From Figma to live previews: reMarkable’s composable rebuild
reMarkable, maker of the paper tablet, credits much of its early growth to its original website. But to keep scaling, the team knew the underlying stack needed an upgrade. Their answer: a composable architecture built on Sanity, Next.js, and Vercel—one that improves the developer experience while giving content teams more autonomy.
A faster, more flexible frontend
The move came after an incremental migration from Gatsby. The team first reworked their site structure, consolidating pages and lifting data fetching to the page level. They then ran the main workload—rewriting queries—in a separate branch before swapping in the new framework and onboarding the rest of the developers. The approach let them change stacks in place, adjusting hosting and a few external parameters without long-lived branches or new repositories.
The results were immediate. Development builds that previously had slow startup times—sometimes requiring multiple attempts—became dramatically quicker after switching to Vercel. Production builds improved as well, dropping from 5m 55s to 39s, a total decrease of 87%. Full-stack developer John described the change as transformative for the team’s day-to-day work.
Previews that bring designs to life
The design team previously relied on static Figma mockups to present new site designs for stakeholder review. While Figma remains in use, Vercel Preview Deployments now offer a more complete picture. Combined with instant content updates from Sanity, the previews showcase functionality rather than just visuals, accelerating review cycles and generating richer stakeholder feedback.
“Preview comments have been a great tool for us to collaborate. It’s been an easy way for us to push changes. We can tell stakeholders: Just log in and comment straight on the solution.”
Kristi Faye-Lund, Full Stack Developer at reMarkable
Editorial independence
Previously, editorial staff needed developer and designer support for even modest website changes. That bottleneck is gone. With Sanity integrated into the stack, content creators can build custom landing pages on their own. As Faye-Lund puts it, the goal was to remove dependencies: “We wanted our content people to actually be able to work on content—not wait for a developer.” The result is faster movement across the organization with less accumulated tech debt.
Looking ahead, reMarkable plans to keep future-proofing its content structure. With an editorial team that no longer depends on engineering for routine updates and a frontend stack that builds in seconds, the company is positioned to keep iterating on its digital experience without the overhead of its previous architecture.
