Public institutions should own their software.
Your town owns its trucks, its buildings, and its records. It should own its website too. Munikit exists to make that normal again — to give local governments a modern, accessible website they buy once and keep, instead of one they rent forever from a vendor whose price only goes up.
The market sells municipalities the wrong deal.
Over the last two decades, the municipal website market consolidated into a handful of large vendors — most of them now owned by private-equity firms — selling the same arrangement: pay to build your site, then pay a platform fee every year, at a rate that climbs roughly 5% each renewal. The contract auto-renews. The code and the system never become yours. And the day you want to leave, you discover that leaving means rebuilding from scratch.
For a big city with an IT department, that's a manageable line item. For a town of four thousand where the clerk also runs elections, processes records requests, and updates the website between everything else — it's a quiet, compounding tax on a budget that has better uses.
We think there's a better deal: a website built to government standards — accessible, bilingual-ready, professionally designed — that the municipality owns outright. Modern web technology makes this entirely possible. The incumbents just have no reason to offer it.
Four principles we build on
Ownership beats lock-in
The most valuable thing we deliver isn't the design — it's the keys. You get the source code and the database, and the freedom to take them to any developer, any time. A vendor that has to earn your renewal serves you better than one that's trapped you.
Accessibility is the baseline
A government website that some residents can't use isn't finished. WCAG 2.1 AA isn't an upsell or an overlay widget at Munikit — it's built into every component and tested before anything ships.
Built for the person who runs it
Every feature answers one question: can the clerk do this without calling for help? If a task needs a support ticket or a developer, we got the design wrong. Your staff should be able to run the whole site themselves.
Honest, predictable pricing
One fixed scope, one clear price, no escalator, no surprise invoices. We'd rather earn a renewal by being useful than collect one because you have no way out.
Modern, open technology — not a proprietary black box.
Munikit is built on widely-used, well-supported open technologies: Next.js for the website, Payload CMS for the admin, and PostgreSQL for your data. None of it is proprietary to us. That's deliberate — it's what makes the code something any competent developer can pick up and maintain, and what guarantees your site outlives any single vendor relationship, including ours.
Every release is tested for accessibility and security before it reaches a municipality. The whole platform is purpose-built for government content — meetings, bylaws, services, permits, emergency alerts — not a generic CMS bent into shape with plugins.
Explore the platform →The stack, in plain terms
- Next.js — a fast, modern website framework used across government and enterprise
- Payload CMS — an independently-owned, open-source admin your staff log into
- PostgreSQL — the standard open database your content lives in
- Your hosting account — in the region and provider you choose
Because the CMS underneath is open source and independently maintained, your site isn't exposed to a single venture-backed product being acquired and shut down.
A small team, close to the work.
Munikit is a small, independent team — not a venture-backed platform with a sales floor. We build and ship every site ourselves, which is why the person who designs your site is the person who answers when you call.
We started Munikit because the same story kept repeating in small towns: a council signs with a big platform, the site goes live, and from then on every edit, every renewal, every export happens on someone else's terms and someone else's invoice. The town never actually owns the thing it paid for.
Our answer is the same modern technology the private sector takes for granted, built so a clerk can run it without a support ticket — and handed over so the municipality owns the code, the content, and the hosting outright. What clerks tell us they want isn't a "portal." They want to post a notice the night before a meeting, meet their accessibility obligations without hiring a consultant, and never have the website be the thing that breaks at budget time. That's what we build toward.
Early, and choosing our first municipalities carefully.
We'd rather be honest than inflate a logo wall. Munikit is in its founding-client phase — we're onboarding a small number of municipalities and giving each one direct, founder-level attention. If you want a vendor that's genuinely invested in getting your launch right, this is the moment to talk to us.
Founder-level attention
You work directly with the people who build and ship your site — not a support tier. Founding clients get our full attention through migration, launch, and the first year.
A voice in the roadmap
We're still shaping what Munikit becomes. Early municipalities help set priorities — the features you need have a real chance of being the ones we build next.
An honest fit assessment
If we're not the right call for your town, we'll tell you. We'd rather have a handful of well-launched sites than a long list of mismatched ones.
"Isn't a newer vendor a risk?" Actually, it's lower risk.
It's a fair question to ask with public money. But the usual logic is backwards: the real risk in municipal software isn't a small vendor — it's being locked into a platform you don't own. Here's how the ownership model removes the risk a new vendor normally carries.
You own it from day one
The code, the content, and the database are yours from launch — delivered to your own git repository and hosting accounts. Even in the worst case where we disappear entirely, your site keeps running and any Next.js developer can maintain it. You are never stranded.
You pay as we deliver
Implementation is billed against milestones, not up front — you pay for work as it's completed and accepted, against a fixed-scope statement of work agreed before anything starts. No big cheque into the unknown.
Compare the real downside
With an incumbent platform, the failure mode is paying indefinitely for a site you can't take elsewhere without a rebuild. With Munikit, the failure mode is… you already own everything. The lock-in risk you're trying to avoid is structurally lower here, not higher.
Want a website your town actually owns?
That's the whole idea. Book a demo and we'll show you what it looks like — and give you an honest read on whether we're the right fit.
Request a demo