Sitepins is open source. You can run the whole thing on your own infrastructure.
What You Get
Every feature, unlocked. The self-hosted build has no plans, no limits, and no billing. Everything marked Pro or Team throughout these docs is simply available:
- Unlimited organizations, sites, private repositories, and members
- Code editor, live preview, branches and pull requests, version history
- SEO tools including the full insights set
- AI assistant, snippets, sidebar arrangement, custom commit messages
- Both GitHub and GitLab
You also get control over where your data lives, your own branding, and no dependency on a hosted service.
What It Costs You
Running it yourself means running it yourself:
- A MongoDB instance
- An S3-compatible bucket for application images
- Your own GitHub App and GitLab OAuth app
- A mail provider, if you want email verification and invitations
- A Vercel token per organization, if you want live preview
- Updates, backups, and uptime
For most individuals and small teams, Sitepins Cloud is less work. Self-hosting makes sense when you have a policy reason, an existing platform to run it on, or you want to modify the product.
Requirements
| Node.js | 22 or newer |
| pnpm | 11 or newer |
| MongoDB | Local, Docker, or a hosted instance such as Atlas’s free tier |
| S3-compatible storage | AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, MinIO, Backblaze B2, or DigitalOcean Spaces |
Architecture
Two services:
app/ # Next.js — the CMS interface
api/ # Express + MongoDB — auth, organizations, projects, git providersThe app runs on port 3000 and the API on port 4000 by default, with a health check at /healthz. The API also hosts the WebSocket endpoint that powers live cursors.
Git provider credentials belong to the app, not the API — the backend never handles your GitHub App private key.
Where Your Data Lives
| Data | Where |
|---|---|
| Site content, media, schemas, snippets, arrangement | Your Git repository |
| Users, organizations, projects, memberships | Your MongoDB |
| Avatars, organization and project thumbnails | Your S3 bucket |
| AI API keys | Each user’s browser, never on a server |
Content is in Git regardless of how you host Sitepins. That’s the whole design — the CMS is replaceable, your repository isn’t.
License
Sitepins is released under the GNU AGPLv3. Free to use, modify, and self-host.
The clause that matters most for self-hosting: if you run a modified version as a network service — including for clients, not just publicly — you must make that modified source available to its users under the same license. Running the unmodified project has no such obligation. Read the full LICENSE before deploying a modified build commercially.
Get the Code
The repository is at github.com/sitepins/sitepins.
Next Steps
For deeper implementation detail — project structure, API internals, extension points — see the READMEs in the repository: the root README.md, app/README.md, and api/README.md.