This was literally exactly what I was about to say. I tried Perch out a few months ago and I feel like this is similar... although, much more refined. I have huge respect for the people behind Perch, so I'm definitely keeping tabs there.
Honestly, I'm excited for Vapid. I've always loved implementing CMS systems. WordPress is great, with undoubtably the largest community of plugins and templates, and like the new Gutenberg editor... but I'm also starting to fall in love with the JAMstack model (i.e. Netlify, Headless CMS). Simply pushing commits to Github and sitting back. Netlify Forms is nice and easy, but their CMS sucks IMHO. Which is why I'm excited for something like Vapid. It fills that void I'm feeling.
I can picture myself spinning out all these nice custom CMS websites for clients and maybe building some custom browser plugins to make it so easy for clients (like how Tipe.io does). That feels like the future / next level.
Was going to come here to say https://grabaperch.com is similar and fantastic - Drew Mclellan and Rachel Andrew are so incredibly helpful in the forums and it's so easy to deploy it's my go-to for knocking out a site quickly for a friend.
I'm a big fan of Processwire (open source), and I also love that you need to define fields explicitly. Doesn't turn into a circus of what's defined where, when it gets a little bit complicated? I never tried this model so I'm really asking.
I don't know about Vapid, but with perch it automatically does some categorization for you. Obviously each page on your site has it's own page in the CMS for setting variables. You can also subgroup pages into sections, still just using simple templating functions. And then there is also a dedicated page for managing your various images/resources.
The main use case I think is for people who build landing pages for other people.
A static site generator is good if you're building a landing page for yourself, but if you're building a website for the butcher shop down the road, they're not gonna want to edit individual markdown files. So you throw in some Perch (or Vapid) variables and it does the rest for you. Then you can just give the shop owner a login and they can edit the site as they see fit.
The appeal is to have the ease of a static site generator (you don't have to develop your HTML with any sort of "CMS" in mind) while actually having that CMS functionality.
I'm excited about multiple products in this space, because it means I can probably switch between them in a matter of minutes/hours, realistically.
Honestly, I'm excited for Vapid. I've always loved implementing CMS systems. WordPress is great, with undoubtably the largest community of plugins and templates, and like the new Gutenberg editor... but I'm also starting to fall in love with the JAMstack model (i.e. Netlify, Headless CMS). Simply pushing commits to Github and sitting back. Netlify Forms is nice and easy, but their CMS sucks IMHO. Which is why I'm excited for something like Vapid. It fills that void I'm feeling.
I can picture myself spinning out all these nice custom CMS websites for clients and maybe building some custom browser plugins to make it so easy for clients (like how Tipe.io does). That feels like the future / next level.