InkCMS Partners
Pre-vetted developers and agencies who specialize in InkCMS. Find the right partner for your project.
Read more§ Partner Program
Build with InkCMS.
Grow your practice.
We're onboarding agencies and dev shops who want to specialize in InkCMS implementations. Training, lead routing, co-marketing — without becoming a reseller.
§ Why partner with InkCMS
A modern CMS your clients can actually edit.
If you build CMS-driven sites for a living, you know the landscape: WordPress is unkillable but increasingly painful. Webflow + Framer + Squarespace are easy but they own the keys. Headless CMSs (Sanity, Contentful, Strapi) are powerful but ask non-technical clients to learn a JAMstack mental model.
InkCMS lives in a gap: a self-hosted .NET app that puts content on disk as Markdown, supports a modern browser-side admin and AI-driven authoring via Claude Code, and lets you (the partner) write Razor templates the same way you'd write any other ASP.NET app. No proprietary template language. No vendor SDK. No build pipeline. Your clients run it themselves; you build the site once and ship it.
The partner program exists because we'd rather have a network of specialized shops than try to be a services company ourselves.
§ What partners get
The mechanics.
01
Hands-on training
File layout, template authoring, deployment patterns, AI prompt design, common migration paths, and the InkCMS/Custom/ extensibility model. Direct access to the InkCMS team throughout.
02
Lead routing
Inbound leads from our Partners page get matched to the partner whose specialty fits. We share project scope + budget; you decide which to take on.
03
Co-marketing
Listing on inkcms.ai, case-study cross-promotion, joint webinars when a major release lands. We don't sell through you, but we'll happily sell alongside you.
04
Referral revenue share
A portion of first-year license revenue from clients you refer comes back to you. The exact split is still being finalized — we'll share the current terms when we open the conversation.
05
Direct priority support
A direct line to the InkCMS team when your clients hit something. Faster than the public queue; partner installs jump to the front.
06
Early access
Preview builds, roadmap visibility, voice in feature prioritization. We're a small team; we ship faster when we hear back from people doing the work.
§ More than a CMS
Build custom applications
on the InkCMS core.
InkCMS isn't just a CMS — it's a working .NET application stack with content storage, an authoring admin, AI integration, licensing, an audit log, and a media library already wired up. Partners can treat it as a foundation and build their own applications on top.
Think of it the way developers used to think about WordPress or Drupal in their prime: a robust core you extend. Except instead of a plugin marketplace, you have a real .NET project that you own as source. Add controllers, services, view models, Razor templates, EF Core data layers — anything you'd add to any other ASP.NET Core app. The CMS is just the layer your custom app shares the same chassis with.
InkCMS/
├── Controllers/ ← product
├── Services/ ← product
├── Views/ ← product
└── Custom/ ← YOURS
├── Controllers/
├── Services/
├── Models/
├── Data/
├── Views/
└── Startup.cs ← DI + pipeline hooks
Everything under InkCMS/Custom/ survives every product update.
§ The Custom carve-out
Extend without forking.
Every InkCMS install reserves InkCMS/Custom/ as a permanent customer-owned folder. Product updates never overwrite anything inside it. That's the contract that makes extending safe.
Custom controllers
Drop ASP.NET controllers into Custom/Controllers/. They get the full DI graph — the same IPageIndex, IPasswordHasher, IEmailService, IAdminLogger the product uses. Mount them at any route.
Custom services + data
Register your own services in Custom/Startup.cs. Wire up your own database with EF Core, ADO.NET, Dapper — your call. The customer-portal billing layer we ship is itself a Custom-folder example you can model from.
View overrides + new templates
Override any product Razor view by dropping a same-named file under Custom/Views/. Or add brand-new page templates. The product view resolver checks the Custom tree first, then falls back to its own.
Reuse the AI layer
The Claude integration that powers content authoring is exposed to Custom code via IAiClient. Build chat surfaces, content generators, classifiers — anything that wants a hosted LLM with a BYOK pattern.
Safe under product updates
The installer skip-list treats InkCMS/Custom/ as permanent. Updates land in the product folders next to it. Your custom code never gets clobbered — and you can keep pulling new InkCMS releases as they ship.
Future-proof contract
The product code never references the Custom namespace. That one-way dependency keeps your customizations from breaking when we ship updates. New extension hooks land additively in each release.
Examples of what partners have built (or can build) on top: client portals, membership systems, event registration, custom intranets, internal tools, SaaS products that re-use InkCMS as the content + auth layer, vertical-industry editions of the CMS itself.
§ What we look for
No reseller pyramid. Real shops, doing real work.
- You ship CMS-driven sites for paying clients. Not a side hustle, not a learning project. Track record matters more than headcount — solo shops are welcome.
- You're comfortable with .NET (or willing to get there). InkCMS is ASP.NET Core. You don't need to write the engine, but Razor templates + appsettings + deployment to IIS or Azure should not be foreign concepts.
- You can hand off cleanly. Partner engagements end with the client owning the keys. If your model depends on locking clients in, this isn't a fit.
- You'll write at least one case study with us. Even a short one. Helps everyone — you, us, future clients.
If you're a solo developer who's done two great projects on InkCMS, that's a stronger fit than a 50-person agency that wants to use you to upsell hosting. We'd rather have ten of the first than two of the second.
§ Apply to the program
Tell us about your shop.
We read every application. You'll hear back within a week. If the fit's there, we'll set up a 30-minute call.