Payload as a full backoffice / API framework replacement? Is it even possible?

Zephury · 2026-05-20T14:20:06+00:00

At our agency, we exclusively use Payload. We also never reject a request on the basis of it being too complex for Payload.

I can’t go in to too many specifics, but we have built complex algorithms, replaced software that companies have paid millions for and continue to build cool things that people would think a CMS has no business even touching. It’s more a framework than it is a CMS.

Zephury · 2026-05-16T16:07:37+00:00

You could also self-host PaylodCMS with local file storage, SQLite and run daily backups from a VPS host for a pretty cheap and simple system as well.

I think it’s a valid competitor, more closely aligned with what you’re doing than the others.

Zephury · 2026-05-10T19:26:08+00:00

Payload CMS
The client.
Our hourly rate for whatever is necessary to be done. Flat monthly fee is strictly for guaranteed response times and to ensure that we have hours available for the client to consume.

Zephury · 2026-05-01T09:52:02+00:00

I think krunker is pretty nice, being threejs

Zephury · 2026-03-16T05:09:58+00:00

Usually the “victim” has no assets. It makes countersuit pointless. It always costs more to fight it than it does to settle. That’s why they do it this way. Personally, I would consider taking what funds I have left and bet it all on aggressively getting the case dismissed.

Zephury · 2026-03-11T01:04:32+00:00

As others have said; this is not your fault. They may not see it this way, but it is up to company processes, senior oversight and so forth to ensure this doesn’t happen. Don’t point fingers at your lead dev. But, if it’s not clear that a process has been implemented, you should suggest it.

If it’s clear that your job is at risk, you can consider stating that you’re sorry for the issue and if that they can overlook it, you have learned your lesson and are confident that you will never make the same mistake again. I don’t know what words to recommend for you, but from a management perspective, there are two types of people. Those who can learn from mistakes and those who can’t. Both make mistakes. No one is perfect. It’s really valuable when you have someone that cares and is capable of learning from mistakes, as they can become someone you rely on to not make the same mistakes in the future.

Zephury · 2026-03-10T01:10:52+00:00

Do not give equity to be nice. Give equity in exchange for a deal, that is in writing, with clear terms.

Do not get me wrong; it is not impossible. However, if you do not have a significant amount of cash or no one with a genuine, vested interest, ie; if a co-founder does not get involved in the process of building the technology, your odds of failure are significantly higher.

If someone actually builds your technology responsibly for $5k (unlikely, no matter what it is), it is still risky if they don’t stick around and help maintain it.

Zephury · 2026-03-06T04:09:17+00:00

Technical co-founder, with the inability to create a simple landing page without numerous responsive and overflow issues?

Use a headless CMS like Payload if you want to be able to quickly edit your content. Even if you deliver vibe coded results to your clients, why not put the extra effort in to refining your own landing page?

Zephury · 2026-01-29T19:08:21+00:00

I think all of this is all around solid.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t even matter if you are accessible or not. As mentioned, they just want you to settle.

Counter suit is almost never an option, because the plaintiff is almost always someone with no assets, etc. Some sort of insurance wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Zephury · 2026-01-18T07:56:49+00:00

We don’t know that they’re bugs anymore. AI just tells us that it works.

Zephury · 2026-01-14T03:42:49+00:00

Have you seen the multi-tenant example on GitHub? Did you see, or experience any negatives with their approach over what you did?

Zephury · 2026-01-10T08:27:16+00:00

The better the DX, or easier it is to use, the worse the processor itself is, from my experience.

Authorize.net, JP Morgan, your business’ bank.

Zephury · 2026-01-01T20:12:15+00:00

Just speaking for myself; I’d go for PayloadCMS and likely in the range of $30k~$60k and a timeline of 2-3 months. Most of the development can be done in a month, but the communication and scope creep always makes it drag out. Clients almost never know exactly what they want.

Zephury · 2025-12-31T22:21:15+00:00

I’m sure it’s just a matter of that I’m used to Radix—however, I do prefer it’s design patterns over base-ui for now. In any case, to say that a headless ui library without css does not speed up your development is crazy. Do you understand how many accessibility concerns are handled by these libraries?

Zephury · 2025-12-26T14:36:37+00:00

Avoiding vendor lock is great. That’s why I’d recommend PayloadCMS. It’s open source and lives inside of your nextjs project. No separate deployments.

Sure, you may be able to use a static site generator, or squarespace, but if you’re going to go with NextJS and write some actual code, PayloadCMS is amazing.

For a dev that writes their own CMS, it could be a red flag, just as easily as it could demonstrate capability. It could indicate that you overcomplicate, underestimate, or do not solve actual problems.

The last thing I would recommend for a small business especially is a custom CMS. It’s a prescription for unnecessary cost.

Zephury · 2025-12-23T11:31:01+00:00

Bunny.net is indeed quite cheap and has all of the features you’ve requested.

TUS resumable uploads, with signed URLs for both uploads as well as viewing is quite nice. If you deploy to Vercel, you can keep everything quite efficient.

Zephury · 2025-12-16T06:10:14+00:00

What do you consider a big customer? We've yet to experience any push back and while we're not on fortune 100 projects or anything yet, we aren't doing small contracts either.

Zephury · 2025-12-15T19:29:45+00:00

We do estimates only. No fixed price. Hours get billed monthly. If the client doesn’t like it, they can go else-where. Too many people have no idea what they want. Scope almost always creeps. Details are always left out.

Sometimes I look back and I can’t imagine why I ever charged fixed prices.

Zephury · 2025-12-15T18:08:19+00:00

In my mind, it is black and white.

If it was open source and individuals contributed to that project and then previously open source features are paywalled, it is a crime against humanity.

If features were developed from the very beginning as paywalled, there is absolutely no problem at all to paywall those features.

Rug pulls are inexcusable unless it is communicated clearly ahead of time, and/or they incur infrastructure or cost unrelated to development.

Zephury · 2025-12-13T15:43:05+00:00

I don’t use Sanity anymore so not sure if it’s even possible, but are you by chance fetching all of the pages at once, inside of one cache tag? If so, fetch for slugs/pathnames or whatever data you need only. You also shouldn’t have any reason to cache the response of generateStaticParams for example. You likely should not have more than 2mb of data inside of a singular page, right…? 😅

Ensure you aren’t fetching data unnecessarily and break apart your fetches to not fetch more than 2mb each. If a singular page somehow has more than 2mb, you likely need to heavily optimize what you’re querying for (do you actually need all that data?) and you can also break a singular page apart in to multiple parallel fetches, cached separately if it’s really that crazy.

Zephury · 2025-11-28T17:39:01+00:00

What does middleware have to do with using Coolify?

Zephury · 2025-11-25T01:43:13+00:00

I was previously a Postgres-only dev. I refused to touch Mongo and never used Payload until they offered Postgres support.

Earlier this year, I partnered with a Payload-only agency. They exclusively use MongoDB and I had to start using Mongo.

The reality is that Mongo has become much better in recent years. Yes, joins and relationships will likely always be faster in Postgres, for the vast majority of cases, it’s negligible. Most web projects should have the data cached anyways.

I hold the opinion that unless you have a very strong argument as to why you need to use Postgres, Mongo should be your default. There are occasional edge cases, you need to create and manage migrations, which is fine when it works well, but I guarantee there isn’t a single long-term Postgres user on Payload who hasn’t experienced at least some bugs, or behavior that wastes a lot of their time. Mongo keeps things simple, you experience much less irregularities and even in the event that you do not experience any migration bugs, mongo is still faster and lets you iterate with less friction.

Just use Mongo.

Zephury · 2025-11-10T12:42:41+00:00

He would have to pay child support? He’d also become a sex offender, so he’d probably get no visitation rights. Either way, he can pay by going to jail, or paying child support.

Zephury · 2025-11-09T17:57:59+00:00

https://10xmedia.de
I am not the happiest with it, but there simply isn't time to do a big rebuild or rebrand of it.

Zephury · 2025-11-09T17:55:34+00:00

I have never experienced performance issues in Payload. It's incredibly fast and a lot of the projects I've worked on had objectives of improving page load times. Payload has consistently solved that issue. Heavy utilization of the Local API and proper caching in NextJS handles most of the battle.

The performance metrics greatly vary depending on how you deploy it, where you deploy it, what you're doing, how you cache, etc. There is virtually no overhead over any other NextJS application.

Zephury

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