Model your catalogue, not someone else's
Build Product, Variant, Category, Store and Campaign models with the exact fields you sell on. Text, rich text, numbers, booleans, dates, media and relations between them.
Content modelsHeadless CMS for retail teams
Stop renting the CMS behind your storefront.
CloudSource runs your product content, campaign pages and media from inside your own AWS account. Buy it once for $1,499, then add SKUs, locales, editors and traffic without the bill moving.
- Deploys into your AWS account
- Imports a Contentful export
- Full source on GitHub
- No seat or entry limits
northfield-retail · CloudSource
Products
4,182
Published
3,947
Spaces
6
Product — Alpine Down Parka
Live
Campaign — Black Friday hub
Scheduled
Category — Winter outerwear
Draft
GET /api/uk-store/content/model/product
Your CMS bill is indexed to your growth
Every SKU you add is an entry. Every market you open multiplies those entries. Every merchandiser you hire is a seat. And the week you finally get the traffic you have been chasing is the week you find out what an API overage costs.
Then the renewal quote lands, and the platform you cannot easily leave knows it.
CloudSource inverts the deal. You pay once, deploy it into your own AWS account, and the only bill that scales with your catalogue is the AWS one you already control — typically tens of dollars a month, not hundreds. See the running-cost breakdown.
Cumulative spend
Three years of content infrastructure
$3,600
Year 1
$7,200
Year 2
$10,800
Year 3
SaaS headless CMS at $300/month, before overages or renewal uplift
CloudSource, same three years
One licence plus your AWS usage
$1,499
Built around how retail teams actually publish
Product data, seasonal campaigns, multiple brands and regions, and a storefront that needs all of it as JSON.
One API, every touchpoint
A clean JSON REST API serves your web storefront, native apps, in-store screens and email templates from the same published content. CORS is on, so browser clients work without a proxy.
API referenceA space per brand or region
Run your UK store, EU store and outlet brand as fully isolated spaces from one installation — separate models, content, media and API keys. Clone a space to launch the next one.
Teams & spacesCampaigns that go live on their own
Draft a sale, set the publish time and the take-down time, and walk away. Content windows mean the Black Friday hub appears at midnight and the promo banner retires itself on the Monday.
Publishing & schedulingProduct imagery on your own S3
Packshots, lifestyle galleries, size guides and video all live in your bucket and serve through your CloudFront distribution. AWS MediaConvert handles video transcoding.
MediaBring your Contentful space with you
Export your space as JSON and upload it once. Content types become models, assets are re-uploaded to your bucket, and entries are rebuilt with their references intact.
Migration guideIt runs in your AWS account
Not ours. Your VPC, your IAM roles, your encryption keys, your region. Content and product imagery never leave the perimeter your security team already signed off.
- Elastic Beanstalk
- Auto-scaling application hosting. Size it for a normal Tuesday and let it scale into peak trading.
- CloudFront
- Edge caching for API responses and product imagery, close to wherever your customers shop.
- S3 and MediaConvert
- Media storage with no library cap, plus automatic video transcoding for product and campaign video.
- Your security posture
- Existing VPC, security groups, IAM policies and KMS keys apply. Choose the region your data must stay in.
Your AWS account
Elastic Beanstalk
Admin panel & API
CloudFront
Edge cache
S3
Media & assets
MediaConvert
Video processing
storefront ──▶ CloudFront ──▶ /api/content
Nothing in this diagram is operated by us
An honest comparison
CloudSource covers what most retail teams use a SaaS headless CMS for. It does not cover everything. Here is the trade you are actually making.
| Capability | CloudSource | Typical SaaS CMS |
|---|---|---|
| Custom content models and fields | Unlimited | Capped by plan |
| Content entries | Unlimited | Capped, then overage |
| Editor seats | Unlimited | Per seat, per month |
| API requests | Your infrastructure limits | Rate limited, overage billed |
| Spaces for multi-brand or multi-region | Unlimited | Usually a higher tier |
| Where content is stored | Your AWS account and region | Vendor's cloud |
| Source code access | Full, on GitHub | None |
| Read API for published content | REST / JSON | REST and GraphQL |
| Write API for content authoring | Not included — authoring is through the admin panel | Management API |
| Third-party app marketplace | None | Extensive |
| Uptime SLA and 24/7 vendor on-call | You operate it | Contractual, on enterprise plans |
| Cost over three years | $1,499 plus AWS usage | $10,800 at $300/month |
Choose CloudSource when
- You already run on AWS and have someone who can own an Elastic Beanstalk environment.
- Your catalogue, locales or seat count keep pushing you into the next pricing tier.
- Data residency or procurement makes a vendor-hosted CMS awkward.
- Editors author in an admin panel and your storefront reads over an API.
Stay on SaaS when
- You need a vendor-backed uptime SLA with someone else's pager rotation.
- Your pipeline writes content programmatically and needs a management API.
- You depend on marketplace apps or a GraphQL-first client.
- Nobody on your side wants to own infrastructure, at any price.
Read the full Contentful comparison, including how each field type maps across.
One price. Yours forever.
No seats, no entry tiers, no API metering, no renewal conversation.
Everything included
CloudSource CMS
Self-hosted headless CMS licence
$1,499 once
Plus your own AWS usage, typically $40–$120/month
- Unlimited models and entries
- Unlimited users and spaces
- Full REST delivery API
- Media library with processing
- Publishing workflows and scheduling
- Contentful import tooling
- AWS deployment configuration
- Private GitHub repository access
Priority support for deployment and configuration is available as an add-on
The three-year maths
- SaaS CMS at $300/month
- $10,800
- CloudSource licence
- $1,499
- AWS at roughly $70/month
- $2,520
- Difference
- $6,781
AWS figure is an illustrative mid-range estimate. Your bill depends on instance size, media volume and traffic — see how to work yours out.
Still evaluating?
The documentation is written to be read before you buy, not after.
The questions buyers actually ask
What exactly do I get for $1,499?
Access to the private CloudSource CMS repository on GitHub: the full application source, the AWS deployment configuration and the setup documentation. You deploy it into your own AWS account, and it stays yours to run and modify.
Is there genuinely no recurring fee?
No platform fee from us. You do pay Amazon for the resources the CMS runs on — compute, storage, data transfer — but that is your account, your reserved-instance discounts and your commitment agreements. See a worked example.
How hard is it to move off Contentful?
Export your space as JSON, then upload it in Tools → Import. Content types become models, assets are downloaded and re-uploaded to your own S3 bucket, and entries are recreated with references resolved. The migration guide lists exactly how each field type maps.
The bigger job is usually your storefront: response shapes differ, so the code that reads content needs updating. Plan for that rather than the content move.
What happens to my API costs during peak trading?
There is no request metering to trip. The API runs on your Elastic Beanstalk environment behind CloudFront, so a Black Friday spike is a scaling decision you make, not an invoice line you discover afterwards.
Who keeps it running, and who fixes bugs?
You run the infrastructure — that is the trade for owning it. Product updates and fixes are published to the repository you have access to, so you pull them when you choose to. If you would rather not own the deployment work, ask about the priority support add-on on your demo call.
Can I modify the source?
Yes. You have the full codebase. Teams commonly add fields, adjust the admin panel to match internal terminology, or wire the API into an existing service layer. Keep your changes on a branch so that pulling upstream updates stays straightforward.
Do we need an AWS specialist to deploy it?
Not a specialist, but you do need someone comfortable with an AWS console: creating an Elastic Beanstalk environment, an S3 bucket and a CloudFront distribution, and setting environment variables. The deployment guide walks through what is involved before you commit.
See it against your own catalogue
Bring a Contentful export or a description of your content model. We will walk through modelling, the API your storefront would call, and what deployment looks like on your AWS setup.