Deploying your CMS for free - Technical perspective for startups

Maximizing Startup Efficiency: Deploy Your CMS Without Paying

I’ve done quite research before building my own integration for CMS and there were quite few CMS that were open source and easy to use. I love open source but open source doesn’t mean you can host for free. It will cost you money to host your own CMS but you want to avoid paying at all for every tool you use for your startup.

Strapi being one of the popular choice out there works well for self host, that means hosting on your own laptop which isn’t accessed publicly. There starter cloud price is $25 per month which is quite a lot in my opinion. Paying for stuff you’re probably not going to build content around that much. Then comes the self host option on cloud, you can spin up an instance like EC2 on AWS or compute service on GCP but minimum requirement is 2GB which is quite a lot and would be expensive running all the time on cloud.

So what do you do? You want to build your own content and put it out there and avoid this much cost ( why pay at all, be smart and save yourself some money for now and utilize it later ). There comes the Sanity CMS. A rare gem in the internet I found when searching for free CMS or would allow free hosting CMS.

I went with Sanity CMS because their pricing was free for starters and then of course when you have growth you can scale up to more premium price or host your own if you can afford it. It can be a bit confusing to setup for newbies but after that it’s easy to use.

A small overview of how setting up works is that you create your own on sanity and get API keys etc for your frontend framework. Then your frontend frameworks installs sanity dependencies. At `/sanity` route you have CMS editor where you can add content and it will save to sanity cloud. Now all you have to do is adjust your framework to use CMS content to be used on frontend. See my demo here https://www.bahroze.com/phoenix , I wrote few AI generated articles.

That’s it for another freebie for today. If you want someone to deploy your CMS for free, I’m here to help with that. See you next time.