Around the month of April 2024, I started freelancing as a frontend dev at IndiaHikes.

The agency that built the initial version used Prismic as the CMS and built on Next.js. So, I think the IndiaHikes team was simply stuck with this decision.

As soon as I onboarded my initial task was to improve the performance of the website, improve and fix any inconsistencies around SEO and accessibility along with day to day items. I spent sometime around the setup of Prismic and noticed some staggering issues either with the implementation or with the way Prismic works itself.

1. No advanced analytics of API usage, you just get an amount of bandwidth consumed and number of API calls made.

This to me seems like one of the biggest drawbacks. The pricing is directly proportional to the API calls and bandwidth consumed. But, there is no way to know which API call is consuming the most bandwidth or which API call is being made the most.

2. No multiple environments support by default

This is the most basic requirement. Many platforms give this support in their most basic plan as well. On Prismic, you have to be on "Plantinum" plan and not just that, this is still a paid feature only when you bill yearly.

Such a non-sense. At least one non-prod environment is necessary to ensure smooth workflows. They can anyways still bill on the bandwidth and API calls made in these environments too.

3. The "Slices" feature - unable to pull Slices that you create on Prismic to local dev

Their Slices feature is a mostly like a component that you can reuse across multiple pages etc. This has a local development facility. You can develop and push them to remote (Prismic) etc. But there is now way to pull Slices that you create on Prismic directly. This is a huge drawback according to me. Either you should'nt let people create Slices on Prismic or you should let them pull the Slices that they create on Prismic.

The biggest issue in this case is the Vendor lock, there is no easy way to get out of platforms like these.