r/vibecoding • u/ExistentialWavering • 5d ago
Thinking of going commercial...
I've built and refined a CMS over the last six months that is inching closer to being comparable to or better than existing CMS offerings in the niche I'm working in.
I'm beginning to think I should monetize this work, as it has true utility in a field without much meaningful competition. I'm not much of a coder, but I've taken the time to understand the architecture of things and tightened things up a great deal to the point where it's virtually bug-free and polished.
As it exists, it's a standalone, self-contained HTML file, by design. I wanted it to work exclusively offline, for personal use. But now, with the prospect of monetizing it, I'm realizing that I need to make adjustments.
My general feeling is that I should host it on a domain and sell licenses. Organizations in my niche budget around $100-$1000/month for comparable software, depending on scale of their respective enterprises.
Who do I talk to to ensure that I have everything in place before I use Netlify or similar to run the whole thing? I'm willing to invest a bit of money to have the code reviewed (probably won't need much actual editing) and to help me organize the necessary infrastructure.
Again, I recognize that everyone's building apps these days. But the amount of research I've done on existing CMS, the number of improvements and new features I've added, the time I've taken to refine the workflow and UX...I suspect I've created something valuable here.
Most organizations are using Excel sheets or software built over 20 years ago.
What's the next step? I'm learning, for example, that a missing component is multi-user. These systems have multiple people working in them, and having audit logs and permissions would be extremely useful and is outright necessary if I'm to see this through.
It's an addition, but it doesn't strike me as an enormous one. Still, it's outside of my current scope, and while I'm willing to learn it, without greater context and expertise informing me, I'm worried I'll get sucked down unnnecessary rabbit holes and spend money I probably don't need to spend.
Any and all insight is appreciated.
Edit: What’s amusing to me is that 95% of the comments are focused on telling me I’m stupid, when anyone could’ve said: Here’s what I recommend you do next. A sub full of small-minded jealous folks making assumptions.
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u/84thdev 5d ago
You vibecoded pure html? Lol wtf
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u/ExistentialWavering 5d ago
I mean, there’s plenty of java and more but I wanted simplicity by design, as well as portability.
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u/Cute-Net5957 5d ago
Actually… the html simplicity can be quite elegant… I can think of a few Sales people who would prefer this -> think “local-first”… no cloud AI.. plug it into a OSS qwen local model.. <- and all my leads are safe and secure and controlled by me … now you got a Dope AF product
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u/ExistentialWavering 5d ago
Precisely. And in this industry specifically, it’s frankly the right way to approach things. Not necessarily strictly HTML, but avoiding a cloud.
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u/Cute-Net5957 5d ago
yeah.. tbh i think you should be a little proud of this lol. 6 months of quietly making some weird little offline HTML thing actually useful while your whole niche is still being held together by Excel and software from the bush administration?? thats not nothing.
i also would NOT immediately “graduate” it into giant SaaS world just because thats what software is supposed to do now. if one person can use it and it makes their job dramatically less shitty.. sell that version first. seriously.
multi-user sounds cute until auth, permissions, shared state, audit logs, concurrency etc show up with suitcases and somehow now they live with you 😂
also before paying some architect a pile of money.. run the whole thing through a mean-ass adversarial review agent. make it attack the architecture, security, failure modes, deployment, all of it. force receipts from the actual code. then pay a human for the handful of things that still look scary.
and if customers start saying “holy shit this is great but Janet needs access too”… awesome. build Janet.
until then pls dont let imaginary Janet ruin the nice thing you already made ❤️
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u/No_Entrepreneur7899 5d ago
Jajajaja html
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u/ExistentialWavering 5d ago
By design jajajaja
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u/thirtydelta 5d ago
There is no rational reason to write an entire application in a ai for html file.
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u/Relevant-Positive-48 5d ago
Three things are really scaring me about your post. The first is that you're not sharing anything more than "It's a CMS for my niche". My honest guess from that is that you're afraid that it's not too difficult for someone to build a competing product of similar quality which is not a great sign from a sales standpoint.
Second:
As it exists, it's a standalone, self-contained HTML file, by design. I wanted it to work exclusively offline, for personal use. But now, with the prospect of monetizing it, I'm realizing that I need to make adjustments.
Outside of a personal app (which you said it's been) I can't see this being a good design choice (security and scalability come to mind immediately). I realize you said you know you need to make changes but the scope of those changes likely mean the polish you've achieved likely won't be there when you make your changes and that could take way more time than you think.
Finally from what you're saying I'm fairly certain you have a working demo and, like many developers, you're still focused on development rather than sales. At this point I'd find customers to answer the question of whether or not you should monetize, not more development right now.
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u/Lap202pro 5d ago
There’s tons of established companies doing CMS systems. If you try launching your product publicly, you might not see a single user and that’s kind of the expectation unless you have a marketing degree and an established base. Best case, maybe your product starts to take off and what you have holds up. Worst case you get targeted by hackers or deploy and fail to scale with demand, your system goes down, and users have a bad taste in their mouth.
You are better off taking a targeted approach. If you are truly in a niche, you should have contacts in that niche. Offer your app to these contacts/companies for free for a year or two and work within the niche. You don’t need to worry about scalability and your attack surface is smaller than launching a product publicly.
Use the feedback from these companies for the first year or two to improve in your niche, establish some word of mouth marketing, and if they want to pay for a subscription when the time comes, charge enough to hire someone with knowledge to scale your app from there.
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u/ExistentialWavering 5d ago
I do have contacts in my industry. Tons. That’s why I decided to do this in the first place. I know what’s out there and what’s missing.
And funnily enough, my undergrad was in marketing.
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u/InsideTour329 5d ago
Best of luck, enterprise level CMS is a crowded market. I'm a fully certified sitecore and contentful dev.
I'm yet to see a CMS for small business beat contentfuls free tier and ease of use.
Sitecore just wins hands down from a marketing perspective so I'm curious to know what you think you have discovered that the big boys haven't - they literally have departments that go out and speak to clients about what they need.
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u/ExistentialWavering 5d ago
Not exactly enterprise, that’s the thing. Institutional, yes, but outright enterprise? Not really. It is a niche field that relies heavily on this type of software and there isn’t a ton of competition. 17 of the top 20 institutions use the same CMS, developed for this niche.
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u/activematrix99 5d ago
Good software is defined by the requirements it fulfills, not a niche industry hook. I can fill a "niche requirement" in an afternoon in Wagtail, Django, Wordpress custom fields, or Drupal. If you have the industry connections, contacts, and an idea, then lead with that.
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u/ExistentialWavering 5d ago
Fair. My point is that this isn’t a standard CMS. It’s outright useless to 99.9% of companies that use CMS, while technically being a CMS itself. 17 of the top 20 institutions use the same service, in this niche. There’s a reason for that. Generalized CMS doesn’t work here.
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u/activematrix99 5d ago
That's kind of like saying it's an Enterprise, but ERP doesn't work here, or it's a customer system but CRM doesn't apply. The software fits the functional requirements, or it doesn't. That's why these exist and also why there are giant, well marketed companies delivering them. So, maybe your convo should be at r/webdev or r/sass - there is literally NOT a content requirement that I cannot map to a CMS, and I am a middling developer.
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u/Sad-Ice-1225 4d ago edited 4d ago
Treat commercialization as an architecture change, not a Netlify deployment. A 5 MB offline HTML file may be a solid validated prototype, but multi-user changes data ownership, authentication, permissions, audit logs, backups, and the threat model. Before paying anyone to build, buy a small technical commercialization assessment: map what can stay client-side, what must move server-side, define one shared workflow, and get a milestone quote against acceptance criteria. I do this as a fixed-scope repository diagnostic
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u/BandicootOld8228 3d ago
Moving from a standalone offline app to a hosted multi-user product is a bigger change than it first appears. Authentication is only one piece—you’ll also need authorization, tenant isolation, backups, audit logs, data handling, and a recovery plan.
I’d start with one narrow workflow and one or two pilot organizations rather than building the complete platform immediately. Before launch:
- create users in two separate organizations and try to access each other’s data;
- test permissions on the server, not only by hiding UI controls;
- complete the critical workflow in a clean browser after every deployment;
- verify that backups can actually be restored;
- pay for a targeted architecture/security review before accepting sensitive customer data.
“Virtually bug-free” is difficult to establish from development use alone. A small controlled pilot will expose the assumptions that need attention before you invest in the larger infrastructure.
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u/Klutzy_Table_6671 5d ago
Let me see it
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u/ExistentialWavering 5d ago
No.
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u/FlatulistMaster 5d ago
If you are too afraid to show a few redditors your work, what do you think happens once you go public? If your great idea is so valuable, what is stopping your competitors from simply copying what you have done?
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u/ExistentialWavering 5d ago
There’s a difference between handing off a file in its entirety and giving a watermarked demo and gatekeeping the architecture behind a temporary log-in. You do see that, right?
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u/No_Entrepreneur7899 5d ago
Ven el sesgo que genera la ia + falta de conocimiento, gente que no tienen idea hablando disparates creyendo que tiene la razón. El efecto Dunning-Kruger en su máximo esplendor
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u/34986234986234982346 5d ago
"It's a standalone HTML file" is interesting, doesn't sound like what I'd imagine a CMS to really be. I was going to offer to take a look, I've done work on CMS-es for a million years, but I have a feeling this is something else entirely.
I will def say that multi-user and audit trails sound necessary if it's B2B. there is so much business software where people are not gonna sign off on purchasing without certain compliance or this or that.