Hello
I was really looking forward to using Strapi Cloud and even told my friends about it as I thought it could be a game changer for me.
I was even part of the user research, I was interviewed 1 year ago.
However, when the pricing was released, I found it to be 2 to 4 times more expensive than I expected.
I’m disappointed and wondering who is this product for and how can it justify such pricing?
PS: I want to express that I found your email highly offensive. To me, it came across as saying, “Thank you for your participation, but you have 24 hours to pack your bags. Otherwise, you will be charged $200 (since I have two projects).”
Needless to say that I just deleted my two projects on Strapi Cloud, I’m staying on Heroku for now.
from: Victor Coise
Hello [my name],
Thanks again for your participation in the Strapi Cloud beta program.
As a reminder, you are now enrolled in a 7-day free trial that will end tomorrow March 7th.
Unless you delete your project(s) before the end of this trial, your existing project(s) will automatically convert to the Pro plan, starting at $99/month.
As a sign of appreciation for your time and commitment to our beta program, we are happy to send you a coupon code for a 3-month subscription discount of 25%. Just reply to this email and to receive it.
Thanks,
The Strapi Team
Thanks a lot for taking the time to share your feedback and being part of the user research, much appreciated.
We understand that Strapi Cloud pricing might be disappointing to some users who were looking forward to moving away from PaaS such as Heroku or DigitalOcean and It seems like we could have done a better job of managing expectations with regard to Strapi Cloud value proposition and price. So here is more context about pricing and the rationale behind it.
Strapi Cloud is more than a PaaS. In addition to a server, Strapi Cloud also includes a database, asset storage, a CDN, and an email service as well as CMS features designed to make the overall experience much better for both developers and content managers. Over the next few weeks and months, we will be adding a lot more features (regions, backups, analytics, etc) without increasing the price.
Strapi Cloud plans also include support and managed services which is both a massive value proposition, responsibility, and a very significant cost to Strapi. Offering a cheaper plan from the start would have overwhelmed our Customer Success and Support teams and negatively impacted the quality of our services for all.
Strapi Cloud is not currently a good fit for individuals and small startups. It’s better suited for SMBs who don’t want to hire DevOps engineers or deal with infrastructure headaches. In the future, we hope to make Strapi Cloud more affordable to smaller companies but it’s not something we can afford to do in the short term unfortunately.
Regarding the email, this was the last reminder of a series of emails that had previously included information about the price and 7-day trials for users previously enrolled in the beta. That being said, I am very sorry if it came off as offensive, and happy to extend the duration of the trial for every user who might need more time.
I was hoping that Strapi Cloud would fill the void left after Heroku changed its pricing - that void being the go-to deployment for indie-hackers and bootstrappers. However, I understand that this may not be the most profitable segment.
I wish you the best with Strapi Cloud, and I hope that we will be able to afford it someday
Yeah. I was in the trial as well, and I plan to pay for Strapi cloud since I’m not a developer and don’t want to touch much on technical stuff.
However:
The pricing is high
Strapi Cloud is still too complicated, as lease for me (as you said it is not for startup or individual).
I will wait until Strapi cloud is more suitable for a non-code guy like me.
I need to host my newly developed Strapi CMS to test it out and see if my idea has legs but I cant do it for $99 a month because my usage doesn’t justify this price - we are talking maybe 1000 requests in 3 months and very minuscule database data.
But if this idea did kick off then we are talking hundreds of thousands of requests in the next year needing the Pro or Team packages.
So yeah its a tricky one because do you make a cheaper option for 1 person startups and hobbyists and hope that they turn into potential bigger clients or do you avoid them completely and they go somewhere else and you miss out on these opportunities or potentially save yourself the headache of these people.
Personally i have to find somewhere else to host for around $10-$30 and I will probably stay with that provider and upgrade with them and not come back to strapi cloud because its a schlep to move everything over… so in my scenario you have lost me as a customer but maybe you have lost nothing at all… only time will tell.
I got this deployed on Digital Ocean as an App with a Postgres DB for $12.00 p/m .
It was pretty easy and straight forward. I am also happy that I can scale the App and DB at any time . I am using the cheapest possible instances:
VM: 512mb ram + 1vcpu ($5)
DB: 512mb ram + shared CPU + 1 GB Disk ($7)
Comparing pricing - heroku seems to have better DB pricing by around $10 difference per month and you get slightly more.
But servers on Digital Ocean have more options with better pricing.
At the lowest chosen option Heroku and DO are about the same cost - good for hobbyists and proof of concept startups. At scaling costs could be better with DO.
Heroku is nice with its auto dyno scaling where as Digital Ocean seems to require more effort and cost. DO says it has autoscaling but it does not seem easy to find information on or enable.
My app on DO seems pretty slow network wise - the containers metrics show there is plenty ram and cpu left so its not that. I deployed the same app on Heroku with the same specs, in the same region and it was faster.
We currently serve around 3,000 users daily and have not experienced any issues with Heroku in the basic plan. I believe we can easily accommodate up to 10,000 users daily without any problems.
Strapi is a well-built platform, so my suggestion would be to focus on finding a hosting provider that is easy to set up and allows for quick iterations and low maintenance. Scaling up can be just as challenging as changing host providers entirely, so if scalability becomes an issue in the future, you can just move to a different provider.
Don’t recommend Heroku lower tears because of the following issue.
What’s happening is that my dyno on Heroku goes to sleep after 1 hour without traffic.
What means that it will take around 30 seconds to 1 minute for it to respond if this happens.
