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.

Why you'll fail

Every custom CMS dies the same way:

1. You think you're special
2. You build something that can't handle file uploads properly 3.Your content team can't paste from Google Docs 4.Your developers are stuck maintaining garbage instead of building your product

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.

The real cost of Custom CMS

Custom CMS costs:

• Initial development (4 months): $40K
• Part-time maintenance: $60K/year
• Infrastructure: $3K/year
• Unexpected fixes: $20K/year Total: $123K first year, $83K/year after

Headless CMS costs:

• 50 users × $10/month = $6K/year
• Two weeks of integration: $15K (one-time) Total: $21K first year, $6K/year after
• But money isn't the real cost. The real cost is time spent not building your actual product.

When a custom CMS makes sense

Only three reasons:

• You have HIPAA requirements no existing CMS can handle (rare)
• You're dealing with classified documents (very rare)
• You're building a CMS product to sell (good luck competing with the dozens already out there, BCMS included)

How this ends

If you ignore this advice:

• Month 3: "Just need to add image uploading"
• Month 6: "Just need user roles"
• Month 12: "Need to rebuild the editor"
• Month 18: "Maybe we should look at existing solutions..."

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

What to do instead

• Accept you're needs are not so special
• Pick a headless CMS (BCMS, for example)
• Integrate it in a week
• Build your actual product

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.