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; a map on every piece showing where it was made, and a single map of the whole collection; a gift-shop builder (custom calendars, card and postcard packs); “making of” films on a work’s own page; and full search, filter and sort.
- Instagram, posted for you. Every piece gets a draft caption written for it and queued up; you read, edit and approve them in the admin, and approved posts publish to Instagram on their own schedule. Nothing goes out that you haven’t signed off on, and if a post ever fails you get an email rather than silence.
- 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.
As featured in
“I’m not after postcards — I’m after the feeling of being there.”
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 & video
- 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. Uploads land in Vercel Blob; the catalogue’s images are then committed to the repository and served from there, so the artwork is version controlled rather than sitting in one bucket. Films are too large for that, so they stay in Blob and stream from it — and nothing downloads until a visitor presses play.
- 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, scheduled Instagram posting — captions drafted by Claude, held for approval, then published by a cron job that emails if anything goes wrong and holds a post back if the artwork was repainted after its caption was written — search-engine metadata, creator and copyright details embedded in every image file, 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.