You open three pricing pages. One starts at $300/month, one at $99/month, one at $49/month. You pick the cheapest. Three months later your bill is $600 because you went over the API call limit, added a second locale, and needed a higher record count. Headless CMS pricing is designed to scale with usage, and it scales in ways the pricing page doesn't make obvious.
What the Pricing Page Doesn't Show You
Most headless CMS platforms charge on multiple dimensions simultaneously:
- Records or entries: How many content items you can store. A site with 500 blog posts, 200 product pages, and 50 team members adds up fast.
- API calls: Some platforms meter every GET request. A site with 10,000 daily visitors hitting uncached endpoints can burn through a plan's API limit in days.
- Locales: Multi-locale support is often gated behind higher tiers. Adding French and German might push you up two plan levels.
- Users and roles: Seat-based pricing means a 10-person content team costs significantly more than the base plan suggests.
- Bandwidth: Asset delivery (images, files) adds to cost on platforms that host media.
Building a Real Cost Estimate
Before you commit to any platform, answer these questions: How many content entries will you have in 12 months? How many locales do you need now and in a year? How many editors need CMS access? Are your pages statically generated (low API calls) or server-rendered (higher API calls)? What's your asset storage and delivery volume?
Run those numbers against each platform's pricing page, including the overage rates, which are usually buried in the fine print. A platform that looks cheaper at the base plan often isn't when you account for overages.
ContentGrid vs. Contentful vs. Sanity
Contentful's entry-level paid plan starts around $300/month and limits records and roles significantly. Sanity's Growth plan is more flexible but charges per seat and per API request beyond a threshold. ContentGrid's Builder plan at $49/month includes unlimited API calls, two locales, and five users, which covers most startup and agency projects without overages.
The 80% price difference is real for teams in that range. It's less relevant if you're at enterprise scale with complex role hierarchies and compliance requirements, at that point you're negotiating custom contracts with everyone anyway.
What to Ask Before You Sign
Ask for a cost estimate based on your specific usage numbers, not the example on the pricing page. Ask what happens when you exceed a limit: do you get billed automatically, or does the platform block new content? Ask whether locale count affects your plan tier. Ask about annual vs. monthly pricing differences. The answers tell you more about real cost than the pricing page ever will.
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The headless CMS with AI built in: a content API, AI-assisted writing and publishing in multiple languages.