The last holdouts are folding. The ones still swearing by Webflow “because of the CMS” or clinging to custom codebases like it’s 2019. They’re tired. Everyone is tired of the same cycle: six months of dev handoff hell, another four patching Safari bugs no one caught, then a year later the whole thing feels dated because the interactions are still 2022-level “acceptable.”

We just shipped three large projects in Framer back-to-back — a fintech onboarding flow, a luxury fashion e-commerce relaunch, and a venture studio’s portfolio that had to feel like money. All three launched in under ten weeks from first component to final QA. All three outperformed their previous versions on every metric that actually matters: time-on-site, conversion, scroll depth, investor eyeballs. None of them needed a single line of custom React that lived outside Framer’s sandbox.

That’s not marketing. That’s just what happened.

The Myth of the “Real” Website

Clients still walk in asking for “a real website.” Translation: something built in Next.js with a headless CMS, because that’s what the last agency sold them as bulletproof. Six months later the budget is gone, the animations stutter on mobile, and the marketing team can’t change copy without opening a ticket.

Framer isn’t a toy anymore. It ships production-grade code, full control over breakpoints, native CMS that actually works, and — this is the part no one wants to admit — interactions that don’t make designers want to cry. The gap closed somewhere in 2024 and most of the industry missed it because they were too busy arguing about App Router folder structure.

Speed Is the New Luxury

Founders don’t have eighteen months anymore. The ones who move fastest are eating the ones who deliberate. A recent e-commerce relaunch we finished went from signed contract to first $100k revenue day in nine weeks. Nine. The old stack would have still been in discovery.

Framer lets the people who actually understand the brand — the designers — stay in the driver’s seat until the site is live. No more translating Figma files into tickets that get misinterpreted by developers who have never met the client. The motion, the micro-interactions, the weird little hover states that make something feel expensive? They survive. They don’t get “value-engineered” out in sprint four.

Yes, the CMS Is Actually Good Now

Stop rolling your eyes. We did too, for years. Then we built a 400-page corporate site with nested collections, dynamic filtering, and localization for four markets. Took two days to structure. The marketing team can now add case studies while drinking coffee instead of waiting for a dev to wake up in a different timezone.

When Custom Code Actually Matters (Spoiler: Almost Never)

Here’s the dirty secret every agency protects: 95 % of the “custom” functionality clients demand is available as a well-maintained package or a 20-line embed. The remaining 5 %? Framer lets you drop in raw React components or straight HTML/CSS/JS overrides exactly where you need them. We’ve shipped canvas-based 3D hero sections, real-time pricing calculators, and WebGL distortions without leaving the tool. The dev time went from weeks to afternoons.

The Animation Arms Race Ended — Framer Declared Victory

Remember when every new portfolio had to one-up the last with paralax’d paralysis and scroll-jank that made users reach for Dramamine? That trend is exhausting and usually pointless. Framer’s animation timeline is now stupidly powerful — variant-driven, spring physics that actually feel right, scroll triggers that don’t break when text reflows. More importantly, you can prototype the expensive-feeling stuff in an hour and know instantly whether it’s worth keeping. Most of the time it isn’t. But when it is, it ships perfect on day one instead of “close enough” after three QA rounds.

The Handoff That Isn’t

On a fintech platform last quarter the engineers were terrified we’d deliver a Framer prototype and say “make it real now.” Instead we shipped the real site. Their job became performance auditing, accessibility polish, and adding one custom webhook. Total dev time: three weeks, part-time. Everyone left happy, which in this industry is basically a miracle.

The Cost Argument Is Dead

Paying a developer £400 a day to move divs around in React is no longer noble. It’s wasteful. Framer’s pricing is aggressive for teams, and the time saved compounds so fast that even the stingiest finance director starts smiling by week four. We ran the numbers on the last six projects: Framer builds came in 40–60 % under budget compared to the custom stack, with higher visual fidelity and zero tech debt. Do that math yourself.

The Last Objection Standing

“But what if we outgrow it?”

Translation: “What if we become Airbnb and need to serve 300 million users with sub-50 ms latency?” Sure. When that happens, hire the fifty engineers and rebuild it. Until then you’re optimizing for a future that will almost certainly never arrive, while your competitors ship tomorrow.

Every studio has that one graveyard project — beautiful in Figma, mediocre on the web, launched late and already outdated. Framer is the first tool that consistently lets us escape that cycle. The sites feel like the design. They launch fast. They stay fast. And — perhaps most dangerously for the old guard — they make clients wonder why they ever needed anything else.

We’re not switching back.

If you’re still on the fence, build one small thing in Framer this week. A landing page. A product tour. Something you can throw away. Then compare how it felt to the last time you shipped the “proper” way.

You already know how this ends.

Drop a message if you want to see the case studies up close. No deck, no sales call — just the live sites and the timelines. We’ll let the work talk.