A lot of people are doing these things already! The Forestry.io blog has a number of articles covering some of these topics: * eCommerce – https://forestry.io

A lot of people are doing these things already! The Forestry.io blog has a number of articles covering some of these topics: * eCommerce – https://forestry.io/blog/snipcart-brings-ecommerce-static-site/ https://forestry.io/blog/snipcart-brings-ecommerce-static-si... * Search – https://forestry.io/blog/search-with-algolia-in-hugo/ https://forestry.io/blog/search-with-algolia-in-hugo/ * Forms – https://forestry.io/blog/5-ways-to-handle-forms-on-your-static-site/ https://forestry.io/blog/5-ways-to-handle-forms-on-your-stat... * Advanced Image Handling: https://forestry.io/blog/master-image-delivery-with-cloudinary/ https://forestry.io/blog/master-image-delivery-with-cloudina... * Building APIs – https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with-hugo/ https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with-hugo/ Regarding user profiles, the Forestry website itself is built with Hugo and has a Rails app to handle profiles. EDIT I know you don't want to rely on third party services, but if it's possible to handle this with third party services then surely open source alternatives could be built.