Kirby CMS

It took almost two years of development to get Kirby 3.0 ready.

We announced in summer 2017 that we are working on a next big thing and started a crowd funding campaign for the development of the new version. More than 400 people signed up and followed every step on Slack and in private Youtube live streams over the following months. We shared private alphas with them and collected tons of feedback and ideas.

Kirby 3 was again another rewrite from scratch. We moved our frontend from an outdated jQuery monster to Vue.js, created a new REST API, redesigned the Panel once more and added countless features.

We also created an entirely new website for the launch and raised the price again to 99 €.

Unfortunately we had to remove the personal licenses. Dealing with commercial projects that exploited the personal license had been a constant struggle over the previous years and we decided it's not worth the effort on our end.

Again, our community took it very well and the new version became popular very quickly.

v3 catapulted us into really profitable territory. We'd grown to a team of 5 at this point.

After more than two years after Kirby 1.0, this release marked a major upgrade. Everything was rebuilt from scratch.

The Panel got a completely new look and feature-wise it was really hard to even compare 2.0 to 1.0. Kirby 2.0 was so much more powerful with tons of additions based on user feedback.

We also raised the price to 79 € and introduced a new personal license for 19 €.

We were super anxious about the price jump, but the community took it very professionally. Our revenue finally reached a point where I could take more time for Kirby and get rid of a few client projects.

After about half a year in beta with about 100 testers, I finally decided to launch Kirby 1.0 and try to sell it publicly.

The version was still very simple. There was no admin panel. Everything was just managed through files and folders. But it took off far more than expected.

The initial price was 30 €, which was very much inspired by Mint and Fever – two self-hosted little apps created by Shaun Inman.