One dashboard instead of five tools.

Verakis Food Academy is the training arm of the Verakis Foundation, which works on scientific outreach about food and nutrition. The Academy sells courses and technical visits that help food professionals work to European standards and better practice in their sector.

I designed and built their site in Webflow a few years ago. It worked, and the team found it easy to edit. But the Foundation doesn’t have large resources, and the bill around the site kept growing.

Where the money was going

Webflow with Localization carried most of it. Course enquiries went from a Webflow form to Make, which sent the brochure by email, added people to the newsletter or stored them in Seatable, a simple CRM I’d set up for them. Mailersend sent the transactional emails, on a paid plan. MailerLite sent the newsletters.

Each tool made sense on its own. Together they were five bills, held together by automations.

Then they started thinking about Spanish as a third language. That would have raised the Webflow bill again, and the cheaper Localization plan doesn’t translate slugs at all, which becomes an indexing problem over time. The client was already finding the costs hard to carry, so I proposed moving the whole thing.

One back end, one front end

I know Craft CMS well, and it fixed the biggest cost on its own: languages don’t change the price. The site runs in Brazilian Portuguese and French (the Foundation is based in France but works mostly with professionals in Brazil), and a third language is just another site in the same install.

The other decision was where the site lives. Craft is only used by me, the editors and the publishing webhook, so it sits on modest hosting at Fortrabbit. Visitors never touch it. The public site is a separate Astro front end on Cloudflare’s free plan, so the client only pays for the back office.

Pages are rendered on Cloudflare and kept in its cache. When the team saves something in Craft, a webhook clears only the pages that depend on it, and the next visitor gets the new version. Nobody has to publish twice.

Everything in one dashboard

Make, Seatable and the paid Mailersend plan had no reason to stay. I built a CRM module inside Craft instead. Every form on the site saves to Craft first, then the brochure goes out through Resend and the newsletter sign-up goes to MailerLite. If either service fails, Craft tries again.

The Seatable history came across too: 408 leads and 13 students.

The team now has one dashboard for everything: content in both languages, new pages and every enquiry.

Four weeks

The design is the one I’d made for Webflow. I rebuilt it in Tailwind CSS, rewrote the Webflow scripts in plain JavaScript, and since I was in the front end anyway, made a few improvements along the way.

All 11 Webflow collections were imported into Craft, and a check compared the 1,217 Portuguese and French versions without a single difference. Every URL stayed as it was.

I know Craft well, and with AI tools in my workflow it took four weeks. After launch there was the usual round of technical fixes in Search Console, and they were fixed. Running costs are now about half of what they were.