Why we only build in one CMS

We turn down work every month because it's WordPress, or Webflow, or Shopify. It's the least commercially sensible decision we've made and the one we would defend hardest, so it's worth setting out both halves — what it buys, and what it costs.

Estimates stop being guesses

When you build the same kind of thing repeatedly, you stop estimating and start remembering. We know what a Matrix-heavy marketing site costs because we built one last month, and one before that, and one before that. The variance between them is small and we know which factors drive it.

That is the entire reason we can quote fixed prices and publish a rate card. Not courage — arithmetic. The uncertainty genuinely is smaller, so the risk premium can be smaller too.

A generalist quoting across four platforms is carrying four separate sets of unknowns, and has to price for the worst of them. That risk premium is real and it comes out of someone's margin, usually the studio's. It's the hidden cost of hiring a partner who can do everything.

The patterns compound

The second build in a system is faster than the first. The tenth is dramatically faster, and not because anyone is typing quicker.

It's because the problems are already solved: how to model content so it stays editable, how to structure a block library so it doesn't sprawl, how to handle the parts of an upgrade that always go wrong, how to set up deployment so a launch isn't an event. Each of those took real time to work out once, and now costs nothing.

Spread that across four platforms and you have four shallow versions of the same knowledge, each one re-learned slightly whenever you return to it, none of them deep enough to be worth much.

Support stops being archaeology

Because we host most of what we build, and it's all the same platform, a support request in year three is a question about a system we know intimately. There is no re-learning phase, no working out which generation of somebody's conventions this site belongs to, no discovering that the previous developer solved a problem in a way we've never seen.

It also means any of us can pick up any site. A studio doesn't have to wait for the one person who remembers their project, which is exactly the failure mode that makes small agencies painful to work with when something urgent happens.

Being able to do five things adequately is worth less to a studio than being able to do one thing without surprises.

We get better at the parts nobody sees

Specialising has a second-order effect that took us a while to notice. Because we aren't spending attention on breadth, we spend it on depth — on the control panel being genuinely well-organised, on the block library being coherent, on the upgrade path being clean.

Those are the things a client experiences daily and a studio never sees, and they're the first things to get skipped when a team is stretched across platforms and just needs the thing to ship.

What it costs us

Real work, regularly, and we should be honest about the size of it. A studio arrives with three projects, one of them Craft. We take one and decline two — and sometimes lose all three, because they would reasonably rather have a single partner for everything than manage two relationships.

That's a genuine loss, it happens often enough to notice, and we've made peace with it rather than solved it.

There's a second cost that's harder to talk about: our fortunes are tied to one platform's. If Craft stopped being well maintained, or changed direction in a way that didn't suit the work we do, we would have a serious problem and not much of a hedge. We watch that closely, we think the risk is low, and it would be dishonest to claim it's zero.

What it buys you

Estimates that hold. A rate card you can quote from on the day. A short handover, because the conventions are conventional. Support from the people who wrote it. And no learning curve billed quietly to your project as a slightly larger number than it needed to be.

That's the trade. We think it's a good one, and you should know it's a trade — because the version of this where we claim to be better at everything would be considerably less useful to you.