The future is command line

The future is command line

We moved this website earlier this month. The reason wasn't the design options or the pricing — it was control. We wanted to be able to deploy, configure, and update from the command line, and Squarespace doesn't give you that. If you run builtwith.com against thenocodecto.com right now, it'll tell you exactly what we switched to, and that choice was deliberate.

If you're a SaaS company without a CLI or a real API, your customers are having the same conversation.

The UI is not the enemy

The interface matters. For anyone using a system day-to-day — team members, non-technical staff, someone updating a record between meetings — the UI is the product. It needs to be fast, intuitive, and forgiving of mistakes.

But there are two kinds of people who interact with any SaaS platform: the people who use it, and the people who set it up. For the latter, a clean UI is not enough. You need an API you can script against, CLI tooling that handles operations in bulk, and granular permission models — not "admin" or "viewer", but scoped keys with defined capabilities. The ability to move quickly and recover cleanly from mistakes matters more than any dashboard feature.

We're in the middle of a CRM migration right now. The platform has a solid interface for day-to-day use, but the setup is configuration-heavy, and one wrong setting creates data problems that take hours to unpick. When you're working through tens of thousands of contact records and something needs correcting, a script against the API takes twenty minutes. The equivalent UI workflow takes a day. Squarespace doesn't have a CLI, and that was the feature that led to our churn from their platform.

Where your data lives

For businesses, the data hosting and security question is where platform selection gets serious — and most businesses don't get into it until something goes wrong.

Where your customer data actually lives, which jurisdiction governs it, and which government can compel access to it aren't abstract concerns. GDPR is one layer, but the US Cloud Act is another, and most SaaS runs on US infrastructure. Most UK businesses are in a more complicated legal position than they realise.

There's also a simpler question: does the platform actually understand UK businesses? Dates in DD/MM/YYYY. Pounds, not dollars. British English in the UI and documentation. VAT, not sales tax. These sound minor until your team is debugging a workflow at 9pm and the help docs keep referring to features that don't exist in your region. The platforms that will win in the UK mid-market are the ones building for this explicitly — single-country data residency, local compliance documentation, proper localisation — and right now, very few are.

What to look for

When we evaluate a platform — for a client or for our own stack — this is part of the checklist:

• API quality: Can you read and write every significant object, or only what the vendor chose to expose?
• CLI or SDK: Can you automate operations from a script, not just from the UI?
• Key management: Can you issue scoped API keys, rotate them, and audit their use?
• Data residency: Where does the data actually live? EU? UK? US? Does the sub-processor list match?
• Export completeness: Can you get everything out in a usable format when you want to leave?

If you'd like us to run the full version across your stack, book a call.

P.S. We're doing a CRM update right now, and the same things apply. Sign up here if you want to follow along.