Thanks for taking the time @comis, this is a valid question.
My assumptions are the following:
1. Dev cost is not only the time spent by the Dev team but, planning, project management, back and forth between tech and the different stakeholders. On top of that, you can add deployment cost, QA, etc...
2. Miss-opportunity cost, I feel like there is a trade-off between developing core features and supporting features (marketing, sales static pages) and that on a competitive market, most of the time, supporting features are not being prioritized due to a lack of tech resource.
3. Finally, small initiatives have a huge overhead for marketing and sales teams, if adding a drop-down to a form requires to create a ticket, ask the product team to spec it, design it, and add it to a Sprint,... Then, the drop-down will probably seat there until it becomes a critical issue or until it can be bundled with other small tickets. Which might never happen...
This is basically to avoid all of this that I'm looking for a CMS to embed in our existing site.
Contentful, from my understanding, is a good headless CMS, but does not allow a product team or a marketing team to manage the design/layout of new pages. Basically I would still need an engineer to implement the structure of the page, create the style, etc...
Regarding Expo specifically:
>>> I have to write bash scripts to create js files. This hurts my brain.
There is an issue on Expo's Github about env management https://github.com/expo/expo/issues/83
Now on a more general use case, I guess there are two types of applications:
- Client-side (like Expo): I would not store any "secret" for security purposes, just configuration. You seem to use JS for your client-side so use dotenv packages (https://www.npmjs.com/package/dotenv, https://www.npmjs.com/package/dotenv-webpack, etc...)
- Server-side: Depending on your environment, CI, hosting you might have a different solution, sadly not any one-fits-all solution to my knowledge. Heroku provides a pretty straight forward solution, on my production environment I use a configuration management, Chef's Data Bag but you could as well use a service discovery like Consul, Zookeeper, Etcd, etc...
I did not know about this directory. I have looked at Strapi in the past, this is indeed a great tool, but I'm looking for a tool that does not need a tech team to build the front end piece (the head) of the CMS.
Ideally, I'm looking for some kind of tool or SaaS to build content and a custom UI at the same time (WebFlow like but embedded in my site).
This would lead to a complete chaos, until we update our security standards.