Most content tools are built for marketers. You get a dashboard full of buttons, a WYSIWYG editor that fights you, and an API bolted on as an afterthought.
We built Whitepaper for the other kind of writer the developer who wants to own their content pipeline the same way they own their code.
What Whitepaper Is
Whitepaper is an API-first CMS. You write in Markdown. Your content is stored with structure titles, slugs, thumbnails, metadata and served through a clean API you can call from anywhere.
You can publish standalone papers or organize them into projects. Projects can have collections that group related papers together. Everything has a public URL out of the box, with SEO handled automatically so you don't have to think about it.
If you've ever built a personal site just to have a place to publish your writing, or cobbled together a dev.to + Notion + some custom repo setup to manage your content Whitepaper is what you were trying to build.
What You Can Do With It
Publish papers. Each paper has a title, a thumbnail, and a full Markdown body. Author attribution and metadata are handled internally. Your content gets a public URL at whitepaper.so/yourhandle/your-paper-slug.
Organize into projects. Group related papers into a project with its own logo, description, and slug. A project is basically a publication a series, a documentation site, a portfolio.
Distribute automatically. Once you publish, Whitepaper can cross-post to Hashnode, Dev.to, Reddit, Threads, Peerlist, and Substack. One publish, everywhere.
Use the API. Every project gets its own API key. Call /dev/paper, /dev/project, or /dev/collection to fetch your content programmatically and use it in your own apps, portfolios, or documentation sites.
Drop in free components. We ship ready-made React components a mobile table of contents island and an edge table of contents for desktop so your readers get a good experience without you building the UI from scratch.
Why We Built It
The developer publishing landscape has a gap. On one side you have fully managed blogging platforms easy to use, but you're locked in and the API is limited. On the other side you have headless CMS tools built for enterprise teams with budgets and dedicated content engineers.
There's nothing in the middle that's genuinely developer-first: fast to set up, API-native, with distribution and SEO built in and out of the way.
That's Whitepaper. Built on Astro, FastAPI, and Firestore. Designed to stay out of your way.
What's Coming
We're just getting started. The roadmap includes a full writing UI, richer project analytics, more distribution targets, and deeper API capabilities for teams building on top of Whitepaper.
If you're a developer who writes about what you build, what you learn, or what you think Whitepaper is for you. Sign up, publish your first paper, and let us know what you think.
We're building this in public. You'll hear from us regularly.
