The Masterpiece Nobody Had Seen.

One of our go-to-market advisors put it to me bluntly this week. "Blutui is like the Mona Lisa sitting in a storage closet at the Louvre. It's extraordinary, but agencies don't know it's there."

It stung a little, because it's true. The real Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre's Salle des États, behind glass, facing a daily crowd. Imagine her instead wrapped in packing blankets in a basement, catalogued, insured, admired by a handful of curators and conservators, and walked past by millions who never knew.

That has been Blutui for most of its life. As of this month, the crate is open, the lighting is set and the doors are unlocked. Our pricing is public, and the Agency Web Ecosystem is finally on exhibition.

Years in the conservation studio

Leonardo never quite finished the Mona Lisa. He carried it with him for years, adding glaze upon glaze, refining a smile most people would have called done long before.

Blutui has a similar story. It was started in late 2016 inside a working independent agency, by people who had spent decades watching agencies lose time, margin and creative energy to tech that was never built around them. Version 1.0 arrived in 2022. Every layer since has been added by agency people, with technologists working alongside as equals.

Like any great museum, we also kept far more in the vaults than on the walls:

• createControl, so front-end teams keep their code, frameworks and craft while Blutui handles infrastructure and repetitive production

• Canopy 2.0 and Blocks, so clients can edit content without uncontrolled technical access

• Cassettes, so campaign sites and multiple front ends run from one source of production data

• Managed hosting with four-nines-plus availability, plus white labelling, SSO, MCP and AI Components

The work was real. A handful of agencies saw it up close. Subvert built the BIMA website on Blutui in around a third of the planned time. John Smith Agency and Kiltr built theirs too. But a private viewing is not an exhibition.

Why the doors stayed shut

As I was quoted in LBB in a recent piece on pricing, we got the commercial model wrong. That is the honest reason the masterpiece stayed in storage. LBB has since covered the fix too, in its story on our 80% price cut.

A painting can't be exhibited without a wall label and an admission price people can live with. Ours charged agencies more the more they grew, at around US$199 a seat. For an independent studio weighing up a new way of working, that was a ticket price at the door that turned people away before they ever reached the gallery.

There's a lesson in the Mona Lisa's own history. Before 1911 she was a respected painting, not a global icon. Then she was stolen, and crowds queued at the Louvre to stare at the four empty hooks on the wall. Fame came from people noticing. Being brilliant was never enough on its own.

We didn't want a heist to get noticed. We wanted to remove the reasons agencies weren't walking in.

Opening night: what's on the walls

The new pricing is the wall label, and it's printed in full on Blutui.com/pricing for anyone to read. No velvet rope, no "price on application".

The principle behind the hang is simple. Blutui should earn its keep, more when your agency succeeds, not by taxing you for growing.

The permanent collection keeps expanding too. Canopy 2.0 and Blocks are now in the main galleries. Remote MCP, connecting Blutui to Claude, opens in mid-November.

Your invitation to the private view

No one understands a masterpiece from a postcard. You have to stand in front of it.

So consider this your opening-night invitation. Through the rest of Blutober, agencies can trial Blutui free. Bring your designers, your front-end developers and your producers. Walk the galleries and judge the work for yourselves.

If you'd rather have a guided tour, book a Fly-Through and we'll show you how agencies take a prototype from Figma to live in minutes.

The crate is open. The lights are on. Come and see what's been hanging in the storeroom all this time.

Graeme Blake, Founder & CEO, Blutui