The free tier is not the pricing
Every major headless CMS has a free tier. Contentful has one. Sanity has one. Strapi is open source. The free tier is what gets you in the door. What you pay for after that — and what you have to build yourself — is the real pricing question.
This post is about reading headless CMS pricing honestly: what the platform cost covers, what it doesn't, and what the total cost of a working production website looks like when you add up the full stack.
The platform cost is not the total cost
A headless CMS is one component of a working website. The others — hosting, image optimization, form handling, deployment infrastructure — cost money and time regardless of how the CMS is priced.
For pure headless CMSs (Contentful, Sanity, Hygraph, Storyblok, and most others), the CMS handles content storage and management. Everything else is your responsibility:
Hosting and deployment: Vercel Pro starts at $20/month per team member. Netlify Pro is $19/month. Cloudflare Pages is free for most use cases but has limits. AWS S3 + CloudFront adds configuration complexity and variable costs. For a client site, someone pays for this — either the agency absorbs it, the client pays a separate hosting invoice, or it gets bundled into a maintenance retainer.
Image optimization: Cloudinary's free tier allows 25GB storage and 25GB monthly bandwidth — enough for a small site. Their paid plans start at $89/month. Imgix starts at $10/month but bills by bandwidth. Next.js's built-in image optimization works on Vercel; running it on other platforms requires configuration. For a headless CMS without built-in transforms, image optimization has a cost.
Form handling: A contact form on a static site needs a backend. Formspree free allows 50 submissions per month (usually not enough for a real business). Their paid plans start at $10/month. Netlify Forms has limits on the free tier. Building a serverless function adds maintenance overhead. Every client site with a contact form needs a solution — and most solutions have a cost.
CDN cache invalidation: When you publish content, the CDN needs to know. Wiring up webhooks from the CMS to trigger rebuilds on Vercel or Netlify is straightforward but takes time to set up and maintain across a portfolio of sites.
Build minutes: Vercel and Netlify both have monthly build minute limits on free and paid plans. For sites with regular content updates that trigger full rebuilds, this adds up.
What "free" tiers actually limit
Free tiers are real — they let you build and evaluate without cost. Understanding what they limit helps you project when you'll outgrow them.
Contentful free: 5 users, 25,000 records, 2 environments, 48 content types. No locale support. Functional for a small project; most client sites hit the record or environment limits within a year of active use.
Sanity free: Unlimited users (on free), 20GB storage, 10GB bandwidth per month. Three datasets. Real-time collaboration included. Generous for evaluation; bandwidth limits become relevant for image-heavy sites.
SleekCMS free: Full platform features, 2 sites. Includes static site hosting, image optimization, and form handling. The limit is the number of sites, not features. Both sites on the free plan get the same capabilities as paid sites.
The per-seat pricing trap
Many headless CMSs charge per user seat on paid plans. This creates a specific problem for agencies: giving clients CMS access costs money.
Contentful's Team plan charges by seat. If you manage 10 client sites and give each client two editor logins, that's 20 seats plus your agency team — the seat cost alone is substantial.
Sanity charges per project and has a growth plan with seat-based pricing above the free tier.
SleekCMS includes unlimited collaborators on all plans. An agency with 30 client sites can give every client Editor access without per-seat cost implications. The pricing model is per-site, not per-user.
The total cost of ownership comparison
Let's build a realistic comparison for an agency managing 10 client sites, each with standard marketing site requirements (static hosting, image optimization, contact form, 3 collaborators per site).
Pure headless CMS stack (e.g., Contentful + Vercel + Cloudinary + Formspree):
| Component | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Contentful Team (30 seats) | ~$300+ |
| Vercel Pro (10 sites) | ~$200 |
| Cloudinary (image optimization) | ~$89 |
| Formspree (10 contact forms) | ~$100 |
| Total | ~$689/month |
This doesn't include developer time to wire up the integrations, manage build hooks, or handle the inevitable failures across the stack.
SleekCMS (10 sites, Agency plan):
| Component | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| SleekCMS Agency plan | ~$99 |
| Additional sites (if needed) | Per-site add-on |
| Hosting, images, forms | Included |
| Total | ~$99/month |
The platform cost difference is significant. The time cost difference — not having to maintain integrations between four separate services — is harder to quantify but real.
When the pure headless stack is worth the cost
This comparison is not an argument that pure headless is always the wrong choice. For the right project, the additional cost is justified.
Large enterprise teams may already have Contentful contracts negotiated at volume pricing with enterprise support, SLAs, and compliance certifications. The true cost of switching is higher than the sticker price suggests.
Complex custom frontends — React or Next.js applications where the frontend is the product, with sophisticated client-side interactivity — need the frontend flexibility that a pure headless CMS enables. The infrastructure cost is the price of that flexibility.
Teams with existing infrastructure — if Vercel, Cloudinary, and the rest are already paid for and maintained for other reasons, adding another project to them has near-zero marginal cost.
Specific compliance requirements — some enterprise buyers need specific certifications (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR data residency) that not every platform offers at every tier.
Reading pricing honestly
A few questions worth asking when evaluating any headless CMS:
- What isn't included? Make a list of everything a production site needs beyond the CMS itself. Price each item.
- What happens when I add my clients? Calculate the seat cost at the real number of users you'll have.
- What does it cost to scale to my target portfolio size? Pricing that looks good for one site can look very different at 20 sites.
- What are the bandwidth and storage limits? Free and entry tiers often have limits that sound generous until you're six months into a real project.
- What does a rebuild cost? If your CMS triggers a rebuild on every content save, and rebuilds cost build minutes, price that at your expected publish frequency.
The free tier gets you in the door. The total cost of a working production site is what you're actually committing to.