We stopped selling clients a CMS. Most barely touched it.

For years we sold small businesses the same package. You get a fast website, and you get a control panel so you can update it yourself.

The fast part held up. The control panel mostly sat there.

We built those sites on Statamic, and we were glad to. Then the economics of building software shifted under us, and we stopped. Our new marketing sites are built with Astro and hosted on Cloudflare. Some of our Statamic sites have already made the move, including the one you're reading.

Statamic earned its place

Statamic's static caching made marketing sites very fast. We could shape its control panel around each client so they could edit their own pages. It also runs on Laravel, where most of our application work lives, so a brochure site that grew into a real product already had a full framework under it. We hosted those sites on Laravel Forge or Laravel Cloud. For a small consultancy, the license fees and hosting bills bought something real.

WordPress was never on the table

We have never built a client site on WordPress. Statamic's own comparison page makes most of the case for us: content stored in flat files, custom features written in Laravel, a more consistent editing experience, and a smaller security surface.

Our view is blunter. A WordPress site is only as secure as its weakest plugin, and we didn't want to own that risk on a client's behalf. None of those reasons changed when we left Statamic. They point at Astro now.

Then AI changed the math

AI made our development faster, and once that happened, every recurring fee had to earn its keep again. Statamic Pro, the edition meant for client sites, costs $349 per site with a year of updates, then $99 a year. Forge and Laravel Cloud started to feel expensive too. Those costs were easy to justify when keeping everything in one ecosystem saved us real time. AI shrank that advantage.

The bigger realization was about our clients. Most of the businesses we build for barely touch the CMS. They don't have anyone whose job is the website. What they want is a site we fully maintain, with changes bundled into the price, and a quick fix whenever they send us a message. We had been selling them an editing tool they rarely opened.

Why Astro on Cloudflare

Astro builds fast sites and Cloudflare serves them fast, with caching and the rest of Cloudflare's network included, for less than we paid on Forge or Laravel Cloud. We went looking for the catch on the hosting side and didn't find one.

The pairing got tighter this year. Cloudflare acquired The Astro Technology Company in January, and Astro stays MIT licensed and platform agnostic. The announcement puts it at close to a million downloads a week.

Staying inside one ecosystem used to be the reason to put a marketing site on Laravel. With AI speeding up development, that reason carries less weight. When a client needs real application features, we build a separate Laravel app alongside the site, or we build the feature into Astro directly.

The one real tradeoff

Astro has no built-in CMS. For the client who really does want to edit their own pages, we add a free, open source CMS such as Sveltia CMS, which edits the Markdown files in the repo through Git. They get their control panel, and nobody pays a license fee for it.

Where that leaves Statamic

Statamic is still a good product. What changed is the cost of building software and our read on how clients actually use their sites. If a client asked us for a CMS-driven site tomorrow, we'd build it with Astro and a headless CMS, and we wouldn't reach for Statamic.

We're grateful for Statamic and the community around it. We maintain a lot of client sites built on it, and those clients love them. We'll keep maintaining and supporting those sites.