#We're Building Contoprix — Here's Why

Swapnil Varade — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 02:21:09 +0000

For the past several months, we've been working quietly on something called Contoprix.

It's a new headless CMS we're building from the ground up.

And this is our first time talking about it here.

So, what is Contoprix?

At its core, Contoprix is a headless CMS designed to give developers structured, API-first content management while giving content teams a better experience managing that content.

But we don't want it to stop at:

Create schema → Add content → Fetch through API.

We're working toward a platform where developers can define how digital experiences are built, while content teams can manage and eventually compose those experiences visually.

Some of the areas we've been working on include:

Structured content modeling
Reusable components
REST and GraphQL content delivery
Multi-website content management
Localization
Media management
Drafts, publishing and versioning
Roles and permissions
Content workflows
Developer tooling
Visual page building

We're now roughly 80% through what we consider our initial product.

But Contoprix isn't ready for launch yet.

And that's intentional.

What are we working on right now?

One of the biggest remaining pieces:

The Visual Builder.

This is where things are getting particularly interesting.

We don't want to build a traditional drag-and-drop website builder where the CMS owns everything.

The direction we're exploring is different:

Developers define the building blocks.
Content teams compose experiences with them.

That raises some difficult product and engineering questions.

How much freedom should editors have?

How do you keep pages visually flexible without losing structure?

How do reusable components, structured content and visual layouts work together?

How do developers stay in control without making editors depend on them for every small change?

We're working through those questions now.

Why are we posting before it's finished?

Because we'd rather share the real process than appear one day with a polished launch announcement.

There will be architecture decisions that work.

There will be ideas we change.

There will probably be features we build and later decide were the wrong solution.

We want to share those parts too.

Over the coming posts, we'll dig into what we're building, why we made certain architectural decisions, the problems we're encountering, and what we're learning from building a CMS from scratch.

And we'd like feedback from the developer community while we're doing it.

So here's our first question:

If you use a CMS today — what is the one thing you wish it did better?

We're listening.

DEV Community: Swapnil Varade

#We're Building Contoprix — Here's Why

So, what is Contoprix?

What are we working on right now?

Why are we posting before it's finished?