Can somebody explain the Strapi Cloud Pricing?

General
#1

Hello :wave:
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
5 Likes
#2

Hello @Antoine

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. The Strapi Cloud prices and margins are in line with the software and CMS industries for the good reason that its the only way to build a sustainable business allowing Strapi to hire and pay a large team of developers to add new features, enhancements, bug fixes, documentation to the Strapi open source project. For instance, we recently announced that the ability to create custom roles will be coming to Strapi Community Edition while it was previously only available to Enterprise users (also known as RBAC).

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.

2 Likes
#3

Thank you for your honest reply @vcoisne

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

1 Like
#4

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.

2 Likes