Ycode

What Ycode is

Ycode is an open source visual website builder with a built-in CMS. Its home page headline is "Visual website builder and CMS, now open source", and it offers two ways to run it: use Ycode Cloud to get started in minutes, or self-host it on your own infrastructure. It is pitched at designers, creators and founders who want the speed of a visual tool without having their site tied to one vendor's pricing, rules and roadmap. The footer names the company as Ycode Inc.

The company explains its reasoning on the home page. When you build on a closed platform, it says, "your website lives inside their ecosystem", and your design, content and infrastructure depend on that platform's pricing, rules and roadmap. Ycode's answer is to combine a modern visual builder with the freedom of open source, so that a site can move between a managed setup and your own servers.

What you build and how

You build websites visually, and the company's line is that you keep full control over your code and infrastructure. The same product serves as the CMS. The FAQ says the built-in CMS manages dynamic content such as blog posts, pages and collections, and that you can extend and control how your data is structured. The AI features on the home page talk about creating collections, adding fields, updating content and organizing structured data, so content is modeled as collections with fields. The pages also mention reusable components, which keep a site consistent across pages, and a customer testimonial mentions the templates available.

There are two ways to run it, and the choice shapes what you operate.

Self-hosting is the open route. The home page gives three steps: fork the repository on GitHub to create your own copy of Ycode, deploy it to Vercel, and connect Supabase. Once you do that you are, in the page's words, "ready to build". You get the open source Ycode platform on your own infrastructure with full code access and custom domains. The pricing block lists unlimited users, pages, CMS items, form entries and languages for this option, with community support. The company's ownership page sums up what that means in 4 lines: you own the code, your hosting is your choice, you stay in control, and your project is portable.

Ycode Cloud is the managed route. It is fully managed Ycode hosting with automatic updates and maintenance, a global CDN and fast hosting, custom domains, unlimited users, unlimited pages, unlimited form entries and unlimited languages. Its CMS allowance is 20,000 items, which is the one cap that differs from the self-host list. Support on Cloud is community and email. The login screen at dashboard.ycode.cloud offers Google sign-in.

Unlimited languages on both options matter for anyone building a multilingual site, and unlimited form entries mean a contact or signup form on the site is not metered.

A "Bring your own AI" section is the newest part of the product. It names the model families you can connect: Anthropic (Claude) Opus 5, Fable 5 and Sonnet 5; OpenAI (ChatGPT) GPT-5.5 and GPT-5 Mini; Google Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 3.5 Flash; and xAI (Grok) Grok 4.5 and Grok 4.3. Three tasks are listed for it:

• design with a prompt, so you can update layouts, spacing, styles and responsive behavior without editing every element manually
• manage your CMS through conversation, by creating collections, adding fields, updating content and organizing structured data
• build reusable components, either new ones or improvements to existing ones, while keeping the website consistent

Because you bring the model, the AI side is a choice rather than a bundled feature, and a team can pick the provider it already pays for.

The company's Releases list gives some idea of where the editor is going. Version 0.2.0, dated Mar 3, 2026, adds collection filtering with pagination, dynamic sorting and improved component overrides, plus many fixes and UX improvements across publishing, filters and the rich-text editor. The filtering, pagination and sorting items are the ones that bear most directly on the CMS side, since they control how a collection list renders on a page.

The finished site belongs to you. The FAQ says "you own your website's code, content, and infrastructure", and that you can run it on your own servers, move it between environments and keep using it independently of any single company. It describes an open source website builder as one that "gives you access to the underlying code and allows you to host your website anywhere". The product also has a Docs site, a Releases page and a Discord server where, the home page says, designers, creators and founders build and share with Ycode.

Pricing and what the pages show

The pricing section is short, which is useful, and the company calls it "Simple pricing for cloud and self-hosting". There are two lines. Self-host is $0 per month. Cloud, on the yearly toggle, is listed at $25 per month beside a $30 per month figure, with a "Start free trial" button, so the managed option can be tried before paying. Cloud users get the unlimited users, pages, form entries and languages already mentioned, and the 20,000 CMS items cap; self-hosters get unlimited CMS items.

The difference between the two is mostly who does the operating. On Cloud, Ycode handles updates, maintenance and the CDN, and you get email support on top of the community. On self-host, the platform is free, but you run the GitHub, Vercel and Supabase side yourself and rely on the community for help.

The testimonials give a feel for who uses it. Laís Lara Vacco, a product designer, says: "I built already 3 websites for my clients using Ycode. Glad to have had the support of the Ycode team and also the great templates available! I'm a big fan of how simple and straightforward the Ycode UI is." Olha L, a growth marketing manager, says: "We've been using Ycode for almost 2 years now, and it's been a great experience. We rebuilt our website and migrated from another CMS with minimal involvement from our IT department."

Who it suits and who it does not

Ycode suits a designer or agency that wants a visual builder and a CMS without a user limit, since both options list unlimited users, and a freelancer building client sites, as the product designer quoted above does. It also suits a technical founder who is comfortable forking a repository, deploying to Vercel and connecting Supabase, and who wants the site code and the data in their own accounts. A marketing team that wants a managed service can use Ycode Cloud at the listed monthly price after a free trial, and the growth marketing manager's quote describes a rebuild with little help from IT.

It also fits teams who want to choose their own AI model for design and CMS work rather than accept a bundled one, and teams for whom portability is the point: a site that can leave the vendor's cloud and run on infrastructure they control.

There are limits to weigh. The product is young: the Releases list shows Version 0.2.0 from March 3, 2026, and the header shows a 0.0.0 label next to Latest, so expect change. Self-hosting means you run the Vercel and Supabase accounts yourself, with community support only. Ycode Cloud caps CMS items at 20,000, which a large catalog or publication could reach, though self-hosting removes that cap.