A year ago I started building a CMS because I had three options for client work and none fit:

WordPress — works, but 250+ plugin CVEs/week (Patchstack 2024). I patch sites every week. Tired of it.

Contentful / Sanity — modern, but $300/mo entry pricing for SMB use cases. Vendor lock is real.

Strapi / Payload — solid, but Node-only. I'm a PHP/Laravel shop.

So I built UnfoldCMS — a self-hosted Laravel CMS that ships as a single product, not a framework you assemble. This post is a tour of what's actually in there. Not the marketing version — the "here are the 183 admin pages" version.

If you're picking a CMS in 2026, this is the kind of breakdown I wish vendors actually published.

The stack, briefly

Laravel 11 + Inertia 2 + React 19 + TypeScript

Tailwind v4 + shadcn/ui (50+ components)

MySQL / MariaDB

Spatie Media Library, Spatie Permission (RBAC), Spatie Activity Log

Runs on $5/mo Hetzner VPS at ~80MB RAM idle

The shadcn + Tailwind theming side I covered in my previous post .…