Compare InkCMS
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Read more§ About InkCMS
A CMS built by someone who's been
building them for 30 years.
InkCMS is the seventh CMS Ken and his team have architected — and the first one built from scratch for the agent era. The first six taught us what to keep. This one started with a question: what would we build if Claude was the senior editor?
§ 01 — Origin
Three decades of CMS. One AI-first reset.
We built our first CMS in the late 1990s, before the term existed. The shape was the same shape most CMSs still have today: a SQL database, a CRUD admin, content types, templates, publishing workflows, role-based permissions. Versions of that engine have powered sites for B2B brands, financial services, editorial publishers, and member portals across three decades. It's robust, multi-server, high-security, high-speed — everything an enterprise stack should be.
It is also, in 2026, the wrong shape for the world we now work in.
The world we now work in has Claude in it. And Claude is not very good at SQL admin panels — but Claude is extraordinarily good at editing files. Markdown files. YAML files. Razor templates. CSS. The substrate of the web.
So we tore the old assumptions up and started over. InkCMS is a complete reconstruction of a traditional CMS, designed from the storage layer up to be edited by an AI. No database. No CRUD admin as the primary path. No content-type schema migrations. Just files — the shape Claude already understands.
The bet is simple: a developer with Visual Studio Code and Claude Code should be able to stand up a complete, functional website in a day. Starting from a small set of HTML and a brand brief. Or from Figma designs and a content drop. Or — once the site is live — from a marketing lead pasting raw notes into the admin chat and clicking Apply.
"This is the seventh CMS I've written. The first six taught me what to keep. This one is what we would build if Claude was the senior editor."
— Ken Svoboda, Founder, InkCMS
The page editor with Claude beside you — the loop the rest of the product is built around.
§ 02 — Philosophy
Three principles. No exceptions.
Every design decision in InkCMS traces back to one of three rules. Where the rules conflicted with convenience, the rules won.
I · Filesystem first
Every byte of state is a file. No exceptions.
Pages, menus, entities, users, sessions, audit logs, AI conversations — all on disk as markdown, YAML, or JSON. An agent that knows the format for one file knows the format for all of them. A human can open any state in a text editor. A backup is tar. A disaster recovery is tar -x. A development workflow is git diff.
II · AI is a senior editor
The agent is a teammate, not a magic wand.
Claude reads. Claude proposes. The human approves. Every write surfaces as a pending-action card. Every action is in the audit log. The AI never has shell access, never sees source code, never holds secrets, never publishes without consent. That's how you trust an agent in production — by giving it nothing it shouldn't have.
III · Developers own the stack
It's your ASP.NET app. We just shipped it.
InkCMS is source-available. Customization is C#, Razor, and CSS — the same tools every .NET developer already uses. No plugin economy. No theme marketplace. No proprietary scripting language to learn. If you want a feature, you write the feature. If you want a different look, you write the CSS. Claude Code helps. The result is yours.
§ 03 — Product timeline
How we got here.
Late 1990s
First CMS — classic ASP
A custom CMS in classic ASP for enterprise clients. SQL Server backend, server-rendered HTML, the shape that became conventional wisdom for the next twenty-five years.
2002 – 2008
ASP.NET Web Forms generations
Ported the engine onto ASP.NET 1.x, then 2.0, then 3.5. Same SQL model under the hood; cleaner runtime and richer server controls on top.
2009 – 2015
ASP.NET MVC era
Rebuilt on ASP.NET MVC. Cleaner separation of concerns, proper routing, Razor templating. Dozens of production sites for B2B brands, financial services, and editorial clients.
2016 – 2024
.NET Core through .NET 8
Lift-and-shift onto .NET Core, then incremental upgrades through .NET 6 and .NET 8. Linux deployments became practical, the runtime got dramatically leaner, the templating engine matured. The SQL-in-the-back shape persisted unchanged.
2025
The Claude experiment
Started experimenting with Claude on real client editorial work. Watched it struggle with admin forms and excel at file editing. The penny dropped: the storage layer was the bottleneck.
2026 Q1
InkCMS — clean sheet on .NET 10
Filesystem-only storage. Markdown + YAML everywhere. Two AI surfaces — admin assistant + visitor advisor. Multi-provider, bring-your-own API key. Single binary.
2026 Q2
v10.5 — Preview release
InkCMS is in Preview — running production sites today, this one included, with new installs going live every week. Source-available under a commercial subscription license. The version number starts at 10.x because InkCMS inherits the line numbering from prior generations of CMS engineering; the product itself is new.
§ 04 — Boundaries
What InkCMS is not.
Knowing what InkCMS isn't is as important as knowing what it is. If any of the below describes what you need, InkCMS may not be the right tool.
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Not a Squarespace alternative.
InkCMS is for sites where the content matters and the operator wants to own the stack. If you want drag-and-drop with no developer in the loop, you want something else.
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Not headless.
Server-rendered Razor templates with embedded partials — because the AI authoring contract works better when the template IS the source of truth. Not when there's a JSON API hiding it from the AI.
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Not WordPress at scale.
No plugin economy. No theme marketplace. Customization is C#, Razor, CSS — and Claude. If you depend on a thousand-plugin ecosystem, InkCMS will feel sparse on day one. But ask Claude to build what you need, and unreliable third-party plugins become custom applications you actually control.
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Not an AI-on-top wrapper.
AI is the design center, not a bolted-on feature. The data model, storage shape, tool surface, and prompt contract were all designed to be edited by an LLM from day one.
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