Directus developer who treats your Postgres as the source of truth, not a hidden detail

Directus is the headless CMS that does not own your data model — it sits on top of an existing Postgres (or MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL) database and exposes it through a clean admin UI, REST endpoints, and GraphQL. The pitch is data sovereignty: your schema lives in your database, not locked inside a CMS that owns the export. The trade-off is operational — you are responsible for the database, the hosting, the upgrade cadence, and the auth layer.

• Teams with an existing relational database who want a CMS layer added without re-modelling everything in a Sanity / Contentful schema
• Multi-tenant SaaS products where the CMS data sits alongside operational tables in the same Postgres
• Compliance-heavy industries (healthcare, finance) where data sovereignty matters and you need self-hosted Postgres + Directus
• Build teams who prefer SQL migrations over CMS schema migrations — the data model is just a Postgres schema

Directus is not a content-team-friendly CMS out of the box

The admin UI is good but the field-level permissions, content workflow, and editorial preview model are less polished than Contentful or Sanity. For pure-marketing-team content, you will spend engineering time on the editorial UX.

Self-hosting is the default, and that is the operational tail

Directus Cloud exists but the canonical Directus deploy is self-hosted Docker + Postgres + a managed-blob-storage of your choice. That is more operational work than a Contentful/Sanity plug-and-play.

The Directus extensions ecosystem is smaller than WordPress / Strapi

Custom interfaces, hooks, and operations are powerful but you may end up writing more glue code than you would on a more mature platform. Plan budget accordingly.

One senior on every engagement

I am the senior on the call, the senior on the architecture review, and the senior who answers when something breaks at 11pm. The build is delivered with senior engineers from Seahawk Media under my direction; the kickoff and the handover are with me directly.

Real Directus experience, not "we read the docs once"

The Directus space is full of agencies that bolted the platform onto a generic offer. The questions a senior Directus developer answers — content modelling, schema migration, performance, observability, multi-environment workflows — are the questions you actually need answered, and that is where the engagement earns its fee.

Modern stack pairing

Most Directus engagements pair the platform with Next.js, Astro, or a modern frontend stack. I have shipped both sides of that pairing across 50+ projects. The integration patterns, the deployment topology, the SEO transport on migrations — all of it has been done before, and you get the lessons rather than paying for them in your project.

I take on a small number of Directus engagements at any given time. Two shapes that fit best:

Project — 4 to 12 weeks, fixed-price. Clear scope (a content migration, a Studio customisation, a performance audit, a build from scratch). Discovery week first, then a fixed-price quote. Most projects land in the 12,000-60,000 USD range.

Retainer — 8 hours per week, monthly. Ongoing Directus engineering support after launch. Schema evolution, new feature work, integration help with adjacent stacks. Typical retainer 6,400-12,800 USD/month depending on complexity.

Booking sequence: 30-minute call, you describe the brief, I tell you which shape fits and the price range. No sales deck, no qualification screen. If I am not the right person, I will tell you on the call.

• Directus in the headless CMS directory Where Directus fits in the broader headless CMS landscape — feature comparison, pricing, license.
• AI SEO + GEO programme Directus content can be optimised for AI search like any other CMS — the structure-and-schema approach applies.

Book a 30-minute call. By the end of it you will know whether Directus is the right pick for your brief, what the realistic scope is, and a price range that fits your budget. If Directus is not the right answer, I will tell you and recommend the alternative.