Why?
Webflow is its own proprietary format. Our sanctioned AI tooling (Claude, in our case) cant help us build pages in it, and it cant even audit our existing pages to review the content and suggest changes. The blog engine is just as proprietary, and getting your design assets out is painful (go try to export your site, I’ll wait.. and yes, were on a paid plan, were just not paying them enough, apparently). The whole thing is built to keep you inside the walled garden, paying designers to make basic web changes, and it hasn’t kept up with what’s now possible with AI. The harder they make the exit, the more obvious it is why.
So we got ourselves out. It took a mix of vibe coding, Claude Cowork, the Claude Chrome extension, curl, and a LOT of manual rework, but we did it.
We now have complete control over our web properties. Design changes take minutes. The sites inherit the same CSS and design system as our product, so everything looks and feels consistent. And under the hood its now really simple.. plain HTML, JS, and Markdown, built with Eleventy and served from Cloudflare.
The whole site lives in Git, and Cloudflare rebuilds it on every merge, so a change is live seconds after its been reviewed and merged. The side benefit we didn’t fully appreciate going in is that our website now gets the same treatment as our code.. every change is peer reviewed before it goes live, there’s a full history of who changed what, and if something breaks, rolling back is one revert away. Try getting that out of Webflow!!
We even self-host our own WYSIWYG blog editor (deployed and managed with Portainer-Run, of course, this creates the PRs in Git too), meaning we can write and publish a blog in minutes, and use AI to help refine our web content (yes, its a balancing act to keep your own personality on a website whilst AI pulls everything toward sameness). Were no longer beholden to anyone or any system.
This is what freedom feels like!
Oh, and yes, it saved us money.. but that's not why we did it. We need velocity, and having to engage a designer for every page change is the inverse of velocity.
Neil
We recently moved the Portainer web properties (3 of them) off Webflow and onto a self-hosted stack running on Cloudflare.. and we couldn't be happier.
