Kirby

Most systems put your text in a database. Kirby doesn’t. A page is a folder on the server, the text sits in a plain text file and the photos sit next to it. That’s the whole system. You could open it in Notepad.

It sounds simple because it is, and that is exactly where the gain is. A backup is a copy of a folder. Moving a site to another server is copy and paste. There is no database to fall over, no export to import, no migration that eats a weekend.

Build on a subscription platform and your words live in their database, on their server, in their format. Walk away and you get an export — if you’re lucky, and if you were on the right plan.

With Kirby your text is files on your own hosting. If you ever want to leave us, you take the folder and you’re gone. You don’t need us for that, and that’s the point. We like it when clients stay. Preferably not because they’re stuck. That’s how Steamy Windows moved from a subscription platform to a site that is actually theirs.

In Kirby we decide what the admin looks like, field by field. So a vet doesn’t get a screen full of “Field group 3”, but fields named after what they do: “Sentence above the number”, “Photo that sinks into the bar”, “Small line at the bottom”.

That saves a manual. Someone changing their opening hours shouldn’t first have to work out where that might live. Here’s what that looks like for vet Jan Van den Daele.

Kirby is not a subscription. You buy one licence per site: € 99 if the organisation behind it stays under a million in revenue, € 349 for everyone else. Three years of updates are included. After that your site simply keeps running — want newer versions, you buy another three years.

Students and teachers get it free, educational institutions at half price, and associations can ask. Development is free regardless, for as long as you like: you only pay when the site goes live.

A fresh Kirby install sets no cookies, loads no scripts from somewhere else and sends nothing to a third party. Everything that happens on your site, we put there on purpose. Which is why most of our sites can do without a cookie banner.

And there is no plugin pile. Elsewhere an ordinary website starts life with thirty pieces of software from thirty authors, each wanting updates and each able to spring a leak. What we need, we write ourselves.

Kirby has been around since 2012 and is made by Content Folder, a small German company with a team spread across Germany and Turkey. No investors, no venture capital, profitable for over a decade simply by selling licences. A euro from every licence goes to a climate organisation.

That sounds boring, and that is precisely the point. Nobody can force them next year to introduce a subscription after all, triple the prices, or sell the thing to someone who will. Your site sits on your server, in files you can read yourself, built on software made by people who are in no hurry.

Kirby is a system for sites with content. If something needs to run orders, stock and payments, or an application with users, roles and a real database, we build that in something else — and we say so straight away.

So our booking system, our web shops and our membership apps do not run on Kirby. A hammer is excellent equipment. Not for soup.

Tell us what you need. If it fits in Kirby, we’ll say so. If it doesn’t, we’ll say that too — and what would.