Why We Built a Website Publisher for Craft Users (and Why We're Not Trying to Be a General Tool)
We're a two-person team. One of us builds. One of us handles community and growth. Our developer has used Craft since around 2020 — going on six years now. What kept him there isn't the feature set; Craft steps back and lets writing feel like writing. That conviction is what led us to build Cravo. We both use Craft.do, and for a long time we both had the same problem.
The Problem: Beautiful Documents, No Way to Share Them
Craft.do is genuinely good at what it does. The writing experience is tactile. The typography is considered. Documents feel designed, not assembled. If you've used it, you know what we mean.
But the moment you want to share something publicly, you hit a wall.
You can share a Craft link, but it's not a website. It's a document view — with the author's profile, edit timestamps, and comment buttons still visible. There's no custom URL, no navigation structure, no way to make it feel like something you own. Your Craft sidebar stays a sidebar. Your content sits inside someone else's UI. If you want a real website, you have to rebuild the whole thing somewhere else, and the moment you do, you lose everything that made Craft worth using in the first place.
We kept running into this. We'd finish a document, feel good about it, and then realize there was no clean way to put it on the web. So we started looking at what other Craft users were doing.
The answer, mostly, was: nothing. Or they were copying content into other tools and spending hours reformatting it. Neither felt right.
Why We Decided to Build
We didn't start with a grand vision. We started with a specific frustration and a question: is this just us, or is this a real pattern?
We spent time in Craft community forums and threads. The same question kept coming up, phrased different ways: "How do I share this as a website?" "Is there a way to publish Craft docs publicly?" "I want my portfolio to look like my Craft documents."
The design always came up. People weren't just asking how to get content online. They were asking how to get it online without losing the look and feel they'd spent time building inside Craft.
That specificity mattered to us. It wasn't a vague "I want a website" problem. It was a "I want this specific thing to survive the jump to the web" problem. Sharp problems are worth building for.
We're not engineers who spotted a market gap. We're users who had the problem ourselves, saw others having it, and decided to build the bridge.
Picking the Niche: Why Craft Users Specifically
This is the question we get most often when we describe what we're building: why not make it work for any document tool? Why limit it to Craft?
The honest answer is that the niche isn't a limitation. It's the whole point.
Craft users are a specific kind of person. They didn't pick Craft because it has the most features. They picked it because it's beautiful. That's a real distinction. Most productivity tools get chosen for capability. Craft gets chosen for how it feels to use.
That same person, when they want to publish to the web, isn't asking "can I get my content online?" They're asking "will it still look like this?"
That question is our entire product.
A general publishing tool has to make compromises. It has to work for everyone, which means it can't be optimized for anyone. We're not trying to be a general tool. We're building for the person who picked Craft because it's beautiful and wants their website to match.
That's a smaller market. We're fine with that. Smaller markets with sharp problems are easier to serve well.
What Surprised Us: How Craft Users Think About Aesthetics
We expected Craft users to care about design. We didn't expect how specifically they care about it.
When we first used it ourselves, what struck us wasn't the features — it was the fidelity. Did the typography match? Did the spacing feel right? Did the navigation feel like something Craft would ship?
The published site felt like a Craft document that had learned to be a website. The sidebar navigation transformed into a card-based grid layout. The document metadata — timestamps, comment buttons, author profiles — vanished. What was left was the content, under a clean URL, looking like something you'd pay a developer to build. That was exactly what we were going for.
Craft users have internalized a specific aesthetic. They know what good looks like because they use it every day. When we built the publishing layer, we weren't just solving a technical problem. We were trying to match a standard that our users already had in their heads.
That raised the bar for us. It also clarified what we were building. We're not a publishing tool that happens to support Craft. We're a Craft-native publishing experience. The distinction matters.
Dark mode was a good example of this. We built it early, not because it was on a roadmap, but because Craft has dark mode and Craft users expect it. If the published site didn't match the document experience, it would feel wrong. So we built it.
Where We Are Now
Free plan is live. Pro plan is $9/mo — includes custom domain support, badge removal, full SEO controls, faster publishing, and email support.
What's live today: you connect your Craft document URL, your site generates instantly on a cravo.site subdomain. Up to 20 pages. Changes in Craft sync automatically every 12 hours (every 2 hours + manual sync on Pro). Dark mode included. Works on all screen sizes.
We spent our free tier phase understanding what matters most to Craft users. That shaped Pro: custom domain support, badge removal, full SEO controls, faster sync (2h auto + manual), faster publishing, and email support. $9/mo per site — available now via Paddle.
The honest state of things: we're using Cravo ourselves every day. Pro is live at $9/mo per site.
If you're a Craft.do user who's ever wanted to share your documents as a real website, we'd love for you to try it. Free, no payment required, no credit card.
If you've built something for a niche within a niche, we'd love to hear how you thought about the market size question. It's the one we get most often and we're still working out how to answer it well.
