Will my site be hosted if I upgrade from free plan to CMS: Site Plan? or Will I have to be buying a separate hosting plan?
Yes your site will be hosted and you won’t need to pay extra.
A Site Plan is a hosting plan.
Basically now in Webflow you have:
- Account Plans: that’s your monthly fee for using Webflow. You need a pay one as soon as you want to lift limitations on your free sites, and/or when you need more than 2 free sites.
- Site Plans: that’s the hosting. There’s a Free and Enhanced staging, then you have the Basic, CMS and Business, then the E-commerce ones. Any site hosted with a custom domain needs at least a Basic plan.
The particularity of this pricing model is that if you don’t need more than 2 “unhosted” (that means hosted but without a custom domain) sites, then you don’t need to pay for an Account Plan at all: you’ll get the full potential of Webflow for your custom domain sites by only paying for a Site Plan for each of them. Your free unhosted sites, however, will have some limitation, but still enough power for you to test out features an start building a new site. When you hit the limitations on a free site, then add a Site Plan to it to lift them.
3 Likes
Thanks a lot Vincent!
Here’s a blog entry on how to start with and use Webflow for free, as a design shop:
I’m trying to understand plans and pricing (https://webflow.com/pricing).
If I have three websites, one of which has CMS functionality, what is the best plan or plans? (No ecommerce, low traffic, and I don’t do web design for clients.)
I’d like to have Webflow host the sites, just for convenience, if it’s not too expensive.
As far as I can tell, I would need to sign up for two Basic Site plans and one CMS Site plan, for a total of $40 per month.
Or would it be better to sign up for an Account plan? Is there separate pricing for hosting sites created with Account plans?
Yes, if they each have a custom domain, yes. Paying for a site plan unleashes all the power of webflow for each site.
Not necessarily. Account plan will give you extra features like having a lot of sites under Webflow.io (sites in development and for research), code export, site transfert… it’s really aimed at pro designers with multiple sites.
No. The price of a site plan varies only regarding the frequency of payments: monthly or annual.
Do I need to upgrade my plan to connect a clients domain to my newly created site(s)?
1 Like
Each site with a custom domain needs a Site Plan. Paying for a Site Plan is what gives you access to linking a custom domain to a site.
On a Free Account Plan you can have 1 or 2 sites in development hosted under the .webflow.io domain and not linked to a custom domain. They then use the Free Site Plan, also known as Free Staging.
With a paid Account plan, you can have as many site as you want under the .webflow.io domain. They then use the Enhanced Free Site Plan, also known as Enhanced Staging.
Enhanced Staging is way better than Free Staging. Free Staging only have 2 pages, no custom code, 20 CMS items. For Enhanced Staging, it’s 100 pages, custom code, 50 CMS items among other differences. Enhanced Staging is good for development, research, and for production landing pages that you don’t care having a custom domain attached to. You can also use them to download their code.
Edit: 22.04.2020 I made a comparative dashboard to quickly compare the plans : Understand Webflow Pricing: Sites & Accounts Plans
2 Likes
oh thank you, this was very helpful 
1 Like
Perfect. Thank you! 
1 Like
Hey, anytime, don’t hesitate. This pricing model is not easy to get, but I think it’s because it wants to be fair for several designers and developers situations.
I am totally confused now. I have a PRO Account Plan. I was (and I guess still) had a site, “johnnybush.com” published under a custom domain in previous months - no problems. Now, today (Jan 13, 2020) I look at the site to do a little editing and the custom domain does not appear under the publishing area. What gives? Do I now need to pay for a “site plan” – NOT good. I can get into my design work to edit but, no way to publish custom domain at the moment!@#$&%@! Thanks for a quick reply that I can understand in layman’s terms as a designer.
Now, since opening up the site in Webflow, my website won’t come up at all!!!
@Claude_Cash could you explain what’s going on a bit more? As far as I understand, you didn’t have a site plan for this particular website yet? Are you on the current or legacy account plan? All current account plans don’t allow for custom domains. Did the domain name re-direct to your webflow.io address? Happy to help, do need a bit more background here.
I have been with Webflow since April 2018…
My site settings indicate I am an enhanced site plan for this site. Not sure the difference between legacy and current account.
The site still comes up as johnnybush.com…not, redirected to the webflow.io address!
The site has been a custom domain as long as I started using Webflow…and always published custom domain. I hate to now go to my client and tell him he now has to pay extra to keep the custom site.
So…now you get paid for hosting AND site plan. Boy howdy. Wish I had known 21 months ago…
Thanks for the quick response.
@Claude_Cash that’s odd. I can still see your website so I’d contact support. The plans we’ve had for a few years now always need you to buy a site plan for each website, at least if you want to connect a custom domain. Not sure why that used to work? That’s why I’d suggest to contact support.
I believe it is possible to download the zipped code and then upload to a server via FileZilla, correct (where the site sits)? Perhaps that is the way I was getting around that in the past? Maybe I had just thought I was using a custom domain. Thanks.
@Claude_Cash so you haven’t got webflow hosting? Your website is hosted on an external server? Thanks for clarifying!
Hi Sarah,
You’ve all explained it in a lot of details and I think I know the answer of this one but does this mean that even subdomain.domain.com would require a site plan?
@Stefan_Stoyanov yes. If you want a subdomain, you’ll need a site plan for that subdomain. A subdomain is pretty much a separate website that’s linked within your site domain. A configuration of Fastest Web Hosting Services | Buy High Quality Hosting is a page on the website so that’s just one plan.