alternatives
A custom alternative to Cargo
For artists, designers and studios deciding between staying on Cargo and having something made instead. The honest version, including the part where Cargo wins.
When Cargo is the right answer
Cargo is made for exactly this audience and it shows. The templates are better than most and it gets out of the way of the work, which is the hardest thing for a portfolio tool to do. If the site is a portfolio and the work speaks for itself, that is often all it needs to be.
That is worth saying plainly, because most pages like this one are written by somebody who wants to sell you the alternative. If the description above matches your situation, stay where you are.
What tends to push a project past it
The way the work should be encountered is itself part of the work, and any template decides that for you before you start.
The practice has moved into things a page cannot hold: environments, real time pieces, work that has to run rather than be pictured.
The archive has become the significant thing and needs a structure designed for it rather than inherited from a theme.
The site is doing professional work now, in front of clients and institutions, and it should not look like a system anyone can subscribe to.
What a commission gives you instead
A design language taken from the practice, so the site reads as part of the body of work rather than as packaging around it.
The ability to build the encounter, not just the presentation, including interactive and real time pieces that run in a browser without an install.
Ownership of the result, hosted wherever you want it, including on hardware you control.
The part that is not about features
Cargo, like every hosted builder, runs your site on its own infrastructure under its own terms. That is the arrangement, and it is a reasonable one at the price. What it means is that the site is something you have access to rather than something you hold.
A commission inverts that. You get the repository, the design files and the accounts, and it can be stood up on your own server so there is no middle man in the stack at all. If you would rather not run infrastructure we will host it, and that stays a convenience you can walk away from rather than a dependency.
Whether it is worth it
Commissioned work costs more than a subscription and takes longer than an afternoon. It earns that when the site has to do something specific, when it is the first serious thing a client or an audience meets, or when the business has grown past the point where its front door should live in an account. If none of those are true yet, the honest advice is to wait until one of them is.
Other comparisons
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Questions people ask first, and guides on commissioning custom work.
use it. commission it. back it.