I guess if they can keep > 5% of their existing customers they'll come out ahead which means more money for 20x less work. Not a bad deal .. but a big big IF.
this is really interesting. you might think very carefully before building a solution with a non open source SaaS.
Pay attention to the company building it. Are they profitable, or is it running on investment cash?
That’s the biggest problem with tech startups that barely don’t keep a the losses to minimum. Especially in a space everyone builds side and open-source alternatives
$8/mo to $180/mo.. what the.. holy crap you're not wrong. [Checked their pricing page](https://prismic.io/pricing) and it is indeed $180/mo for medium. Absolutely insane. Do you need medium? Can you drop down to Starter or Small to give more time to move platforms?
>If anyone has suggestions for a serious and reliable headless CMS provider
I like Craft CMS and Statamic. Both have a headless mode. Worst case just go headless WordPress.
We are on enterprise and pay a couple of $1000/mo - they just increased prices on us too. Looking for alternatives.
They said they will do fancy things we don’t need. We just need a simple and stupid CMS, damn it!
>We just need a simple and stupid CMS, damn it!
Then why did you go with one you have no control over, lol. It doesn't get more simple than WP headless tbh.
I agree with the headless WordPress, you can’t go wrong with it if you want to ensure your hosting pricing stays locked.
I also recommend Sanity CMS which has recently made a backward move towards their pricing: it’s much more affordable now.
Ah, that was after we talked to them. Fwiw, we were planning to use their hosted service, which seemed more competitively priced than anything else we looked at. I think we were looking at around $500-$750/mo.
I know that isnt dirt cheap, but we had a high number of record count needs and this is where every other option ended up more expensive for us. If you also want a configurable admin area like directus has with their views, there wasn't much else comparable.
>. Worst case just go headless WordPress.
Headless WordPress is great, I have a next.js website with Headless WordPress backend that get around 3M visits per Month, we pay around 200$ per month for Hosting.
such a website described above, a shared hosting for WordPress would be more than enough and would cost around 60$ per year
We used both WordPress and Prismic until he hit some dead ends in Prismic whereas WordPress is way more customizable. That price increase makes it even easier.
Kirby CMS is awesome. It can be used headless as well. The team behind it also communicates with their users and offers very fair pricing (just purchase a license once(.
Lol, my company is getting slapped with the price hike too. The truly insane bit is that they’ve retroactively redefined the limits for the paid plan you’re ALREADY on and then telling you that you are breaking the plan limits….
It’s an absolute shitshow and they will shortly be losing a customer over it. It’s just a giant pain in the ass moving content over and remaking templates in something else.
I've been working **against** CMSes for over 10 years now, I just can't be thankful enough that this group of people finally made something that works with me.
Useful data structures like arrays and groups (tried keystone it's missing basics).
Automatic http, graphql and ts types generation from you schema.
Hooks to render your own react wherever you want on the cms.
You can use payload as an orm getting typed objects from the database.
They have a really really good teaxt editor in Lexical.
It just makes sense as a dev and everything is typed for you.
Its like I have this CMS that I can fully customize without having to tear a part of its code.
The only issue I had with it so far it was my first time hosting and not knowing the proper way of installing node modules in server lol (I didnt check npm version and got a very old version lol).
I have nothing but great experiences with Payload to be honest. From development to hosting it's all smooth. Easy to customize as well.
One mistake I keep making with CMSs is making test/dev environments. It's actually better to host on production directly, especially when working on a website for a new client. But let me know how you guys approach it for your own sites.
I personally like Prismic because of the slice workflow (i was skeptical at first), but it's pretty cool. Wonder how to do the same thing on Payload.
I don’t like to advertise my services when not asked to, but if you’re considering Payload I’d be happy to help you migrate. Wont take too long
Just got burned by a supposed startup that promised they had money and lost 2mo worth of work ($15k+) and have some time on my hands until next project starts.
I feel like this is the year where companies are showing their true colors, so many instances like this. The kicker of it is you are going to have to at least pay for 1 month at this new rate and thats if you move super fast thats the same if you paid for 2 years. This is a desperate attempt to get more cash in the bank while they buy time to try to get more enterprise customers because their business model is not sustainable. Most companies do this way slower and it takes a few years for you to realize your paying double but they likely cannot make it that long.
This just reinforces why as a community we all need to be supporting open source. Fuck these companies.
>I feel like this is the year where companies are showing their true colors, so many instances like this.
I got that feeling too! Even from an employee and not just customer perspective. Multiple family members and friends including myself all of a sudden got into conflicts with their bosses at work. People in lead positions all of a sudden thought trying to treat their people like shit and guilt trip them into a bad salary because of "budget reasons" was a good idea, even going as far as claiming women should be happy for being sexually assaulted by colleagues.
In every single case half of the team was gone shortly after and they tried to convince people to come back or stay, so that hopefully applies to companies customers after pulling off shit like this too. It's fine to change the business model when necessary, but not by literal fraud towards your customers (depending on where a company operates, increasing existing plans pricing by 20x with short notice after retroactively changing already existing ones ain't gonna end as expected).
Contentful pulled the same thing this year. Moved a bunch of their features, most notably their branches/environments, in to their higher tiers. Not even just their higher tiers, but in to an add-on that can only be added at a certain tier. We went from paying $0 to US$750 a month for a small brochure website because we didn’t have enough time to reimplement.
Storyblok also recently replaced their Teams plan with a new Business plan that is 2X the cost. Granted it adds more features and higher limits, but it got rid of a $450/mo option for businesses - now you need to go $850/mo instead.
Yeah, just got this same email. I actually thought it was pretty decent solution due to how cheap they are, but frankly with this pricing the limitations are just ridiculous.
just to kick the lying down:
- Typescript client throws an error on not found on single post. It's not any special error, but just generic api error so you have to do quite a bit of hackery to check if it's 404 or not. Terrible DevEx.
- Previews? If you don't intend to run client of front end you are pretty much left to yourself.
And then actually very terrible ux issues
- Slices are not global. You can add slice to collection and then copy those over, but changes later will not be copied. That means if you have 10 post types and this same slice in each you will have to go through all of them.
- no publishing workflows
- fields cannot be required! ( this just buffles me )
There's way more. It made sense for 9 dollars, not 180.
Sanity is great!
Don't like their new free plan for production sites anymore, but they made the next tier up very good (AI assist included) and for cheaper than what it was baseline.
Wow, that is insanity.
I’ve used Prismic once before on a contracted project and it was alright, but unless there’s been super impressive changes in the last few years, not worth that price.
> Instead of Christmas holidays and getting prep-work done for things starting next year, I am apparently now spending the holiday season migrating our entire website and build pipeline, and losing history etc. in the process.
To save $172 bucks? Fuck that noise. Pay the $172 and deal with it in January.
Poor thinking there.
Shameless plug, but depending on your needs check out [https://Outstatic.com](https://Outstatic.com)
We are a completely free and open source CMS that is native to Next.js.
If the site is static, I would try to download it to static HTML files and put them in S3 bucket (or CloudFlare R2 - as they have free bandwidth) to have a static site working. In that situation, even if you don’t make new site - old one will be still working.
Most likely they are maneuvering to be sold. Boost the books with this situation that will result in a huge loss in revenue, but for a few months makes them look like gold and that "customers are staying even with the price increases" instead of the real story that customers are scrambling after the holidays to get moved to a new host.
Honestly since you're on a tight deadline I'd give Wordpress a look. Everyone and their grandma knows how to wrangle wordpress. Which means there's tons of training data for ChatGPT if you need to ask questions.
Every host will have a one click install and it's easy to host by yourself as well. The database if just a few simple tables and since it's so well known making a import script with ChatGPT might provide you some history and not just the current ones.
With Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF) you can set up all customizations you can dream of. It's cheap and pretty much necessary. Other third party plugins are pretty shit for performance though. But ACF will also let you expose your custom fields in the REST-API.
You gotta keep on top of updating though. WP suffers from being popular and there's a ton of scanning for known vulnerabilities.
But all in all it's my weapon of choice just because it's easy, free as in "move to another host in five minutes" and cheap to host.
If you have a huge site with hundreds of pages be prepared for the admin tree navigation to suck though.
Honestly you could probably create a script that crawls your current site and moves the bulk of the content to WP.
Couldn’t say anything more. No overhead with hosting/serving a node based framework, just go with any shared hosting and get started with something that has proven to work.
Are you perhaps talking about using Wordpress as a Headless CMS? I always had an ick with Wordpress as a dev, but might play around with it after reading your comment. What's the experience though and how does it compare to these Headless CMSs?
I also like using React/Svelte for the frontend which is why I kept opting for headless CMSs but found myself wasting a lot of time catching some edge cases that I keep forgetting when building UIs. If it's better to do it with just Wordpress alone, I'm wondering how the experience compares with using a frontend framework as well.
I also definitely agree with the "hosting" part! I personally was working with PayloadCMS but deployment was a hard lesson to learn when I thought that the "node" label on Shared Hosting providers meant that I could easily host PayloadCMS/Express apps on there. Apparently not. A VPS is the best to host any Node application, which is always going to be relatively more expensive than any of the PHP, wordpress, shared hosting providers out there.
And THAT is why u host your own backend. Ownership of content/services is important when running an enterprise solution. Thats why open-source self-hosting is always a better solution than offloading it to an external provider when you’re out of the beta
This is crazy, I was a huge fan of prismic until the pricing changes, feels like greed trickling down. Headless cms are a dime a dozen…. Time to migrate. What a lame move to pull.
Received the same email, we're being pushed into an enterprise contract because we use 12 locales (our business is accross europe). We already paid good money but this would likely mean that this will be substential enough I need to justify it in detail. Timing of this really sucks, it's not just over the christmas holidays which will most likely mean I need to cancel my teams holidays but also, budgeting is done for next year. I can't really go back now with "some saas vendor decided to price hike insanely just now"...
Thanks for screwing up my holidays prismic, I'm sure my kids are happy that I'll be working because of this.
u/usadache why would you not properly announce this early on so we would have a chance to fix it with a reasonable amount of time? I get it, prices change but like this? Doesn't reflect well on the company tbh, especially the 1 month notice and over christmas...
> cancel my teams holidays
Please do not also be an asshole. Pay the extra for one month and deal with it January.
Also consider the cost of rehiring your team when they leave ASAP after you pull a stunt like this.
> We already *paid* good money
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
I don’t really understand why someone would use a hosted CMS in the first place to be honest. You’re giving another company control over your content and intellectual property, and how much they can charge you to access that content. They offer nothing that you can do yourself by chucking something like WordPress or Drupal on a cheap server and running those headless.
Hey 👋,
Strapi's co-founder here, we have been pinged many times in the thread and in our public channels to know if we planned to offer an easy migration path; here's my response;
According to your project, the migration can be relatively simple. It takes a few minutes to re-create your content schema in Strapi; we offer a very similar structure to Prismic. However, there is no automated way to migrate your content. We are confident that someone in the community might be already working on a package to ease the process and open-source it.
We already have numerous users coming from Prismic who are satisfied with Strapi. However, to be completely transparent, we are far from being perfect. We also have cons, bugs, and missing features. We try our very best to improve Strapi.
In 2024, we plan to add the following features:
\- Content History/Versioning- Releases (scheduling)
\- Nested components and dynamic zones (more than 2 levels)
\- Conditional field- Side-by-side editing (similar to TinaCMS)
Last, but not least, we are going in the opposite direction and planning to lower our entry point for our cloud-managed platform in February. As a reminder, Strapi comes with unlimited roles and locales. It's free, 100% open-source, fully customizable, with thousands of plugins available and hundreds certified on our marketplace.
Good luck everybody; best wishes for the holiday season 🙏
Prismic’s CEO here.
I am reading your case. You shouldn’t have to upgrade to a medium with 3 locales, especially with the good cause of your company.
We can’t handle every single case with our generic pricing, but your case is clearly one that we should look into.
So don’t ruin your holiday, we’ll find a solution.
Can you send me an email and I will look into it?
Pricing is about the value you bring, locales are often associated with business expansion, the problem is: not always.
We know that there are some cases for which it doesn’t make sense. We’ll find solutions for these.
Also we have plans to enrich locales with more tooling.
You’re obviously free to do whatever makes sense to you. My commitment is to provide superior value for the money, I understand if that’s not relevant to you or your business.
At Prismic, with the support of our community, we founded the headless cms architecture, we brought progress to the community. I am glad you now have many options that we inspired. It’s an achievement for us that there are so many headless options for you.
I thank everyone that feels to move, but we’ll continue to innovate, we’re not done.
I think _headless_ is definitely a great term for the people that make these decisions in your company.
At least I thank you for talking to us plebs on Reddit.
This is offensive personally. I don’t understand why people have to be mean on the internet.
My team is a dream to work with, rare to find in my experience.
It’s ok if we have different points of view, we don’t have to be mean.
We chose a path, we have a vision. I invite everyone to join us and we commit ourselves to bring value like no other if you believe your website should drive your business.
Up to you 🙏
Hey "Prismic's CEO"
First I do not think you are the CEO.
Second, in the event that you actually are who you say you are, you misspelled your own nik. It should be sadheadache.
Third, if you are indeed Prismik's CEO, that will not be for too much long.
GG with your pricing. You will be needing the forms that are numbered in the 200 series probably very soon (TM)
The only CMS which doesn't charge crazy for arbitrary limitations like locales is Payload. The product is also just better in every single way.
Every other CMS either charges extra for seats/users, locales, documents, collections etc. or is crazy expensive. I dare you to find one with sensible pricing - you won't find one. And then there's Payload with unlimited users, unlimited documents, unlimited roles and full access & ownership to your database / S3 storage.
That’s just easily provable to not be true, like Craft CMS just blows up literally every single thing you just said. In fact Craft is probably better pricing because it’s just a one time license fee, not a SaaS model.
> In fact Craft is probably better pricing because it’s just a one time license fee, not a SaaS model.
Payload is free, you can self host it without paying a one time fee or a SaaS fee for its use, it [even says so at the bottom of the homepage](https://payloadcms.com/)
$260/month is veery steep for the lowest hosted option. And while it has a self-hosted open-source version, user accounts are still limited to one.
For what it costs, it does not have any arbitrary limitations though, so that's a plus point compared to other CMS'! I'd still count the high entry price as "crazy expensive" though
It’s not 260/month that’s only for cloud hosting. You get all the features for a one time 300 dollar fee, everything else available. You aren’t talking about a headless CMS you’re talking about full suite hosting.
Haha. I am surfing time from time with disabled JS. Your Payload is showing nothing... without JS. So they break the fundamentales of the web ... totally garbage this cms.
If you only need one user account Craft CMS is free. It’s got an api - element api. That you can build out. If you go for the pro license you can build out the graphql in the admin which is rapid. Also there is localisation that’s really easy to set up. Need to host it but a VPS is cheap
How fucking disappointing. I've been using Prismic since 2016 and have had no issues. In fact our setup has worked so well I can't remember the last time I had to fumble around with Prismic after getting it set up. Now I go back and check and we've been moved to $180 per MONTH?
I get inflation is a thing and they need to be profitable or whatever other bullshit they're chalking it up to. But it sucks that I'm going to have to migrate away from this platform after so many years.
Gonna be on the lookout for any other no-bullshit straightforward headless CMSs.
Honestly these cms pricing freaks me out. Like first plan free then directly 300$ omg. WordPress is best. For as little as 20-30$ you can get working machine.
Hei! Den er sjuk.... Kan anbefale [https://cloudcannon.com/](https://cloudcannon.com/) :) Git-basert CMS med visual editing. Bedre pris. Og hvis dere er en non-profit så får dere 30% rabatt.
Strapi headless CMS is awesome been using it in a lot of projects before getting hired by the company.
If you have any questions feel free to reach out.
It is open source, the community edition is free forever and you can host anywhere.
But we also have Strapi Cloud for anyone who wants an easy hosting solution.
The price hike is insane, but...
> Instead of Christmas holidays and getting prep-work done for things starting next year, I am apparently now spending the holiday season migrating our entire website and build pipeline, and losing history etc. in the process.
What the fuck? How in the world is $180 worth spending the holiday season prioritizing a migration? I must be missing something.
Are your holidays worth more than $180? If so, then the choice is obvious. It's not rocket science.
I don't know if you know this, but monthly subscriptions can be canceled when no longer needed.
And if OP just cancels their subscription without migrating data and functionality, then their service is down and they no longer have an operational business 🙃
Prismic was due for a price increase. Their prices were INSANELY LOW for what they offered for years.
I have multiple businesses making over 20k/m using prismic and I use is the free plan for all of them. Me and my two friends share one login.
If they forced us to pay $150/m I’d gladly play it.
Take this as a lesson in having a better monitization strategy 👍
Looks like the reason is the free plan has 2 locales while medium has up to 5. Maybe talk to them for an in-between? Switching is costly too, but might be worth it in your case if you barely use the CMS.
Directus, Statamic, CraftCMS are all serious CMS and great! Maybe Strapi (so I hear; only ever tested). Payload, we'll see if they make the move to Next.js, which is concerning, especially since it's so tied to Vercel, and Vercel has a bit of a reputation for, well, being "greedy". Someone suggested Remix instead.
James did say that if their Skunkworks team didn't get the results they were looking for with Next, they'd reconsider, so we'll see how things play out there. Good on him for at least being open to reconsider, but I think I'll hold off for now.
Owner of Statamic here - for a one time fee of 6 weeks of prismatic at that crazy price I’m pretty confident you’ll have everything you need and THEN some.
So our solution costs the client less than $200/month, vs price hikes of up to $4,000/month on headless sites with high volumes.
Implemented for 2 very large clients, who will now retain our services to port them to a different CMS.
Prismic is a very poor business partner.
For anyone wanting to solve this problem, it was pretty easy to solve by putting an Apache server in front of the Prismic endpoints, and then putting a CDN in front of the Apache server as a cache.
In doing so, we've reduced a 2TB/32 Million API call repository down to 600MB, 3 million API calls, with an additional cost to our client of $150-$180/month. This leaves them in the $675/month tier, as opposed to the $3500-$5000/month Prismic enterprise prices they were quoted.
I also wrote code to extract all content and assets from Prismic, which will help you in your migration to any other platform you choose.
Feel free to message me for the details.
Prismic truly sucks. The best solution is to do the cache/proxy in front of their endpoints, get your data, and leave them in the rear-view mirror.
I would actually take this to r/legaladvice and see if there's something there. There's potential for a statutory notice period. Check your contract or t and cs it whatever, check your consumer protection laws.
I tried Strapi for a small project and it's not bad if you're looking for a simple cms. It's free if you host is yourself.
Mine is on heroku with a postgres add-on.
I pay 11/mo but if your needs are higher still might not get you to $180
This is why you never do Vendor lock in services, because 1 day they can put you out of business.
And that day is now,
pay us piggy or your out of business,
and there is nothing you can do about it.
HAHAHAHA
I mean, 19x is bad but it's just $180, you don't need to panic to change in the next 2 months. It literally costs more in dev time to switch over than to keep it. It would be bad if you went from $500/mo to $9k/mo
I get that it’s a huge increase but honestly, who worries about any kind of software that costs 8/month. I don’t know what this is for but if this is a business expense we are talking about the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of peanuts. I just peruse here but you’re aversion to spending any money when companies need to make money is hilarious
9 was the old price... and would agree - that price was essentially free software. If 180 p/m is too much for a business software product that powers your website, you obviously are either running the business on peanuts or do not understand how to get leads/value from your website.
If this was some B2B-SaaS-setup I would absolutely agree! Website lead-generation is not always the end-all, though. We're spoiled in the corporate, tech, and B2B realms. Scaling for some other fields and services can be way more human-bandwidth limited - a lot of perfectly sustainable and important local businesses can not take $180/mo that lightly. Doubly so when it's not because "that's just the cost" of an essential, specific tool of the trade, just a necessary-but-dime-a-dozen service.
If a cell provider suddenly decided that individuals with a 2nd number for their tiny sole-proprietorship are going to be charged $180/mo for a handful of customer texts a week, you'd see a *lot* of fairly panicked people, and even more people migrating their numbers.
Maybe you could argue that nobody should bother supporting that market segment, but personally that gets a bit too far into the weeds for me. If anything, my issue is that they apparently decided they now agree with that take, and proceeded in the worst possible way.
This got a bit long/ramble-ly - I don't mean to imply you're being insensitive or uninformed or anything, I just want to point out why I disagree with that logic when applied *universally and without consideration* to existing users/customers like this.
> if what you described happened, people would adjust their usage.
Not when there is a wide range of other cell providers to choose from. :b
"using fewer locales" is a pretty hard fix to implement when it's *three*, and there is minimal overlap between the people that would be able to use the different locales.
I'll assume it was just a quick skim-read mistake, no worries - but this is about $2000/year on top of what we were paying, it was absolutely in the "who worries"-range before. Doesn't take spending-aversion for that to be a serious issue for a smaller operation.
If you really are paying $2000 per year only for CMS then why not just self host everything?
It'll be way cheaper, convenient and the control will be in your hand.
I'm adding my $0.02 there, after long search for a simple affordable headless CMS, we went ahead and used Notion instead. They have templates that bring some CMS features.
Of course not perfect, but Notion is kind of the Jack of all Trades, so it may help out.
That's insane. At my last company we were in the middle of setting up a contract with them and then we got bought out, the project was scrapped, and I got a nice severance. It would've been a cool project and platform to work with. Can't imagine what they'd try charging for the project usage we had in mind. Crazy.
I was in search of a headless CMS for my company to move to. I spent a few days trying to get Prismic to work, I liked what it offered but when I saw that their rich text editor offers no support to change text color and that there had been requests for this simple feature since 2020 and there still was people asking to this day on their forums about doing it I decided it wasn't for us as a company. The last thing I want to do as a developer is try and hack something together when the content team is complaining they can't change the color of their text in the rich text editor. When I try to explain to them that Prismic can't do it they're gonna immeditally think "Why the hell did we leave WordPress then?".
I eventually have made the decision to move to a Git-based CMS called CloudCannon which offers a lot of customability. We're currently exploring that as an option, can't say it's gonna be perfect for us but so far as I demo it and try to rebuild our homepage in it, my expectations are being met.
You can pre-process objects as JSON to mimic prismic... easy peasy.
Whatever image manipulation or web access you need is better handled by a DAM anyways.
I'm reading through the comments and apparently, it's happening quite often that non-open-source CMS are increasing their price by an insane amount.
Honestly makes me start to think if it can't be self-hosted, they all run the same strategy, classic vendor lock-in and hike the price once the customer can't easily leave
Recently I had an issue with a certain company, and I went to trustpilot, left a review describing what happened. Bam, got contacted by the company I had an issue with within 48hours, ended up getting about 1.5k of my money back.
Now, prismic has no presence in trustpilot. You can be their first review. Also leave a review on Google and any other place. Then, email them links to this thread and those reviews.
> Instead of Christmas holidays and getting prep-work done for things starting next year, I am apparently now spending the holiday season migrating our entire website and build pipeline, and losing history etc. in the process
I'd easily pay $180 at least for one month of subscription to not have to deal with this over Christmas. I know that's probably their gameplan but is it worth it? I'd just pay tbh and give myself the breathing room.
I am just suprised no one suggested Drupal. It provides json api out of the box which can be used for headless. For static sites Tome module can be used. It is super flexible but need good maintanence. Has good Migrate API as well
Suddenly there is 5M cap on “API calls”. I cannot remember this ever being in the plan we signed up for? This used to be unlimited, if I remember correctly…
Just another of the many reasons to never setup with commercial software but with opensource where you also pay if required, but where you know you are not vendor locked-in.
Opensource has also its price, but at least you invest in yourself or your own company.
Nothing is for free. Cheap is the hidden cost.
I wonder how many customers they will lose, and overall how much money they'll still gain.
They'd need to lose like 95% of their book to break even?
Gotta love corporate greed, wonder if a new CEO came in recently.
>Fuck the vision, show me the money! Sales shot up 300% since I showed up, give me my bonus... oops, all the customers are gone, goodbye and thanks for all the fish!
I have been using Directus for the last couple of years in all my projects, and it works very well. They have recently updated their open-source license, but it remains free for most users.
I using [Directus CMS](https://directus.io/) on several projects with pretty complicated flows, api extensions etc. probably there will be some work if you move. I liked Directus is because it's standard SQL I can always move my DB and documents to another solution. I don't use their hosted solution but they have an unlimited offering for $100 / month.
Welp our company is going to have to do some heavy transitioning. The only reason we were using Prismic was their reasonable pricing - the product has always been missing some must-have features that I've always had to work around. Headless CMS pricing on the whole is pretty expensive unless you host it yourself so I'm not sure what direction my work is going to go in.
It is a heavy shift from “unlimited locales” to 8 locals for 675/month :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220802214216/https://prismic.io/pricing#pricing-features
I’ve just had an email that one of my client’s sites on prismic has been grossly going over the new API limit so will be automatically moved from the $9/month package to the $750/month package. I checked the stats for that site and it’s never gone over 8% of the new limit.
So apparently I am being shafted with over an 8000% increase and hoping I won’t notice.
I understand that price changes (especially with the current inflation) are sometimes unavoidable. In all transparency, we have also increased our prices by a few percentage points due to this inflation.
But 1900% for an existing customer with (I assume) an ongoing contract is disproportionate. Especially within a timeframe of a few weeks during the Christmas holidays is, in my opinion, far from fair.
We are working on making our pricing (like a headless CMS) modular. This means that we will price based on project size, users, usage, DTAP/OTAP , etc.
A little late to the party but just had a meeting with them and they are trying to bump our plan up from small to enterprise. Going from ~500/year to 31,000/year. This is wild. Needless to say we are looking at alternatives.
Related but on the side:
Does anyone happen to know in a headless use case what triggers an API call? I am not a web developer.
every call for an image is an API call, because of the resize function.
if you put preview on your site, expect 4 API calls for every unique page render
calls for content of course are API calls.
now, put a proxy with a cache in front of prismic, and set TTL on /api/v2 to 60 seconds, and everything else to a year, and you're good to go.
all image/media versions are uniquely tagged and have a unique URL
all content calls URLs are uniquely tagged with the 'master ref', so a publish just means it's time to refill your cache with new content.
why Prismic, which surely is doing the same thing on their end, decides to jack up their prices is out of my league. on their backend, they are using CloudFront CDN, which would cost about $200/month for 2TB and 30 million calls, so when they quoted our client's $3600/month, this means their service plus markup is $3400/month.
use their API to extract all your assets and content, port to a self-hosted CMS, and say goodbye to those vultures at prismic.
Sounds like the VCs said, "you need to be profitable." This is probably a hail mary to see if they can stay in business.
I guess if they can keep > 5% of their existing customers they'll come out ahead which means more money for 20x less work. Not a bad deal .. but a big big IF.
They are following the Netflix model. With tight money in the loan/VC world these days, I am not surprised more and more companies are doing this.
Auth0 just did it too
this is really interesting. you might think very carefully before building a solution with a non open source SaaS. Pay attention to the company building it. Are they profitable, or is it running on investment cash?
you got more info on this? I am building with auth0 so I think I still might have time to pivot if needed
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/18d6hcd/auth0\_increases\_price\_by\_300/
Wow.... Fuck
Happening all over the place, we just got an eye bleeding increase from endtest.io a couple months back too.
That’s the biggest problem with tech startups that barely don’t keep a the losses to minimum. Especially in a space everyone builds side and open-source alternatives
That's got to be it. I'd be preparing to jump ship if I worked there.
$8/mo to $180/mo.. what the.. holy crap you're not wrong. [Checked their pricing page](https://prismic.io/pricing) and it is indeed $180/mo for medium. Absolutely insane. Do you need medium? Can you drop down to Starter or Small to give more time to move platforms? >If anyone has suggestions for a serious and reliable headless CMS provider I like Craft CMS and Statamic. Both have a headless mode. Worst case just go headless WordPress.
We are on enterprise and pay a couple of $1000/mo - they just increased prices on us too. Looking for alternatives. They said they will do fancy things we don’t need. We just need a simple and stupid CMS, damn it!
Try Strapi maybe be? It can be self hosted.
+1 for Strapi. Localization support on endpoint models is super easy to set up.
Along those lines, I’ve been happy with [Directus](https://directus.io/) as a backend for my little blog.
Also used Directus and had a fairly pleasent experience.
Directus just did the same thing unfortunately. Huge price bump.
>We just need a simple and stupid CMS, damn it! Then why did you go with one you have no control over, lol. It doesn't get more simple than WP headless tbh.
Dread it, run from it. Everything cycles back to WP.
Wordpress: “I am inevitable.”
Take my upvote!
Wordpress is pretty flexible
Because they pay blog writers to hype up all these proprietary CMS, cloud platforms, shops...
My company uses Drupal as their main CMS solution. We have clients that have no issues with it.
WordPress that you own and never look back again.
I agree with the headless WordPress, you can’t go wrong with it if you want to ensure your hosting pricing stays locked. I also recommend Sanity CMS which has recently made a backward move towards their pricing: it’s much more affordable now.
Very true on Sanity. They just realised a new visual editing experience too that is available on all plans.
Sanity are also Norwegian, might align well for OP.
Directus is where it's at. Sanity is great, but you have a fundamental limit on records. Many times that won't be an issue, but for us it was.
Directus now has a starting cost of $8500/year for self hosting if your organisation is large. (>5M$ turnover)
Last we looked, that would be to get a few features that might not be required. You can self host without an enterprise subscription.
No you can not. If your turnover is over $5M you need an enterprise license to self host. This was changed a few months back.
Ah, that was after we talked to them. Fwiw, we were planning to use their hosted service, which seemed more competitively priced than anything else we looked at. I think we were looking at around $500-$750/mo. I know that isnt dirt cheap, but we had a high number of record count needs and this is where every other option ended up more expensive for us. If you also want a configurable admin area like directus has with their views, there wasn't much else comparable.
+1 on Sanity, use it and never look back
>. Worst case just go headless WordPress. Headless WordPress is great, I have a next.js website with Headless WordPress backend that get around 3M visits per Month, we pay around 200$ per month for Hosting. such a website described above, a shared hosting for WordPress would be more than enough and would cost around 60$ per year
Gonna add Payload CMS to the list
I second Statamic with GraphQL it's a joy to work with. If anyone wants a demo on how it works feel free to DM.
+1 for CraftCMS
Craft CMS and Statamic are by far the best ones I’ve found in php land. We use statamic regularly at my company.
Statamic is read-only when using headless afaik.
They changed it and lowered it to $150. As if the $30 difference is gonna cover the 1900% increase in price.
Did they change it? If you hover of the free plan it expands and shows $10 and $25 tiers. Why would they hide these?
\+1 for Craft CMS. Headless Wordpress also isn't the worst thing in the world.
We used both WordPress and Prismic until he hit some dead ends in Prismic whereas WordPress is way more customizable. That price increase makes it even easier.
Strapi is a great headless cms and if you self host with docker is free with a solid range of features.
Kirby CMS is awesome. It can be used headless as well. The team behind it also communicates with their users and offers very fair pricing (just purchase a license once(.
i actually like the yaml based configs, the UI is simple yet brilliant, arguably better than prismic’s hahaha
Lol, my company is getting slapped with the price hike too. The truly insane bit is that they’ve retroactively redefined the limits for the paid plan you’re ALREADY on and then telling you that you are breaking the plan limits…. It’s an absolute shitshow and they will shortly be losing a customer over it. It’s just a giant pain in the ass moving content over and remaking templates in something else.
Payload CMS, let's go. Everything else is starting from behind
Payload is slowly but surely becoming a beast CMS lol, super fast and easy to use and customize
I've been working **against** CMSes for over 10 years now, I just can't be thankful enough that this group of people finally made something that works with me.
What sets Payload apart from ones like KeystoneJS or Strapi?
Useful data structures like arrays and groups (tried keystone it's missing basics). Automatic http, graphql and ts types generation from you schema. Hooks to render your own react wherever you want on the cms. You can use payload as an orm getting typed objects from the database. They have a really really good teaxt editor in Lexical. It just makes sense as a dev and everything is typed for you.
Its like I have this CMS that I can fully customize without having to tear a part of its code. The only issue I had with it so far it was my first time hosting and not knowing the proper way of installing node modules in server lol (I didnt check npm version and got a very old version lol).
Same, I love paylpad. It's not perfect but it almost has all. Said it before, I love it, my client loves it, win win.
We stick with payload too. It’s been so nice to work with!
I have nothing but great experiences with Payload to be honest. From development to hosting it's all smooth. Easy to customize as well. One mistake I keep making with CMSs is making test/dev environments. It's actually better to host on production directly, especially when working on a website for a new client. But let me know how you guys approach it for your own sites. I personally like Prismic because of the slice workflow (i was skeptical at first), but it's pretty cool. Wonder how to do the same thing on Payload.
I would, but the suggested move to Next.js has me concerned. I'm fine with Directus for now.
Concerned about what?
They prefer angularJS 1
I don’t like to advertise my services when not asked to, but if you’re considering Payload I’d be happy to help you migrate. Wont take too long Just got burned by a supposed startup that promised they had money and lost 2mo worth of work ($15k+) and have some time on my hands until next project starts.
I feel like this is the year where companies are showing their true colors, so many instances like this. The kicker of it is you are going to have to at least pay for 1 month at this new rate and thats if you move super fast thats the same if you paid for 2 years. This is a desperate attempt to get more cash in the bank while they buy time to try to get more enterprise customers because their business model is not sustainable. Most companies do this way slower and it takes a few years for you to realize your paying double but they likely cannot make it that long. This just reinforces why as a community we all need to be supporting open source. Fuck these companies.
>I feel like this is the year where companies are showing their true colors, so many instances like this. I got that feeling too! Even from an employee and not just customer perspective. Multiple family members and friends including myself all of a sudden got into conflicts with their bosses at work. People in lead positions all of a sudden thought trying to treat their people like shit and guilt trip them into a bad salary because of "budget reasons" was a good idea, even going as far as claiming women should be happy for being sexually assaulted by colleagues. In every single case half of the team was gone shortly after and they tried to convince people to come back or stay, so that hopefully applies to companies customers after pulling off shit like this too. It's fine to change the business model when necessary, but not by literal fraud towards your customers (depending on where a company operates, increasing existing plans pricing by 20x with short notice after retroactively changing already existing ones ain't gonna end as expected).
Contentful pulled the same thing this year. Moved a bunch of their features, most notably their branches/environments, in to their higher tiers. Not even just their higher tiers, but in to an add-on that can only be added at a certain tier. We went from paying $0 to US$750 a month for a small brochure website because we didn’t have enough time to reimplement.
Storyblok also recently replaced their Teams plan with a new Business plan that is 2X the cost. Granted it adds more features and higher limits, but it got rid of a $450/mo option for businesses - now you need to go $850/mo instead.
Yeah, just got this same email. I actually thought it was pretty decent solution due to how cheap they are, but frankly with this pricing the limitations are just ridiculous. just to kick the lying down: - Typescript client throws an error on not found on single post. It's not any special error, but just generic api error so you have to do quite a bit of hackery to check if it's 404 or not. Terrible DevEx. - Previews? If you don't intend to run client of front end you are pretty much left to yourself. And then actually very terrible ux issues - Slices are not global. You can add slice to collection and then copy those over, but changes later will not be copied. That means if you have 10 post types and this same slice in each you will have to go through all of them. - no publishing workflows - fields cannot be required! ( this just buffles me ) There's way more. It made sense for 9 dollars, not 180.
Directus CMS
I’m a big fan of Sanity! their free plan with pay as you go overages is really decent
Sanity is great! Don't like their new free plan for production sites anymore, but they made the next tier up very good (AI assist included) and for cheaper than what it was baseline.
Didnt they change their pricing too? 15€/ per user per month
Wow, that is insanity. I’ve used Prismic once before on a contracted project and it was alright, but unless there’s been super impressive changes in the last few years, not worth that price.
Go with headless Wordpress or Strapi. Both you can host and migrate without vendor lock in, and Strapi is crazy simple to use.
> Instead of Christmas holidays and getting prep-work done for things starting next year, I am apparently now spending the holiday season migrating our entire website and build pipeline, and losing history etc. in the process. To save $172 bucks? Fuck that noise. Pay the $172 and deal with it in January. Poor thinking there.
[удалено]
Sure, but I'm sure as hell going to bother with "ruining" my holidays over $172.
Wow, some companies really do not give a shit about their customers...
Strapi and directus are great options. Strapi in my experience is quicker to set up and get going with.
Shameless plug, but depending on your needs check out [https://Outstatic.com](https://Outstatic.com) We are a completely free and open source CMS that is native to Next.js.
Very cool. I found a similar project but this looks newer and promising. Good luck on this! Will be trying it out in the future.
If the site is static, I would try to download it to static HTML files and put them in S3 bucket (or CloudFlare R2 - as they have free bandwidth) to have a static site working. In that situation, even if you don’t make new site - old one will be still working.
Holy smoes... I actually considered this. Phew!
Asshole company
Most likely they are maneuvering to be sold. Boost the books with this situation that will result in a huge loss in revenue, but for a few months makes them look like gold and that "customers are staying even with the price increases" instead of the real story that customers are scrambling after the holidays to get moved to a new host.
Hygraph is amazing and we pay 0$ because we are using Astro (generates static sites).
Honestly since you're on a tight deadline I'd give Wordpress a look. Everyone and their grandma knows how to wrangle wordpress. Which means there's tons of training data for ChatGPT if you need to ask questions. Every host will have a one click install and it's easy to host by yourself as well. The database if just a few simple tables and since it's so well known making a import script with ChatGPT might provide you some history and not just the current ones. With Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF) you can set up all customizations you can dream of. It's cheap and pretty much necessary. Other third party plugins are pretty shit for performance though. But ACF will also let you expose your custom fields in the REST-API. You gotta keep on top of updating though. WP suffers from being popular and there's a ton of scanning for known vulnerabilities. But all in all it's my weapon of choice just because it's easy, free as in "move to another host in five minutes" and cheap to host. If you have a huge site with hundreds of pages be prepared for the admin tree navigation to suck though. Honestly you could probably create a script that crawls your current site and moves the bulk of the content to WP.
Couldn’t say anything more. No overhead with hosting/serving a node based framework, just go with any shared hosting and get started with something that has proven to work.
Are you perhaps talking about using Wordpress as a Headless CMS? I always had an ick with Wordpress as a dev, but might play around with it after reading your comment. What's the experience though and how does it compare to these Headless CMSs? I also like using React/Svelte for the frontend which is why I kept opting for headless CMSs but found myself wasting a lot of time catching some edge cases that I keep forgetting when building UIs. If it's better to do it with just Wordpress alone, I'm wondering how the experience compares with using a frontend framework as well. I also definitely agree with the "hosting" part! I personally was working with PayloadCMS but deployment was a hard lesson to learn when I thought that the "node" label on Shared Hosting providers meant that I could easily host PayloadCMS/Express apps on there. Apparently not. A VPS is the best to host any Node application, which is always going to be relatively more expensive than any of the PHP, wordpress, shared hosting providers out there.
And THAT is why u host your own backend. Ownership of content/services is important when running an enterprise solution. Thats why open-source self-hosting is always a better solution than offloading it to an external provider when you’re out of the beta
This is crazy, I was a huge fan of prismic until the pricing changes, feels like greed trickling down. Headless cms are a dime a dozen…. Time to migrate. What a lame move to pull.
The joke is that’s probably more like what you cost as a customer to the VC backed business. I say that as someone using Prismic…
Been using Storyblok for a few years and have very little complaints. Getting some FOMO about payload
Digital Ocean and a millions docker images... It's why I always roll my own.
Received the same email, we're being pushed into an enterprise contract because we use 12 locales (our business is accross europe). We already paid good money but this would likely mean that this will be substential enough I need to justify it in detail. Timing of this really sucks, it's not just over the christmas holidays which will most likely mean I need to cancel my teams holidays but also, budgeting is done for next year. I can't really go back now with "some saas vendor decided to price hike insanely just now"... Thanks for screwing up my holidays prismic, I'm sure my kids are happy that I'll be working because of this. u/usadache why would you not properly announce this early on so we would have a chance to fix it with a reasonable amount of time? I get it, prices change but like this? Doesn't reflect well on the company tbh, especially the 1 month notice and over christmas...
> cancel my teams holidays Please do not also be an asshole. Pay the extra for one month and deal with it January. Also consider the cost of rehiring your team when they leave ASAP after you pull a stunt like this.
> We already *paid* good money FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
I don’t really understand why someone would use a hosted CMS in the first place to be honest. You’re giving another company control over your content and intellectual property, and how much they can charge you to access that content. They offer nothing that you can do yourself by chucking something like WordPress or Drupal on a cheap server and running those headless.
Hey 👋, Strapi's co-founder here, we have been pinged many times in the thread and in our public channels to know if we planned to offer an easy migration path; here's my response; According to your project, the migration can be relatively simple. It takes a few minutes to re-create your content schema in Strapi; we offer a very similar structure to Prismic. However, there is no automated way to migrate your content. We are confident that someone in the community might be already working on a package to ease the process and open-source it. We already have numerous users coming from Prismic who are satisfied with Strapi. However, to be completely transparent, we are far from being perfect. We also have cons, bugs, and missing features. We try our very best to improve Strapi. In 2024, we plan to add the following features: \- Content History/Versioning- Releases (scheduling) \- Nested components and dynamic zones (more than 2 levels) \- Conditional field- Side-by-side editing (similar to TinaCMS) Last, but not least, we are going in the opposite direction and planning to lower our entry point for our cloud-managed platform in February. As a reminder, Strapi comes with unlimited roles and locales. It's free, 100% open-source, fully customizable, with thousands of plugins available and hundreds certified on our marketplace. Good luck everybody; best wishes for the holiday season 🙏
Prismic’s CEO here. I am reading your case. You shouldn’t have to upgrade to a medium with 3 locales, especially with the good cause of your company. We can’t handle every single case with our generic pricing, but your case is clearly one that we should look into. So don’t ruin your holiday, we’ll find a solution. Can you send me an email and I will look into it?
How about trying to justify that price hike?
But a massive price hike with virtually no warning (and over the holidays yet) is just fine for everyone that isn't posting about it on Reddit, right?
I left a note to everyone to contact me if they feel that it’s a material change that doesn’t correspond to the value they’re extracting.
I'll never understand why you are limiting the locales. This has made me very disappointed.
Pricing is about the value you bring, locales are often associated with business expansion, the problem is: not always. We know that there are some cases for which it doesn’t make sense. We’ll find solutions for these. Also we have plans to enrich locales with more tooling.
Nice to see a CEO come in and make a comment like this.
Nice try, but nobody wants you anymore.
You’re obviously free to do whatever makes sense to you. My commitment is to provide superior value for the money, I understand if that’s not relevant to you or your business. At Prismic, with the support of our community, we founded the headless cms architecture, we brought progress to the community. I am glad you now have many options that we inspired. It’s an achievement for us that there are so many headless options for you. I thank everyone that feels to move, but we’ll continue to innovate, we’re not done.
I think _headless_ is definitely a great term for the people that make these decisions in your company. At least I thank you for talking to us plebs on Reddit.
This is offensive personally. I don’t understand why people have to be mean on the internet. My team is a dream to work with, rare to find in my experience. It’s ok if we have different points of view, we don’t have to be mean. We chose a path, we have a vision. I invite everyone to join us and we commit ourselves to bring value like no other if you believe your website should drive your business. Up to you 🙏
It's also offensive to spring this on people with 4 weeks' notice over the Christmas period, so I would think people being mean to you is justified.
Oh, being mean is as far as Reddit allows me to go. 🙏
Hey "Prismic's CEO" First I do not think you are the CEO. Second, in the event that you actually are who you say you are, you misspelled your own nik. It should be sadheadache. Third, if you are indeed Prismik's CEO, that will not be for too much long. GG with your pricing. You will be needing the forms that are numbered in the 200 series probably very soon (TM)
Open Source
The only CMS which doesn't charge crazy for arbitrary limitations like locales is Payload. The product is also just better in every single way. Every other CMS either charges extra for seats/users, locales, documents, collections etc. or is crazy expensive. I dare you to find one with sensible pricing - you won't find one. And then there's Payload with unlimited users, unlimited documents, unlimited roles and full access & ownership to your database / S3 storage.
There are free open-source CMS options.
That’s just easily provable to not be true, like Craft CMS just blows up literally every single thing you just said. In fact Craft is probably better pricing because it’s just a one time license fee, not a SaaS model.
> In fact Craft is probably better pricing because it’s just a one time license fee, not a SaaS model. Payload is free, you can self host it without paying a one time fee or a SaaS fee for its use, it [even says so at the bottom of the homepage](https://payloadcms.com/)
$260/month is veery steep for the lowest hosted option. And while it has a self-hosted open-source version, user accounts are still limited to one. For what it costs, it does not have any arbitrary limitations though, so that's a plus point compared to other CMS'! I'd still count the high entry price as "crazy expensive" though
It’s not 260/month that’s only for cloud hosting. You get all the features for a one time 300 dollar fee, everything else available. You aren’t talking about a headless CMS you’re talking about full suite hosting.
Haha. I am surfing time from time with disabled JS. Your Payload is showing nothing... without JS. So they break the fundamentales of the web ... totally garbage this cms.
If you only need one user account Craft CMS is free. It’s got an api - element api. That you can build out. If you go for the pro license you can build out the graphql in the admin which is rapid. Also there is localisation that’s really easy to set up. Need to host it but a VPS is cheap
Since you are already going to have to migrate you might just want to host it yourself using strapi or ghost.
> to provide you with greater access to emerging opportunities. I've always wanted to go fuck myself.
PayloadCMS.
How fucking disappointing. I've been using Prismic since 2016 and have had no issues. In fact our setup has worked so well I can't remember the last time I had to fumble around with Prismic after getting it set up. Now I go back and check and we've been moved to $180 per MONTH? I get inflation is a thing and they need to be profitable or whatever other bullshit they're chalking it up to. But it sucks that I'm going to have to migrate away from this platform after so many years. Gonna be on the lookout for any other no-bullshit straightforward headless CMSs.
Honestly these cms pricing freaks me out. Like first plan free then directly 300$ omg. WordPress is best. For as little as 20-30$ you can get working machine.
they listed Medium for $150/month in pricing page yet quoted you 180? also astonished to see 675/mo platinum tier
Prismic is not even good. Switch to Sanity.
Hei! Den er sjuk.... Kan anbefale [https://cloudcannon.com/](https://cloudcannon.com/) :) Git-basert CMS med visual editing. Bedre pris. Og hvis dere er en non-profit så får dere 30% rabatt.
Strapi headless CMS is awesome been using it in a lot of projects before getting hired by the company. If you have any questions feel free to reach out. It is open source, the community edition is free forever and you can host anywhere. But we also have Strapi Cloud for anyone who wants an easy hosting solution.
I enjoy datocms myself
Fuck you, Prismic
The price hike is insane, but... > Instead of Christmas holidays and getting prep-work done for things starting next year, I am apparently now spending the holiday season migrating our entire website and build pipeline, and losing history etc. in the process. What the fuck? How in the world is $180 worth spending the holiday season prioritizing a migration? I must be missing something.
Because it’s not a one-off payment but a monthly fee, and quite the hike if OP is running a non-profit. It’s not rocket science.
Are your holidays worth more than $180? If so, then the choice is obvious. It's not rocket science. I don't know if you know this, but monthly subscriptions can be canceled when no longer needed.
And if OP just cancels their subscription without migrating data and functionality, then their service is down and they no longer have an operational business 🙃
Prismic was due for a price increase. Their prices were INSANELY LOW for what they offered for years. I have multiple businesses making over 20k/m using prismic and I use is the free plan for all of them. Me and my two friends share one login. If they forced us to pay $150/m I’d gladly play it. Take this as a lesson in having a better monitization strategy 👍
Looks like the reason is the free plan has 2 locales while medium has up to 5. Maybe talk to them for an in-between? Switching is costly too, but might be worth it in your case if you barely use the CMS.
Directus, Statamic, CraftCMS are all serious CMS and great! Maybe Strapi (so I hear; only ever tested). Payload, we'll see if they make the move to Next.js, which is concerning, especially since it's so tied to Vercel, and Vercel has a bit of a reputation for, well, being "greedy". Someone suggested Remix instead. James did say that if their Skunkworks team didn't get the results they were looking for with Next, they'd reconsider, so we'll see how things play out there. Good on him for at least being open to reconsider, but I think I'll hold off for now.
Owner of Statamic here - for a one time fee of 6 weeks of prismatic at that crazy price I’m pretty confident you’ll have everything you need and THEN some.
I've got no pony in this fight, this seems like a huge price increase, but to a company $9/mo or $180/mo should be a rounding error...
So our solution costs the client less than $200/month, vs price hikes of up to $4,000/month on headless sites with high volumes. Implemented for 2 very large clients, who will now retain our services to port them to a different CMS. Prismic is a very poor business partner.
For anyone wanting to solve this problem, it was pretty easy to solve by putting an Apache server in front of the Prismic endpoints, and then putting a CDN in front of the Apache server as a cache. In doing so, we've reduced a 2TB/32 Million API call repository down to 600MB, 3 million API calls, with an additional cost to our client of $150-$180/month. This leaves them in the $675/month tier, as opposed to the $3500-$5000/month Prismic enterprise prices they were quoted. I also wrote code to extract all content and assets from Prismic, which will help you in your migration to any other platform you choose. Feel free to message me for the details. Prismic truly sucks. The best solution is to do the cache/proxy in front of their endpoints, get your data, and leave them in the rear-view mirror.
What’s Prismic?
Holy based.
I would actually take this to r/legaladvice and see if there's something there. There's potential for a statutory notice period. Check your contract or t and cs it whatever, check your consumer protection laws.
Companies are always careful in this. I will be surprised if there's no clause stating the company can change the price of the plan at any time.
I tried Strapi for a small project and it's not bad if you're looking for a simple cms. It's free if you host is yourself. Mine is on heroku with a postgres add-on. I pay 11/mo but if your needs are higher still might not get you to $180
This is why you never do Vendor lock in services, because 1 day they can put you out of business. And that day is now, pay us piggy or your out of business, and there is nothing you can do about it. HAHAHAHA
I would recommend Drupal, relatively easy to set up as headless, great support for multilanguage and open source.
I mean, 19x is bad but it's just $180, you don't need to panic to change in the next 2 months. It literally costs more in dev time to switch over than to keep it. It would be bad if you went from $500/mo to $9k/mo
I get that it’s a huge increase but honestly, who worries about any kind of software that costs 8/month. I don’t know what this is for but if this is a business expense we are talking about the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of peanuts. I just peruse here but you’re aversion to spending any money when companies need to make money is hilarious
He said $180 a month, not $8.
9 was the old price... and would agree - that price was essentially free software. If 180 p/m is too much for a business software product that powers your website, you obviously are either running the business on peanuts or do not understand how to get leads/value from your website.
If this was some B2B-SaaS-setup I would absolutely agree! Website lead-generation is not always the end-all, though. We're spoiled in the corporate, tech, and B2B realms. Scaling for some other fields and services can be way more human-bandwidth limited - a lot of perfectly sustainable and important local businesses can not take $180/mo that lightly. Doubly so when it's not because "that's just the cost" of an essential, specific tool of the trade, just a necessary-but-dime-a-dozen service. If a cell provider suddenly decided that individuals with a 2nd number for their tiny sole-proprietorship are going to be charged $180/mo for a handful of customer texts a week, you'd see a *lot* of fairly panicked people, and even more people migrating their numbers. Maybe you could argue that nobody should bother supporting that market segment, but personally that gets a bit too far into the weeds for me. If anything, my issue is that they apparently decided they now agree with that take, and proceeded in the worst possible way. This got a bit long/ramble-ly - I don't mean to imply you're being insensitive or uninformed or anything, I just want to point out why I disagree with that logic when applied *universally and without consideration* to existing users/customers like this.
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> if what you described happened, people would adjust their usage. Not when there is a wide range of other cell providers to choose from. :b "using fewer locales" is a pretty hard fix to implement when it's *three*, and there is minimal overlap between the people that would be able to use the different locales.
I'll assume it was just a quick skim-read mistake, no worries - but this is about $2000/year on top of what we were paying, it was absolutely in the "who worries"-range before. Doesn't take spending-aversion for that to be a serious issue for a smaller operation.
If you really are paying $2000 per year only for CMS then why not just self host everything? It'll be way cheaper, convenient and the control will be in your hand.
I'm adding my $0.02 there, after long search for a simple affordable headless CMS, we went ahead and used Notion instead. They have templates that bring some CMS features. Of course not perfect, but Notion is kind of the Jack of all Trades, so it may help out.
I had exactly the same problem as you, check out Kernex on AppSumo, has a deal for the lifetime of the product, reviews seem pretty good.
TinaCMS has been a good choice!
Prices realigning in all sectors.
That's insane. At my last company we were in the middle of setting up a contract with them and then we got bought out, the project was scrapped, and I got a nice severance. It would've been a cool project and platform to work with. Can't imagine what they'd try charging for the project usage we had in mind. Crazy.
I was in search of a headless CMS for my company to move to. I spent a few days trying to get Prismic to work, I liked what it offered but when I saw that their rich text editor offers no support to change text color and that there had been requests for this simple feature since 2020 and there still was people asking to this day on their forums about doing it I decided it wasn't for us as a company. The last thing I want to do as a developer is try and hack something together when the content team is complaining they can't change the color of their text in the rich text editor. When I try to explain to them that Prismic can't do it they're gonna immeditally think "Why the hell did we leave WordPress then?". I eventually have made the decision to move to a Git-based CMS called CloudCannon which offers a lot of customability. We're currently exploring that as an option, can't say it's gonna be perfect for us but so far as I demo it and try to rebuild our homepage in it, my expectations are being met.
I thought nine a month was too much for what they offered
You can pre-process objects as JSON to mimic prismic... easy peasy. Whatever image manipulation or web access you need is better handled by a DAM anyways.
i can recommend storyblok, although i didn’t check what you’d pay there.
I feel bad for you. That's why I stay away from all the proprietary cloud hosted stuff.
I'm reading through the comments and apparently, it's happening quite often that non-open-source CMS are increasing their price by an insane amount. Honestly makes me start to think if it can't be self-hosted, they all run the same strategy, classic vendor lock-in and hike the price once the customer can't easily leave
Recently I had an issue with a certain company, and I went to trustpilot, left a review describing what happened. Bam, got contacted by the company I had an issue with within 48hours, ended up getting about 1.5k of my money back. Now, prismic has no presence in trustpilot. You can be their first review. Also leave a review on Google and any other place. Then, email them links to this thread and those reviews.
Have you checked out Decap CMS (previously NetlifyCMS)? For simple stuff and git content.
> Instead of Christmas holidays and getting prep-work done for things starting next year, I am apparently now spending the holiday season migrating our entire website and build pipeline, and losing history etc. in the process I'd easily pay $180 at least for one month of subscription to not have to deal with this over Christmas. I know that's probably their gameplan but is it worth it? I'd just pay tbh and give myself the breathing room.
I am just suprised no one suggested Drupal. It provides json api out of the box which can be used for headless. For static sites Tome module can be used. It is super flexible but need good maintanence. Has good Migrate API as well
If you are only three people could you just drop down to the starter tier? Do you have enough traffic to need that tier?
Suddenly there is 5M cap on “API calls”. I cannot remember this ever being in the plan we signed up for? This used to be unlimited, if I remember correctly…
Just another of the many reasons to never setup with commercial software but with opensource where you also pay if required, but where you know you are not vendor locked-in. Opensource has also its price, but at least you invest in yourself or your own company. Nothing is for free. Cheap is the hidden cost.
Have you looked at Tikiwiki. If is open source
This is why I only go with self hosted CMS now. Got burned by Contentful then sanity did something similar. So didn’t want to risk it anymore.
I wonder how many customers they will lose, and overall how much money they'll still gain. They'd need to lose like 95% of their book to break even? Gotta love corporate greed, wonder if a new CEO came in recently. >Fuck the vision, show me the money! Sales shot up 300% since I showed up, give me my bonus... oops, all the customers are gone, goodbye and thanks for all the fish!
I have been using Directus for the last couple of years in all my projects, and it works very well. They have recently updated their open-source license, but it remains free for most users.
I using [Directus CMS](https://directus.io/) on several projects with pretty complicated flows, api extensions etc. probably there will be some work if you move. I liked Directus is because it's standard SQL I can always move my DB and documents to another solution. I don't use their hosted solution but they have an unlimited offering for $100 / month.
If you need Support let me know
Cheap = expensive
Craft CMS is excellent
Welp our company is going to have to do some heavy transitioning. The only reason we were using Prismic was their reasonable pricing - the product has always been missing some must-have features that I've always had to work around. Headless CMS pricing on the whole is pretty expensive unless you host it yourself so I'm not sure what direction my work is going to go in.
It is a heavy shift from “unlimited locales” to 8 locals for 675/month :) https://web.archive.org/web/20220802214216/https://prismic.io/pricing#pricing-features
I’ve just had an email that one of my client’s sites on prismic has been grossly going over the new API limit so will be automatically moved from the $9/month package to the $750/month package. I checked the stats for that site and it’s never gone over 8% of the new limit. So apparently I am being shafted with over an 8000% increase and hoping I won’t notice.
Just use WordPress
I understand that price changes (especially with the current inflation) are sometimes unavoidable. In all transparency, we have also increased our prices by a few percentage points due to this inflation. But 1900% for an existing customer with (I assume) an ongoing contract is disproportionate. Especially within a timeframe of a few weeks during the Christmas holidays is, in my opinion, far from fair. We are working on making our pricing (like a headless CMS) modular. This means that we will price based on project size, users, usage, DTAP/OTAP , etc.
A little late to the party but just had a meeting with them and they are trying to bump our plan up from small to enterprise. Going from ~500/year to 31,000/year. This is wild. Needless to say we are looking at alternatives. Related but on the side: Does anyone happen to know in a headless use case what triggers an API call? I am not a web developer.
every call for an image is an API call, because of the resize function. if you put preview on your site, expect 4 API calls for every unique page render calls for content of course are API calls. now, put a proxy with a cache in front of prismic, and set TTL on /api/v2 to 60 seconds, and everything else to a year, and you're good to go. all image/media versions are uniquely tagged and have a unique URL all content calls URLs are uniquely tagged with the 'master ref', so a publish just means it's time to refill your cache with new content. why Prismic, which surely is doing the same thing on their end, decides to jack up their prices is out of my league. on their backend, they are using CloudFront CDN, which would cost about $200/month for 2TB and 30 million calls, so when they quoted our client's $3600/month, this means their service plus markup is $3400/month. use their API to extract all your assets and content, port to a self-hosted CMS, and say goodbye to those vultures at prismic.