Petition to keep hosting discounts on paid plans. Pricing reviewed

Let me know if you do :wink:

Probably one of the main reasons behind price increases are Webflow’s own costs, and that may be due to using AWS. Google Cloud offers far better pricing, and I have the idea they are a better network company. Maybe you should consider moving the whole operation with them.

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I am not an established web designer. Quite new at this, although have been with Webflow long enough to know hosting static sites used to be $5. I agree with what I am reading here about this price increase being too much. And I find it especially annoying that the price changes have occurred several times, so a) it’s confusing, b) it doesn’t build trust, and c) how are we supposed to know what we are going to be charged (and thus will be charging potential clients) down the road? And as much as you guys are touting the “grandfathered in” option - that’s only for hosting plans purchased before your cutoff date. After, any new plans will go up, so frankly, I think that’s bollocks. :frowning:

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I have to agree with most or all that’s been said here. I’m fairly new at this, but I’m building my company with Webflow as my main supplier, and I chose this solution because a)it’s awesome (it must be said) and b)it’s affordable!!! But one can’t go without the other! Otherwise everyone would be on Adobe or IBM solutions… This is a sharp increase in cost and it puts my entire business plan at risk because my burn rate will go through the roof! And we all know what happens if cash burn goes out of hand…
@callmevlad, @thesergie, you have a very engaged community here, do listen please! And if you need a hand to find a solution because of cost increase, put it out there. It sounds to me everyone here is willing to help you out.

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Please webflow team could you give us some feedback on what you think about all our comments.
It is important for us to know what you think about this issue so we can make our business plan.

Thank you in advance.

$15 / Month for a simple splash page / Contact & about? I am going to loose/scare-away A LOT of my smaller clients.

How about this.

$5 / Month for Hosting for 5 pages
( Which should get a lot of small businesses in the door. I am currently charging them $15-$20/month - because that’s all these little guy can afford)

With this new plan - I’ll be asking them to pay $30-$40 dollar a month - and they cannot even blog??? There needs to be a REALLY basic plan so I can wet people’s whistle - and not waste my time turning wheels trying to convince them of Webflows’ superior value. I need a pricing to get them in the door - so I can upsale them on CMS services down the road.

$10 / Month for 10 Pages.
$15 / Month for 10+ Pages.

Also - If you guy are so set on the $15 price - then please pleaseee allow us to have at least ONE CMS database - so my clients can do some basic blogging. @callmevlad

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I will chime in here with full agreement with all that’s been articulated above by @average_joe, @PasolInteractive, et al. Your product, for all it’s virtues, breaks down as a tool for professionals servicing clients if the pricing models are

a) unreliable and subject to increases based on Webflow’s P&L/COGs objectives
b) passing cost on to the Value-Added Reseller (ie. us, the designers) without substantial and meaningful product or service features that enable us to justifiably bill our clients 2x more per month when debatably comparable (from an end user product perspective, at least) site development platforms exist, and the clients know it.
c) … if the pricing models demonstrate your understanding that we’ve commited ourselves and our business models to your platform, but that you give very little concern for the actual viability of our business in general once we’re locked in and developing/hosting with you by playing with tier pricing, increases substantiated by incremental expansion of existing features (ie more pages, more CMS collections, etc), but with no new, meaningful revenue-generating or time/cost saving tools or features.

Don’t get me wrong - I understand your dilemma as a SaaS business in 2017, with VC in their current freeze and wavering belief in companies not demonstrating profitability. We’re not privy to what your business strategies and growth imperatives are, but we are, in many ways, completely your business. If you’re striving for Enterprise sales and growth through their channels, which can absorb those cost increases more easily on behalf of their end clients, please be ware that we, the individual account holders and private contractors are not fools or oblivious to this, and that your organic customer base can so very quickly evaporate if we sense that we’re just marginalized padding to your revenue model, and that is a very dangerous gambit you’ll be playing, given how vocal and numerous we are. Not a threat, just a cautionary tale that’s been played out so many times in this industry, and you’d be wise to take the lessons of others who’ve alienated their original customers in a bid for high-end customers. After all, hosting services and traditional development tools are still very much in our wheelhouse - you’re just a nice - even preferable -convenience, but only when your costs are reasonable and inline with the market.

Talk with us. Be straight with us. Are we your priority? Or just a means to an end in a game where we can expect the costs to rise far above what we can reasonably justify given readily available alternatives? Please be fearless and honest - you’re playing with too many people’s livelihoods to justify anything less.

Thanks,

  • D
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Wanted to add in here an issue about grandfathered hosting plans.

What about for people who are updating a site? As in, not a “tweak” but an overhaul? If you design the update as a new site, you can’t transfer hosting. Webflow doesn’t support that. They say you have to cancel hosting on the old start and start it on the new. But that means you’ll lose your grandfathered hosting rate.
Can someone please address this?

(and once again, I’ll add that the new rates are too high…)
@callmevlad

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The new $16/mo Webflow pricing for CMS Hosting is killing my business. Small businesses are unwilling to and barely able to pay more than $12/mo let alone $16/mo just to have a website they can make posts to and change content on. Especially with cheaper static page generators for Wordpress, it is quickly becoming a superior and cheaper alternative to Webflow.

With Wordpress you can at least store files BESIDES images. It is now to the point where it takes just about as long to design a Wordpress site as it does a Webflow site, and hosting for a Wordpress site will easily be superior considering $8 to $12/mo can buy amazing hosting (have to mention it again) that ISN’T LIMITED TO IMAGES.

Webflow, you’re hurting yourself. I’m beginning to question where all this money is going and who you really want to target. It seems like massive firms have the upperhand here, but Webflow is too basic and limited for firms with high budget clients.

Most small businesses barely understand the pricing of design services as it is. Being a small business is not much different from being poor. Poor people tend to eat unhealthier than wealthier people. Similarly, small businesses tend to under budget and not make proper investments into design services. The wealthier businesses make better investments and develop a better business. But no matter how much they can ever understand this, you can only help them if you aren’t charging an arm and then a leg for a website. It costs enough to design business strategies and design a website as it is. And there is no way to convince (especially without buyer’s remorse which causes issues for future potential designers) a small business that $16/mo for CMS web hosting is normal and affordable. Most of these small businesses are between one person and 30 people. Webflow, how about you convince these businesses for me that $16/mo is okay. I can’t. It doesn’t work and it never will. Every penny counts, and small businesses take it too seriously. HELP.

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The webflow prices are comparable to Squarespace. However, with Squarespace
hosting you get eccomerce too. As far as CMS design and hosting, I’ve
seriously been considering Wix, which is stupid cheap ($4-$16 with
eccomerce). Also, Tumblr is free, and the mobile app for making updates is
excellent. Yes, it’s difficult to design a Tumblr theme, but free hosting
is kinda hard to beat.

I love webflow, but I agree. Small businesses simply will not understand
$16-$20 for a CMS. Especially when WordPress, Wix, and Tumblr are out there
for much cheaper. I know there are a ton of new features on webflow, but
not enough to justify the price hike in my opinion.

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I’ve used just about every service, especially Wix. I’ve been with Wix since it was based on FLASH. Wix is alright if you’re good at making cheap and extremely minimalist designs and have good images. Wordpress still has to be the best. I will never use Joomla for clients again (that was made up of several nightmares) and Wix is too basic for what they want.

Your best bet is to use a static page generator on Wordpress. Divi 3.0 on Elegant Themes is pretty awesome (and recently published), and I think some others that compete well. Wordpress is very modular so finding that right ecommerce platform or that right contact form backend combined with the front end is made fairly easy. You might have to buy a premium bit of software, but most of the time it’s unnecessary to buy it (or you can make the client buy it on top of what the budget already is). On top of all that, it takes no convincing of any business owner on how great Wordpress is, because they already think it’s great.

Also, apps are dead. Ignore apps. They’re a waste of time and money. Just optimize for mobile on the web.

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You’re right.

I would be happier if Webflow came out and announced that this whole pricing scheme was a ploy to raise tons of money to develop something mindblowingly amazing alongside Interactions 2.0 that they never mentioned. My expectations are extremely high; they need to deliver with what we are paying (on the increase June/July and for new sites after the promotion ended).

Unlimited always works, and Webflow’s limits are too low. Just like the internet, the platform won’t expand well with limits. The only reason YouTube could be a thing is because so many people were no longer limited to dial up speeds. The only reason Webflow can grow is if we aren’t limited to stupid quantities like 2k without having to pay extra. Because it will get to a point where Webflow can easily be used to host forums and all types of websites… someday…

(IMO) Wordpress is very useful if you consider a hacker friendly bloated platform to be acceptable.

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True, although I have automated backups so the one time it happened I just replaced the destroyed version on the server (and changed passwords and what not, of course, and sent a password reset request for the client’s account). Hacking is only really bad for larger businesses and any site that might hold important user information. Most of these sites don’t have user accounts, so it’s a non-issue.

But yes, it’s bloated and fugly. And what really pisses me off is that you don’t even have to tell someone why it’s so great. They’re already sold on it. In fact, once you mention Wordpress they become overjoyed that they are finally getting what they think they dreamed about.

WP is hacker friendly only if improperly managed. There are features missing in WP that sure are nicely supported in Webflow. With that said, Webflow has quite a way to go to be what I consider mature and easy to defend. Hense, the pricing issue …

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Release your inner salesman.

I’m pretty sure if you drop webflow support a message they will fix the discount. They’re good in that way :slight_smile:

I won’t host for a few reasons.

1.) You can’t optimize the code. I have been testing PageSpeed Insights hosted on Webflow vs. exporting and optimizing code and there is absolutely a huge difference in the scores.

Two sites I finished recently one scored 62 Mobile/77 Desktop, while the other scored 62 Mobile/73 Desktop. Not hateful but not where I like to be when I tell my customers “Hey your site is done.”

After I finished optimizing code the 62/77 now scores 75/87 and the other 62/77 scores 85/95. Both of these suffer from the “Blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.” that should be fixed but to be honest there’s a lot of code to sort through to inline.

2.) It’s cheaper to get a Dreamhost account and add in KeyCDN than it is to host 1 website on Webflow currently. Right now Webflow is $12 a month for 1 website. Dreamhost is $11 a month and KeyCDN is .04/gig. Thing is though I can host as many sites as I want on Dreamhost and mix in the KeyCND. See my point?

3.) I like Webflow for what it is, a rapid WYSIWYG website builder. To be honest I’m really starting to see some limitations though that is making me want to go back to just hand coding. There’s a lot of bloat code, there’s a lot of missing CSS and HTML5 features, and there’s things that were promised YEARS ago that still haven’t been implemented… I’m looking at you custom breakpoints.

I love Webflow. I’m critical of it because these things matter when it comes to my businesses reputation and my customers bottom line, money.

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He has a really good point here. I need to see

  • Much better image optimization
  • Caching of all the sorts
  • Much better code optimization
  • The minifying doesn’t seem to work well…it should be able to fit into two files like it does with autoptimize on Wordpress. I need this for my SEO reputation.
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Agree with most of the above and just wanted to add my name here. We host a few sites and the price increase dramatically reduces our profit. Incentivising multiple sites that use hosting with a reduction in cost seems like the way forward to me.

One thing in particular I noticed was the model you are planning on implementing. Hosting is fairly cheap now and the hosting that webflow supplies seems very expensive. I came onboard with webflow because it’s a valuable tool - I would be happy to pay a little more for the software/app if a reduction in hosting cost was made.

Why not put a couple of fair options forward to the community and get a vote on the most likely winner? You never know, it may stop you losing a lot of valued customers…

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