Reading the room: when not to add a CMS
A CMS adds engineering tax in exchange for editorial velocity. If you have neither editors nor velocity, you don't have a problem a CMS solves.
Every team that asks for a CMS thinks they need one. Half of them do. Here's the decision tree I use.
Question one: is there a non-engineer who needs to ship copy or layout changes weekly without a deploy? If no, you don't need a CMS — you need MDX in your repo. Stop here.
Question two: are those changes structured (cards, hero blocks, product grids) or unstructured (long-form articles)? Structured: headless CMS with a defined schema. Unstructured: a markdown editor on top of git. Don't conflate them.
Question three: how many environments? If the editorial team needs preview, draft, scheduled publish, and rollback, you're paying enterprise CMS prices. Budget for it. If they don't, you're overbuying.
The tax is real: every CMS adds a content layer, a build pipeline, a webhook surface, a permissions model, and an editorial onboarding cost. None of that is free. Pay it when the velocity gain is real.