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I’ve been an API-based CMS fan for a while but at the end of the day it’s a huge bet on the viability of the vendor, because good luck migrating away from an API-based CMS.

No way all of the myriad vendors in the headless-CMS world survive this downturn.

I think that needs to inform any CMS decision.

Ultimately I suspect there will be vertical integration at play with the companies raising money to be the Wordpress of the 21st century. Wordpress is a CMS after all.

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I company I worked at had 20 or so sites on a headless API based CMS. Basically you’d enter structured data in their proprietary backend, and the site would request that data as JSON via the API. The marketing department hated it with a passion, because there was no way to do “one-off” things without involving IT, and IT hated it because marketing needed permanent handholding for the simplest of things.

After about a year of paying €8000 a month for hosting they replaced it with one really good 100% custom WordPress theme.

How did this remove the need of using IT to do one-off things?

WordPress has a publish button, post scheduling and revision history all out of the box with no plugins. That right there eliminates most of the need of IT in day to day publishing.

I don’t follow. Everything you’ve listed is a feature of most headless CMSs I’ve investigated.

Headless CMS may have that feature but then you have to deal with a more complicated deployment pipeline that a marketer might not be as comfortable with as WP.

There might be a misunderstanding here. Headless CMSes don't mandate deploys, that's only if they're used in conjunction with static-site generators. A headless CMS is just a CMS that provides content as structured data over an API rather then pre-bound to a rendering layer. You can use WP as a headless CMS if you use its content API.

Why would it be particularly difficult to migrate away from an API-based CMS?

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