For Artists
Own your gallery outright. No monthly platform fee.
If you’re an artist paying Squarespace, Wix, or a similar platform every month just to keep your work online, here’s another way: have a site built once that you actually own — then run it for next to nothing.
A template platform
≈ $20–40 / month
Every month, indefinitely. Stop paying and the site can go dark. Over a few years that’s well over a thousand dollars in rent for a site you never own.
A site you own
One-time build, then ≈ $0
Built once, then it runs on the free tiers of its hosting services. The only recurring cost is your domain name — about $20 a year. No platform subscription.
What you get
- A real admin area, built for an art practice. Add, edit, reorder and hide works, upload images, and flag pieces as New or On Sale — all without “upgrading to the commerce plan.”
- Features shaped around how art is sold and seen. “In a room” wall mockups, an optional inspiration photo and map showing where a piece was made, a gift-shop builder (custom calendars, card and postcard packs), and full search, filter and sort.
- Fast pages, ready for Google. Image-optimized and search-engine-ready out of the box — sitemap, link previews, structured data — plus built-in visitor analytics.
- You own the code and the data. Everything is backed up automatically every day and can be exported anytime. No lock-in.
The honest part
This isn’t drag-and-drop. It’s a real, custom-built website, so changes to the design or structure happen in code rather than a visual editor. The day-to-day work of adding and managing your art, though, is all done through the simple admin area — no code required. It’s the right fit if you’d rather invest once and own something fast and tailored than pay rent forever for a template.
Like the idea of a site like this one?
Get in touchHappy to talk through what it would take to build one for your work.
Under the hood
For the curious — or your developer — here’s what powers it.
Shipping an update
Loading a page
- Framework
- Next.js (React). A modern framework that server-renders pages for speed, with small interactive pieces layered on where needed.
- Hosting & updates
- Vercel. The site redeploys automatically whenever a change is pushed. Every change gets its own preview link first, and an automated test suite must pass before anything reaches the live site.
- Database
- Neon (Postgres), via Prisma. A single catalog of works is the source of truth; edits made in the admin appear on the site immediately.
- Images
- Vercel Blob storage. Photos are resized and converted right in the browser before upload, so pages stay light and load fast — with blur-up placeholders while images arrive.
- Admin & security
- A password-protected admin area with login rate-limiting. Nothing else to manage.
- Extras
- Visitor analytics, a daily automatic backup of the entire catalog, search-engine metadata, and unit + end-to-end tests that guard every deploy.
The whole stack runs on services with generous free tiers — which is what keeps the ongoing cost close to zero.