A platform for writers who care about ownership.

Inkwell is a free, open-source, self-hosted blogging platform built on ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core, targeting .NET 8 and above. It ships as a single binary — no Node.js, no PHP, no plugin marketplace. You clone the repository, configure a database connection and a tenant list, publish, and write.

The platform is multi-tenant by default. One Inkwell install can serve many independent publications, each with its own domain, theme, author roster, and isolated database schema, without a second deploy or a per-tenant fee.

Inkwell separates structure from surface through a Layouts and Presets theming system. Four editorial Layouts — The Magazine, The Journal, The Notebook, and The Studio — pair with four color Presets to produce sixteen distinct looks, all swappable without a rebuild or a migration.

The platform is MIT-licensed. The source code on GitHub is the entire product. There are no paid tiers, no telemetry, and no vendor lock-in.

Inkwell is designed, built, and maintained by Maruti Software Solutions — a software engineering studio based in India and the United Kingdom, specialising in .NET web platforms and open-source tooling.

The studio works across the full stack: architecture, back-end engineering, database design, front-end development, and production operations. Inkwell is the studio’s flagship open-source project and the platform it uses for its own publications.

Alongside the free platform, Maruti Software Solutions offers optional paid services — turnkey installation, ongoing support retainers, custom feature development, and bespoke Studio themes — for teams that want hands-on help deploying or extending Inkwell.

Most blogging platforms ask you to rent a piece of the internet. Inkwell asks you to own it. The platform is deliberately small — it ships the things you actually need to publish and almost nothing else.

No plugin marketplace means no surface area for supply-chain compromises, no upgrade-time dependency hell, and no cognitive overhead deciding which of twelve SEO plugins to install. The things Inkwell does — clean server-rendered HTML, fast cold starts, multi-tenancy, typography, and a keyboard-first editor — it does well. The things it doesn’t do, it leaves to you.

We build in public on GitHub because we believe the source code should be auditable, forkable, and improvable by the people who use it. Every pull request is read. Decisions are explained in issues and discussions, not hidden in a product changelog three steps behind a paywall.

“The blog, in its original form, was a paginated, dated, indexed object — a thing you could subscribe to and, more importantly, a thing you could leave alone.”