Every tool in a small company's stack is excellent on its own. None of them talk to each other, and all of them bill monthly. fastsite exists because that pattern reached publishing too.
The problem
Putting words on the internet used to be simple. Then it needed a CMS, and the CMS needed plugins, and the plugins needed a build pipeline, and the build pipeline needed a runtime, and the runtime needed a hosting plan priced per seat. Somewhere in there the actual job — write something, put it live, have it load fast — got buried under several hundred kilobytes of JavaScript and a monthly invoice.
fastsite takes the opposite position. Content goes in over an API, a webhook, or MCP. Static HTML comes out. There is no runtime at the edge, no database your visitors can reach, and no JavaScript shipped at all — the build refuses to publish a page that would cost a PageSpeed point rather than letting it degrade quietly.
Who builds it
fastsite is written by Lennart Øster, a developer in Denmark who has been programming since 1995 and founded his company, SitePoint Systems, in 1999. The first decade looked conventional: consulting for large companies across Denmark, Sweden, and Brazil, building custom software for people with problems rather than shipping products at them.
About fifteen years ago he went the other way from the usual founder story. Having already run a company with employees, he decided a one-person operation suited him and his family better, and he has built and run software products alone ever since. The constraint turned out to be the useful part: when you are the entire team, a thing has to genuinely matter before it gets built.
European Magazine covered the approach in July 2026 under the title The one-man rebellion against software bloat.
The pattern
The products all start the same way — with something in his own stack that works but costs too much.
- Needing reliable cookie-consent management and finding the options solid but expensive, he built Conzent. It became a certified CMP in its own right, and in July 2026 it went fully open source with a hosted version for anyone who cannot or should not run their own server.
- Nothing on the market fit how he handled email and support, so he built that too.
- Then a CRM, Geniziz, priced flat instead of per seat — because per-seat pricing quietly forces small teams to ration who gets a login, which defeats the point of having the tool.
fastsite is the same move applied to publishing, with one addition: it was designed from the start for agents rather than retrofitted for them. The MCP server is not an integration bolted onto a dashboard. It is how the engine is meant to be driven.
What this means for the project
It stays free to self-host
The GPL version is the entire engine, not a stripped tier designed to push you to a paid plan.
It will never be per-seat
Including when the hosted version lands. Add every colleague, client, and agent you like.
It cannot be closed
A reciprocal licence means the project stays available to everyone running it, whatever happens to the author.
It is maintained by one person
Which is worth knowing. Issues get read. Roadmaps stay short. Nothing ships to hit a quarter.
Honest about the trade-offs
A one-person project is not the same as a funded platform, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of thing this site is supposed to be against. There is no 24/7 support desk. Feature requests are weighed against one person's available hours. If that is a dealbreaker for your organisation, it should be — and the licence means you can fork the engine and maintain it yourself rather than being stuck.
What you get in exchange: no seat maths, no vendor lock-in, no roadmap driven by an investor deck, and a codebase small enough that one person can hold it in their head.
Elsewhere
Lennart still consults internationally on custom software and automation for mid-size companies, alongside the product work. He lives in Denmark.