Most companies rent their own content without ever thinking about it. The text on your homepage sits in someone else’s database, you pay per editor to reach it, and the price is set by someone you have never spoken to. We built Galea CMS to get out of that. Here is what it is and what it means for you.
The problem we wanted to solve
A website is really two things. There is the site your visitors see, and there is the system where you edit the content. We have always built the first part ourselves. The second part we rented from someone else for years, the way almost every agency does.
That works until it does not. One client wanted to add a fourth person who could post news, and suddenly there was a fee per editor. Another moved their site to a new provider and found that the content could be exported but the editing tool stayed behind. A third was told the platform had changed its pricing model, with six months’ notice.
We tell every client they own the code, the data and the domain. That was true. But they did not own the editing tool, and that is where they actually work every week. We had to close that gap.
What Galea CMS is
Galea CMS is the editor we built for our clients’ websites. It runs on your own domain, stores your content in your own database, and travels with the site if you ever change provider. There is no fee per editor and no platform subscription on top.
What matters most is how it feels to use. When you log in you do not land in an admin panel sitting next to your website. You land on the website. You see your homepage exactly as your visitors see it.
- You click the text you want to change, right on the page
- You rewrite it and see the result as you type
- You publish, and the change is live within half a minute
- If you change your mind you can roll back to an earlier version
No preview in a separate window, no guessing how a headline will wrap on mobile. You edit what you see.
Webflow, Sanity and Galea CMS
We have built client sites in all three. They solve the same problem in different ways, and the differences only show up after a couple of years. Here they are side by side.
| Webflow | Sanity | Galea CMS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where your content lives | With Webflow | In Sanity’s cloud | In your own database |
| Cost per editor | Added per seat | Free up to a limit, then per user | None, however many you are |
| Ongoing platform fee | Subscription required to keep the site up | Subscription above the free tier | None, you pay for hosting only |
| How you edit | In Webflow’s editor | In a separate studio beside the site | Right on the page, you click the text |
| Design freedom | Limited to what Webflow can render | Free, the frontend is built separately | Free, the frontend is built separately |
| If you change provider | The site stops working without the subscription | Content can be exported, the tool stays behind | Code, database and editor come with you |
Webflow is still a good tool, especially for sites that need to ship quickly and rarely change at a structural level. Sanity is a well designed system that served us well on several projects. The point is not that they are bad. The point is that both mean renting a central part of your own website, at a rate someone else sets.
What it means for you
The most concrete difference is that the number of people who can update the site is no longer a budget question. If the whole office should be able to post news, the whole office can post news. We have watched clients limit themselves to a single editor purely on cost, with the result that the site sat still for months whenever that person was busy.
The second difference is that the pieces fit together. Because we own the site, the editor and the client portal, they can talk to each other. You log in once and move on to your website, your invoices or your support tickets without entering a password three times.
The third difference shows up the day you no longer want to work with us. Then you take the code, the database and the editing tool with you. We have nothing to hold you back with, and that is exactly how we want it. A client who stays because leaving is a hassle is not a happy client.
What stays the same
Prices are unchanged. Galea CMS is included in every website package from the basic tier upwards, at no extra charge. A website still costs SEK 20,000 to 60,000 depending on scope, at a fixed price agreed before we start.
Sites are still built in Next.js, still load in under a second, and still have SEO built in from the first line of code. What changed is where the content lives and who decides over the editing tool.
Clients who already have a site with us have been moved across at no extra cost and with no downtime. If you have questions about your own setup, get in touch and we will walk through it together.