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Clark Pesa for SGEN

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Why We’re Building SGEN Differently: A CMS Without the Plugin Stack

Hi DEV Community 👋

We’re SGEN, and this is our first post here.

SGEN is a flat-rate CMS built around a simple idea: website teams should spend less time managing the stack and more time building and growing their sites.

The problem we wanted to address

Modern websites often depend on a growing collection of separate tools.

A CMS handles content. Plugins add functionality. Another service handles forms. Another handles analytics. Hosting lives somewhere else. Security needs its own setup. SEO introduces another set of tools.

Each addition can solve a problem, but it can also create another dependency to maintain.

For agencies managing multiple websites, that complexity can multiply quickly.

A different approach

SGEN brings essential website capabilities into the platform through 23 native modules.

Instead of building around a large collection of third-party plugins, the goal is to provide the tools teams regularly need within one CMS.

SGEN also includes hosting, security, SEO, and server-side rendering as part of the platform.

And our pricing follows the same philosophy:

Pay for sites, not features.

The 23 native modules are included across our plans. As your needs grow, you're primarily scaling the number of live sites rather than unlocking individual features one tier at a time.

Why we're joining DEV

We don't want this organization to simply become another place to post product announcements.

We'll be sharing what we're learning about:

  • CMS architecture
  • Website performance
  • SEO and technical SEO
  • Managing multi-site workflows
  • Native modules vs. plugin-heavy stacks
  • Building and maintaining websites at scale

We'll also share some of the decisions, tradeoffs, and problems we're encountering as SGEN continues to evolve.

We're looking forward to learning from the DEV community as well.

What creates the most friction in the CMS or website stack you use today?

We'd love to hear about it.

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