Dreamkit

Dreamkit is the platform campaign and movement organisations use to run their websites without depending on American infrastructure. Petitions, sign-ups, fundraisers, recurring donations, multilingual content, newsletters and analytics are part of the product rather than a stack of third-party subscriptions bolted on afterwards. It runs on European hosting, and unlike its predecessor the site is transferable: a client who wants to leave can take it with them.

It is the successor to Wings, which I built and ran for most of a decade. Wings was a proprietary CMS-as-a-service on US infrastructure; Dreamkit is a WordPress theme and a suite of plugins that replicate and extend the same feature set on ground the client can actually stand on.

The sovereignty argument, made concrete

Digital sovereignty is easy to agree with in the abstract and expensive to act on. Most of the work of the last two years has been making it a practical default rather than a principle you pay extra for.

Hosting. Since 2026 Dreamkit runs its own EU stack: Hetzner boxes in Falkenstein managed through Ploi, deSEC for DNS, restic backups following a 3-2-1 pattern to Scaleway in Paris and a Hetzner storage box in Helsinki, and three-layer monitoring that deliberately avoids the usual American defaults. The vendor choices were argued from public values and cap-table analysis, not just price, which is why there is no Cloudflare and no UptimeRobot in the diagram. The cost reduction against the previous managed host is around 85 to 90 percent, and the measured restore time is fifteen to twenty-five minutes.

Email. Rather than keep paying Mailchimp or Brevo to hold client mailing lists, Dreamkit sends its own: Scaleway’s transactional service underneath, self-hosted Listmonk with a container per client above it, and a WordPress plugin on top so editors never have to leave the admin they already know. Bounce handling included.

Identity. A self-hosted ZITADEL instance is the single OIDC provider across wp-admin, the client portal, the support desk and the newsletter tooling. One login, no vendor holding the user directory.

The rule I keep having to restate to myself while building this: the promise is that everything lives in wp-admin. When elegant single-sign-on architecture conflicts with that promise, the promise wins, and the elegant thing becomes a power-user nice-to-have.

Migrations, which is most of the actual work

Every organisation moving onto Dreamkit is a migration, and migrations are where platforms are really tested. Republiek was the first, a three-site topology that went live in 2026. Controle Alt Delete, Frisse Wind, Jongsocialisten, BIJ1 Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and SPD Lüdenscheid followed, the last of those being the first German-locale site.

Not everything should be migrated. For sites a client only wants to keep readable, there is a static archiving pipeline that mirrors the design and text to a static host and lets the forms break by design. It is dramatically cheaper and it is the honest answer for a campaign that finished years ago.

Go to market

The marketing strategy is compounding inbound: SEO and evergreen content, no ads, no daily posting. That is a constraint, not a preference. I have a full-time job and very little airtime, but almost unlimited capacity to build and write. The beachhead is campaign and movement organisations that want off American tools, defined by pain and values rather than organisation type, where I have both a track record and a network in which referrals compound.

Content is open by default. No gated PDFs, no email wall in front of the thing that would actually help you. The first comparison pages went live in 2026 and they are fully readable, with the data visualisations included.

Successor to Wings.