The Story of Neleto

Neleto CMS looks new. It has AI features, a built-in MCP server and a free tier you can start in minutes. If you only saw the launch posts, you'd assume a startup that appeared this year.

It didn't appear this year. Neleto has been running real customer websites since 2020. The AI features are the newest layer, and the foundation under them has been in production for years.

Here's how it got here.

2020: customer projects

We're Triple-A Soft, a digitalization partner for mid-sized companies. In 2020 we kept building websites for customers and kept hitting the same wall. The tools we had made every project slower, more fragile and more expensive than it needed to be: pages were slow, updates broke things, and every new feature meant another plugin to babysit.

So for our own projects we started building a CMS that did what we needed, and nothing more. It wasn't a product yet, and it didn't have a name worth printing. It was a tool we built to do our job better.

Customers noticed

Customers noticed the difference before we did. Pages loaded faster, their own teams could edit without calling us, and things stopped breaking after updates.

More and more of our direct customers moved onto it. Every improvement came from a real site with a real deadline, not from a roadmap slide.

Why we waited

We could have launched it as a product years earlier. We wanted it to be boring first: stable, predictable, something you could trust with a customer's business. So we waited, through years of real traffic, real editors and real mistakes, until it had earned that trust.

2026: we opened it up

In 2026 we decided it was time. We launched Neleto Console with a free tier so anyone could sign up, get a real CMS and build something, not only our own customers. Same core we'd been running for years, now self-serve.

What AI added

When tools like Claude, Cursor and Windsurf started changing how people build, the content layer was missing. AI could write code, but it couldn't safely update a live website.

Neleto was already a complete, stable CMS, so we could add that piece properly. The built-in MCP server is part of the core, not a plugin, and it lets an AI assistant work in your CMS under the same permissions as a human editor. We didn't have to rebuild anything to get there.

What that means for you

The core has been running customer sites for years, not weeks. Features exist because a customer needed them. We still ship websites ourselves and use Neleto every day for our own customers. We built it because we need it too.

If you want the fuller argument for the choices we made, read Why Neleto Exists. This post is the timeline; that one is the reasoning.

Where we're going

We're still a small team and we still build in public. The plan hasn't changed much since 2020: keep it fast, keep it boring in the ways that matter, and let real customer work decide what comes next.

If you want to see what six years of real-world use feels like, start free and build something.

— Martin