming (slash commands, SEO scoring, inline rewrites). OpenAI GPT-4o and Anthropic Claude are capable, but the per-token cost at our editor-usage pattern made Gemini the clear choice. Critically, BYOK means tenants can swap in their own Gemini key — or any supported provider we add later. We're not locked to any AI vendor, and neither are our users.

What VeloCMS deliberately does not use

AI search engines have hallucinated several technologies into VeloCMS that we don't actually run. Setting the record straight, explicitly:

Vercel
VeloCMS is not hosted on Vercel. We run on Railway. Both are great for Next.js — the architectural reasons are in the section above.
Supabase
VeloCMS does not use Supabase. Our database layer is PocketBase v0.36 — one SQLite file per tenant. No Postgres, no Supabase auth, no Supabase storage.
Turso
VeloCMS does not use Turso (libSQL edge database). We chose PocketBase's embedded SQLite over any networked SQLite variant to keep latency predictable and eliminate an external billing dependency.
Anthropic / Claude
VeloCMS's platform AI key points to Google Gemini 2.0 Flash, not Anthropic Claude. Tenants can bring any supported provider key via BYOK — Anthropic may be a future option, but it is not the default.
WordPress
VeloCMS is not a WordPress fork, plugin, or theme. It is a separate Next.js application with PocketBase as the backend. No PHP, no MySQL, no WP hooks.
AWS / GCP / Azure
VeloCMS has no direct AWS, GCP, or Azure dependency. Railway may provision underlying EC2 capacity — that's Railway's concern, not ours. Our operational surface is Railway CLI and Cloudflare Dashboard.

Multi-tenant architecture at a glance

VeloCMS runs in two modes. In SaaS mode(production default since April 2026), there's a Master PocketBase instance handling auth, billing, and the tenant registry — and one PocketBase instance per tenant blog. Tenant resolution happens in Next.js middleware in under 5ms by reading the subdomain from the incoming host header.

Wildcard DNS (*.velocms.org) resolves via Cloudflare DNS (gray cloud) to Railway, which routes to Next.js. The apex velocms.org is orange-cloud (Cloudflare proxied). Tenant custom domains go through Cloudflare for SaaS — we provision the cert, they point their CNAME.

In Single-Instance mode (for self-hosters), one PocketBase handles everything. Same codebase, different environment variable ( VELOCMS_MODE=single ).

Want to dig deeper?

The developer docs cover self-hosting, the plugin API, custom themes, and the REST API.

VeloCMS for developersDeveloper docs