A Readymag alternative for a CMS, newsletter and store around the design

This is the part of Readymag most people do not read until it bites. Every paid plan carries a monthly page-view allowance across all your published sites: 10,000 on Personal, 25,000 on Freelancer, 75,000 on Advanced. Readymag counts repeat visits, your own visits and Preview views. Go over, and you are invoiced; leave that invoice unpaid for seven days and Readymag branding goes back on all of your projects. Grigora's plans count sites, AI credits and subscribers instead.

Takeaway: Readymag’s paid plans include view allowances; estimate expected traffic and clarify overage pricing before purchase.

Concede this one properly. Readymag does not stack sections; you put any widget at any coordinate. Desktop, Tablet and Mobile are three separately editable layouts where content stays in sync but size, colour, type and animation can diverge per device. That is art direction per breakpoint, and a block editor cannot do it. There is also an official Figma plugin that drops a selected element or a single-page layout straight onto the canvas.

Takeaway: If the page is the artefact, Readymag's canvas is the better instrument and this page will not argue.

Readymag's animation is built into the widgets rather than bolted on. Four triggers (On Load, On Click or Tap, On Hover or Hold, On Scroll) apply to every widget except Hotspot and Google Maps, alongside custom cursors, draggable elements, Lottie and lightboxes. The Shots widget turns a video or an image sequence into stills you scrub with scroll or hover, which is a genuinely uncommon effect to get without code. Grigora's block editor does not attempt this.

Takeaway: Readymag wins motion outright, as long as you are on a paid plan, because Shots and Lottie never reach a published free site.

Readymag has no CMS. No collections, no dynamic pages, no post templates, no categories, no tags. The help centre returns nothing for either 'blog' or 'CMS', there is no CMS section among its documented help topics and no collection widget among its widgets. Every page is positioned by hand, so anything that repeats is rebuilt by hand, and changing a shared element means opening every page that contains it. Readymag runs its own blog on a separate property rather than on Readymag.

Takeaway: Readymag can publish many pages, but repeating editorial content requires more manual structure than a collection-based CMS.

There is no product catalogue, no cart and no checkout anywhere in Readymag, and no commerce section in the help centre. Selling in practice means pasting a Shopify Buy Button or a Gumroad embed into the Code widget. Readymag's own articles for both open by recommending you enlist a professional web developer for code injection, and warn that support cannot help with custom code. The Code widget does not publish at all on the free plan, so a shop needs a paid Readymag subscription plus a paid commerce account. Grigora's store is native on every plan, Starter included.

Takeaway: Readymag takes no commission because Readymag never touches the money, the product or the customer.

Readymag sends no campaigns, holds no subscriber list, runs no automations and has no templates, and the help centre returns nothing for 'newsletter'. The one email-adjacent feature is the Form widget, which can forward submissions to a Mailchimp audience, a Google Sheet or Drive folder, a Dropbox folder or a custom URL. That is lead capture handed to someone else. Worse, Readymag documents that the Google Docs, e-mail and Mailchimp destinations stop working in code-exported sites.

Takeaway: Readymag stops at the submission. The list, the send and the follow-up are all someone else's invoice.

Readymag markets 'Advanced SEO' and then switches it off entirely on the free plan, along with Google Analytics and GTM. On paid plans you get per-page title, description and keywords, Open Graph settings, an auto-updating sitemap.xml, free SSL and the usual analytics and pixel integrations. What is missing matters: robots.txt cannot be edited at all, there is no redirect manager, no canonical control, no schema tooling and no hreflang. The indexing toggle only becomes editable once a custom domain is mapped, so a site on a Readymag subdomain cannot be controlled that way. Code export drops custom Open Graph and SEO tags for every page except the first.

Takeaway: Readymag gives you meta tags and a sitemap, then removes the controls you need when rankings actually move.

Readymag rations publishing capacity tightly below the top tier, which is exactly what per-project pricing looks like in practice. Personal permits one published site with one custom domain. Freelancer permits five published sites but only three custom domains. Advanced lifts published sites to unlimited but caps custom domains at ten. Collaborators run 1, 2 and 10, and Personal's single collaborator is restricted to a layout-locked mode. Picture upload is capped at 6 MB per file on every plan, including the custom-priced Extra tier.

Takeaway: Readymag counts projects, domains, collaborators and visitors separately, and each one has its own ceiling.

The second honest concession. Readymag has a real exit. From Freelancer upward you can transfer ownership of a project to a client's own Readymag account, which is a clean agency handover. From Advanced upward you can export HTML source and host it yourself, or embed a project into an external site in an iframe. Grigora has no code export at all. The Readymag caveats are worth knowing: exported sites lose the Mailchimp and e-mail form destinations, and custom SEO and Open Graph tags survive only on the first page.

Takeaway: If owning the files matters more than owning the content model, Readymag is the one that lets you leave with something.