Aveiro: a website, blog, and newsletter without a developer

I write software for a living. Java, Spring, databases, the kind of work that lives behind a surface. So building a no-code website builder was never on my list. I built one anyway, and this is the honest version of why.

It started with watching people around me try to get online. A friend with a small studio, a relative with a side project. Every time the same story: they opened WordPress or Wix full of motivation and came back a week later worn down. Not because they are not capable, but because the tools ask them to care about things they should never have to care about.

The WordPress and Wix problem, from my chair

I have set up enough WordPress installs to have an opinion. You start with a blank theme, then you need a page-builder plugin, then a forms plugin, then a caching plugin, then a security plugin because the first three opened holes. Updates break layouts. The page builder fights the theme. And the moment you want to send a newsletter, you are wiring up a second product entirely and copying your subscribers between them.

Wix hides more of that, which is genuinely nicer at the start. But you trade it for a ceiling: the day you want something the editor did not anticipate, you are stuck, and your content was never really yours to move. Both options leave the person who just wanted to publish doing systems integration instead.

My take, plainly: publishing online in 2026 should not mean assembling five tools and praying they stay compatible. That belief is the entire reason Aveiro exists.

What Aveiro is

Aveiro is one workspace that holds the site builder, the CMS, the blog, and the newsletter. You build pages, you write posts, you email the people who subscribed, and it is all the same project, with the same subscribers and the same design. It is currently in private beta, invite and waitlist based, at aveiro.app.

When you create a site from scratch you do not get a forty-section template that you then have to gut. You get a small Welcome page that teaches you the editor in the first minute. From there you drag in what you need. There are 32 prebuilt content blocks (hero sections, card collections, carousels, charts, logo clouds, comparison splits, signup forms, and more), arranged by hand in a visual editor. And if you do happen to write code, you can flip any page to its MDX source and back. The visual view and the code view stay in sync.

The part I actually care about: email

Here is what nobody warns a first-time publisher about. Writing the newsletter is the easy ten percent. The other ninety percent is plumbing, and the plumbing is what makes people quit.

Managing subscribers. Confirming opt-ins so you are not emailing people who never agreed. Honouring unsubscribes instantly. Handling bounces so your sender reputation does not collapse. Generating a plain-text version of every email so it does not land in spam. Adding the legally required footer with a working one-click unsubscribe. Verifying a sending domain through DNS records that read like hieroglyphics. None of that is the creative work, and all of it is mandatory.

Aveiro carries that part so the person publishing never sees it. Concretely:

• Subscribers live with the site, with real statuses (active, unsubscribed, bounced) and segments, so you are never exporting a CSV into a second tool.
• Signups run a proper double opt-in, and the welcome email goes out on its own without blocking the signup.
• Five prebuilt email layouts (welcome, newsletter, announcement, product, and a minimal text-only one), composed with the same drag-and-drop blocks as a page. The plain-text fallback is derived for you.
• Personalisation like the subscriber's name is filled in at send time.
• Unsubscribe pages, compliance footers, and one-click unsubscribe headers are injected automatically. Bounces and complaints are handled through provider webhooks.
• Sending runs on Resend by default, with scheduling and with opens and clicks tracked. On paid plans you can bring your own Resend, SendGrid, or Postmark key.

That list is deliberately boring. Boring is the point. Every item on it is a reason someone once abandoned their newsletter, and every one of them is now handled.

AI as a tool, not a gimmick

There is an AI assistant in the editor (I call the system Quasar) that can draft a page, generate a section, or make an image, and it can actually edit the site through tools instead of just printing text you paste somewhere. It runs in two tiers, a fast cheap one and a higher-quality one, and it is metered with credits so it cannot quietly run up a bill. It is genuinely useful against a blank page. It is not the reason the product exists, and I worked hard not to pretend it is.

Why it is built on Once UI

I have written before about being a backend engineer who could never trust his own frontend taste, and how Once UI fixed that by pre-deciding the calls I am bad at. Aveiro is the proof at scale. The entire dashboard and editor, every toolbar and panel across a 960-file app, is built on Once UI. Shipping a product this size solo would not have been realistic if I were still hand-guessing spacing and colour on every screen. The design system is what let one person build something that does not look like one person built it.

What it took, honestly

Aveiro is a Next.js 16 app on Supabase, with roughly 184 API routes, billing through Stripe, and five languages built in from the start. I designed it, built it, and I run it alone. That is not a brag, it is context for the opinion: I now know exactly how much hidden work sits between "I want a website with a newsletter" and actually having one. It is enormous, and almost none of it should be the user's problem.

That is the whole thesis. The boring, compliance-heavy, easy-to-get-wrong plumbing is mine to carry. The publishing is theirs. If you want to watch it come together, the beta is at aveiro.app.