Decoupled.io: Drupal Should Do Less.

The bet we're making with Decoupled.io is simple: Drupal—now 20+ years mature—is a stronger backbone for a cloud-managed CMS than most of the proprietary or "pseudo-open" platforms out there right now.

We're building a developer-friendly platform that doubles down on Drupal's real strengths (content modeling, revisions, translations, powerful entity system) while finally fixing some of its biggest pain points.

One huge strength of Drupal that's underused: even a vanilla install + a few solid contrib modules often beats what's available in the broader marketplace. And on the managed side, we're prioritizing sane update management over full extensibility—because endless custom code and dependency hell is exactly what we're trying to escape.

The escape hatch is key: if you ever outgrow our hosted setup, grab your database, files, and code, and deploy anywhere. Zero lock-in.

Our philosophy? Drupal should do less—yes, less. It started as a monolith, but in today's world, it shines brightest when focused narrowly on content management. Push everything else to the frontend.

• Frontend → Next.js (modern React experiences that Drupal's theme layer just can't match anymore)
• Search, email, e-commerce integrations, AI features → handle it all in Next.js
• NPM ecosystem has integrations for pretty much anything you need

You don't need Decoupled.io to go decoupled/headless—plenty of folks do it already. We just make it dead simple.

I love tools that are free (or free-tier generous) and easy: Resend for emails Vercel for hosting Stripe for payments Supabase for backend/DB GitHub for everything Groq for quick AI wins

All have paid upgrades when you scale, but you can build a real product for basically zero upfront cost—especially in this AI-vibe coding era where speed matters.

Decoupled.io fits right in: a free-for-devs, API-first managed Drupal instance you can plug into your stack instantly. No need to grok PHP, Composer, or Drupal internals—just use the familiar CMS UI like any cloud platform, and integrate via our CLI, MCP server, starter repos, etc.

We solve the classic two-stack headache: you focus on building, not maintaining the CMS under the hood. Production traffic? That's when the billing kicks in.

Makes sense? I'd love your thoughts/feedback.

In the meantime, jump on the waitlist at decoupled.io.