CMS White label feedback

Just saying… The pricing structure for white-label has nothing to do with BC challenges. It is just the nature of inheriting and upgrading a platform that has a lot of backward-compatibility to carry over to new web technologies that is making development somehow slow. Remember ABC was purchased by Adobe and since then it has grown in bounds and a reference for SAAS similar platforms. To be honest, BC is secure and powerful, it just requires the team at Adobe to be more agile.

Muse was developed to attract print designers migrating to the web. It’s a middle ground product.I was with the product from day one and up till now I still check the forum once in a while too. I’m into Webflow nowadays, for the design tool which is super-good. But for web applications and development, am a BC loyalist to the core until things take a compelling turn at Webflow, I might sign-on. :grinning:

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+1 for everything @Hatch stated above. my biggest concern with this new feature is scalability. the cost and what this feature adds doesn’t seem to match up. as i mentioned previously, for my needs (which are described below) this feels like a feature that could to be a part of the professional or team plans. whether that means an increase in the monthly subscription fee is up to webflow but to me that is the real logical way this could be implemented for many of our needs.

what i see in the threads about this are two type of users who want/can benefit from white-labeling. (1) those who are using it as a way to be a reseller for hosting and want to remove ALL webflow branding (2) those who have freelance businesses working with multiple clients and would like to brand the CMS with their client logos to give that personal touch to their clients. these are two very different needs. for group #1 the current pricing structure of $5 per site makes sense. for group #2 not so much.

to the webflow team, is there any room for a hybrid model. for instance is there a way to have both the webflow logo and our client logo on the dashboard? and that being something that is included in the professional/team plans? that way it gives group #2 what we are looking for while still allowing you all to generate the word of mouth buzz you want to generate by having the webflow logo as part of the backend? then have exactly what you are presenting as white-labeling for group #1 who wants to scrub all instances of webflow branding from the back-end?

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I’m totally agree with @Topelovely, regarding Business Catalyst. It is a secure and very powerful platform.
But I never had problems with ABC support, actually they have a live chat support that is always there when I need, day and night. The downside is that is becoming quite expensive for my clients in Brazil due to our economic situation. Yesterday I moved 02 clients from BC to Webflow CMS because they were not able to pay for ABC. It is also true that I believe the Webflow CMS interface will be much less complicated for my clients.
If Webflow would offer a white-label package ($2500) like the one @Topelovely mentioned above, sure I would take. I would prefer such a package instead of the addon fees we are having now with CMS, White Label and soon eCommerce. Finally I have to say, that the Whitelabel from Webflow at a R$5 per month per client is way to expensive. I was quite disappointed.

Wow, 2500-3500 is ridiculous and no one but the biggest agencies doing a lot of work in webflow could afford it. Plus, agencies of that size are not using webflow at this point, it isn’t powerful enough yet. I like the idea of white labeling but not for that price, and not for $5 per site either.

Maybe I am reaching but if designers like myself purchase a pro or team plan, they are professionals or teams of professionals and white labeling should be included as a pro feature. I think webflow is forgetting that we pay a pretty big monthly fee to use webflow on a pro or team plan already. Use it as a value added incentive to get a pro or team plan instead of charging extra. This also reinforces brand loyalty that we are getting something extra as being a part of webflow. Of course offer the option to the free and personal plans at an extra cost, potentially $5 per site since it is more of an a la carte site by site basis for personal users.

So far, since before the CMS, all of the added “features”, while welcome, have really only been getting webflow up to the level of their competitors. The CMS was the first thing that actually offered something more, and then we are hit with a price tag, and no way to use it without hosting here. Now we are met with another feature, a true feature, and again they are charging for it. I do want to support the webflow team but I do that with my plan and I think a little bit of a bonus like white labeling for pro users and up would be a nice gesture to us as well. We have all stuck with you guys for many months waiting for the CMS and didn’t leave. Why not give us something back too.

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That’s another angle to it you have pointed out. I like that. I think they should look at all our suggestions and come with a plan that cut across depending on your size, volume, etc

@DFink Very well said. I hope the webflow team is listening.

thank you @DFink for succinctly saying everything i have been trying to express :slight_smile: it would be great if someone from the webflow team would respond to at least let us know they are paying attention. this thread is 45 responses deep at this point.

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We read every post, and we’re always listening (not in the creepy NSA way though) :smiley:

You all bring up a lot of good points, and we’re still very early in determining how all this will work for white labeling, so all options are on the table. Thank you for sharing your feedback!

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thanks and keep up the great work!

I was really hoping the private label option would be part of the Professional and up plans. That would work best for me as a small business owner.

More important, I am concerned that if the monthly price for hosting and important addons gets too high, a lot of people will go with cheaper alternatives and in the long run Webflow would end up loosing revenue.

Just my 2 cents.

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@callmevlad, we need white labelling so we can get recurring, passive revenue from sites we build. If you charge too much for this our profit margins are ridiculously low and using webflow becomes a non-viable option for monetising our businesses, big or small.

I can currently earn over 400% more per site per month if I build with wordpress and and use an affordable reseller hosting account. Sure, it’s a bit more work to setup and maintain, but please understand I want to feed my family, and I’m not going to lose out on huge chunks of cash for a little convenience.

If you really want to be competitive in the marketplace stop making it so damn easy for me to choose other options for site dev.

I am still on a free plan, because I was waiting for white label to launch before I started using webflow for client sites. Now it’s here and it’s totally not worth me signing up. So you guys haven’t actually got a single dollar out of me yet. If you had a better pricing structure you would have over $100 a month coming in from me. And I’m sure there’s plenty of guys and gals out there just like me who can’t be bothered with webflow for the same reasons.

Ultimately, it’s your call on the pricing. But you are really only ever going to get a limited slice of the pie if you can’t help us to compete on price when we are selling to our clients. If you give us the ability to have healthy profit margins, so many more freelancers and hobby developers will use webflow.

Think about it. Would you rather sell 10 Ferraris or 10,000 Fords. It’s your call.

Much love, yet another unhappy potential customer.

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I’m sorry but your statement didn’t quite make much sense at all. If your “I can currently earn over 400% more per site per month” could actually do so much better, I would think you shouldn’t even consider using Webflow. And the statement about you wanting to splash $100 is even more absurd.

If you really saw value, you would had at least spent on using some of the earlier plans. Like I did and many of us did. By the gods you’re still on the free plan and you considered all the other features to be not worthy of being paid for, it goes to tell me a message; that at least you had no respect for the R&D work, OPEX and everything else that was in placed to make things work in Webflow.

I do agree with some other posters that perhaps, Webflow should had handled the pricing better. But I really don’t get what’s the fuss about when it isn’t obligatory at all. You want something, pay for it. That something cost lots of time to make. You would convey the same message to your clients when they accuse you of charging them higher for something or when they simply refuse to pay for your something.

To Weblow: Pricing could have been handled better, I don’t disagree that you should charge for white-labelling. Bundling it along would be great, but it’s no deal breaker for me anyway. Our business model allows us still, to feed our staff, our families and all the crap. But to be fair, maybe the charges for white-labeling was slightly too high.

@alexanderwong I think that what Pyeman is saying is that his preference would be to use the tools here but he finds the pricing structure to be too expensive, especially in comparison to other platforms like WordPress. I do see where he is coming from as I’ve disagreed with their pricing several times as well. He does make some good points. I hope they revisit the pricing for the cost of the white-label but I have my suspicion that they will not. So if that is the case, we either suck it up and pay for the more expensive tools here or we don’t use the features that we don’t need (like white-label or CMS) to save money.

I know the webflow team says that we can pass the costs on to our customers, and that is true, but at the same time, there is just so much we can get by with charging the average customer. Not to mention, IMO we could probably charge the same price regardless if we are developing with webflow or WordPress. If anyone thinks that would not be the case, give your thoughts.

With all of that being said… there is still much more to it than all of this. I thought long and hard about whether or not to move away from webflow. And, I’m still here, even after my problems with the pricing. I think we must keep in mind that while we pay more here (and possibly earn less per client) we can design a site from scratch and design it exactly how we envision. I don’t know about any of you, but I can’t do that with WordPress.

Additioanlly, there is less glitches trying to build sites here. Trust me, I’ve used practically every product on the market, and all of them have things I can’t design the way I want and not everything always functions the way it should.

For example, right now I am using Adobe Muse to build my music site.The good news is that Muse has lots of widgets to spruce up the website, like animations, parallax, sliders, video AND audio widgets. And now with the latest pre-lease, it has responsive tools.

However… I have been having one hell of a hair-pulling experience getting my site’s layout to look exactly the way it should, even though Muse has the ability to add breakpoints. Perhaps it will get better after it becomes a proper release, but as of now, I’m having various issues. Now to mention, you have to manually move everything on the page that isn’t laid out properly on every single breakpoint. That could end up being a LOT of work as the site grows.

The bottom line: webflow is more flexible, often saves time, and simply works better but the pricing is a bit of turn off for some. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: support is superior here. And thus, we really should weigh all of it together.

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@alexanderwong, I currently spend $400 USD a year on hosting. I can host 50+ Wordpress sites on that plan. I currently charge clients $25AUD a month for hosting, so I make a good profit. If that still doesn’t make much sense bust out a calculator and do so sums.

I’d happily reduce my profit margins somewhat to use Webflow as I do consider the other features worthy of being paid for, but not if I then have to pay extra upon extra for every single site.

I get that it’s really easy for you to jump in and start criticising an individual’s opinion, even though this thread is titled CMS White label feedback. That’s my feedback, so I’m going to leave here. If you don’t like that’s cool, but calling my opinions absurd because you don’t understand basic math is just petty.

My point is simply this; white-labeling a cms is usually done so people can re-sell it to customers for a profit. That is why whitelabeling exists. As such, to maximise sales potential, Webflow would do well to make sure people utilising this feature actually have the ability to make reasonable profits.

I completely respect Webflow’s right to charge whatever they want. It’s a great product and they deserve to make some serious bank. It is my opinion though that they could make a lot more money by making their pricing more competitive.

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@Pyeman $400 a year for hosting? That better be some badass hosting. lol. I bought a basic plan at DreamHost for $41 for the first year (and the second year is $119). I realize as I grow that I may need something else.

Well it can with Microsoft Azure from my perspective…it depends on scaleability

Like this ^^