Why I'm Building Arc CMS: An Open-Source Foundation You Own

I've set up the same stack 47 times. Same tools. Same yearly bill per client. Same scattered logins and the same data typed into three places. After the 47th time, I stopped accepting it as "just how things are" and decided to build something better.

I run Quadralyst, a boutique agency that works with startups and growing businesses. Almost every project starts the same way: a website the client can update, a way to collect leads, and email to keep in touch with them. Then, sooner or later, sign-in, members and payments. It should be simple. It isn't.

The same setup dance, every time

For every client, I'd assemble the same patchwork:

• A website builder or a CMS, with a monthly fee per site

• An email marketing tool, priced by the number of subscribers

• A forms tool, because the built-in forms never quite fit

• Plugins or add-ons for SEO, languages, search and analytics

That is three to five tools, three to five logins, three to five bills, and often $600 to $1,200 a year before the client has earned anything. Worse, their data ends up spread across platforms they don't control.

I kept thinking, "There has to be a better way." Then the next project arrived and I repeated the cycle.

It wasn't just landing pages

When I first started on Arc CMS, I thought the problem was the landing page: getting a simple page to collect sign-ups and send emails without five subscriptions. That was only the first layer.

Clients' sites grew. They needed articles and case studies their team could publish without calling a developer. They needed pages in more than one language. They needed to show up in Google and, increasingly, in the answers that ChatGPT and Perplexity give. Some needed a members area or paid plans.

And the apps we built had the same story underneath. Every new product needed sign-in, user roles, transactional email, an admin area for the team and a way to take payments. We rebuilt that plumbing for every project, and every time it was weeks of work before we wrote a single feature that made the product different.

What I set out to build

So the goal changed. Not another landing page tool, but one open-source foundation that does three jobs:

• A website your team can run. Content types shaped like your business, an editor anyone can use, and pages that are fast and easy to find.

• The foundation for your next app. Sign-in, roles, email, payments and an admin area on day one, so you only write what makes your app yours.

• A backend for an app you already have. Its admin area, content store and email engine, next to your existing Firebase app.

All of it runs on your own Firebase project. You own the code, the data and the infrastructure.

What Arc CMS does today

For websites:

• Content types and an editor. Articles, services, team, events: each gets its own fields, from 18 types including galleries, maps and FAQs. Drafts save themselves, and every publish is kept so you can restore an earlier version.

• Fast pages. Every page is published as plain HTML and served from Google's global CDN.

• Found by Google and cited by AI. Structured data, a sitemap, RSS, llms.txt and a Markdown copy of every page are written on every publish, and you choose which AI crawlers may read your site. The editor scores each draft out of 100 and tells you what to fix.

• Languages and search. Publish in as many languages as you need, with site search built in.

• Forms, audience and email. Signup forms with emailed verification codes, contact forms with spam checks, one contact list with tags and consent, and broadcasts, drip sequences and automations from the admin area.

• A media library that does the work. Images resized and converted to WebP, cropping, pictures pulled straight out of a PDF, and documents in the same library.

For apps:

• Sign-in by email and password, Google, or phone with a PIN, on one page.

• Roles carried in signed claims and checked by security rules.

• Payments with one-time and subscription checkout, credits and premium-only pages.

• A member area, an admin area and an installable app, ready to extend.

• A custom space for your own code that Arc CMS never touches, so you pull every update with a git merge.

And underneath it all:

• Open source under the MIT licence. Read it, change it, ship it.

• Your Firebase, your data. Export your content, contacts and media at any time.

• Built to last. More than 8,000 automated tests and over 100 pages of documentation.

What it is not

I'd rather you hear this from me than discover it later:

• It is not a drag-and-drop page builder. A developer sets up your templates once. After that, your team works in the admin area without code.

• It runs on Firebase only, on the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan. You pay Google for what you use, and small sites often stay within the free allowances.

• Some choices are narrow on purpose. Payments run through Dodo Payments today, and the admin area is in English and Hindi.

Where Does Arc CMS Go From Here?

Arc CMS is open source and in active development, and I build it in the open. The documentation covers every feature and walks you through building a website or an app, step by step.

If you'd like to follow along, sign up for updates. If you'd rather not do the setup yourself, we can build it for you. And if you want to look under the hood, the code is on GitHub.

I'm tired of watching teams pay for five tools before they've earned anything, and of rebuilding the same plumbing for every new product. Arc CMS is my answer: one foundation, yours to keep.

Gunjan