I recently learned about Webflow and have done significant research into the platform and I would love to move my agency’s future websites to Webflow’s hosting and CMS as opposed to exporting and hosting elsewhere. It looks amazing!
However, I have one hang up and that is that the pricing seems to have changed several times over the past three years and I recently learned that pricing is yet to increase again quite significantly. I want to take advantage of the CMS too but I’m worried about being locked into this platform with over 100 sites and then being at the mercy of Webflow’s increasing prices over the coming years. I can imagine now how stressful this would be trying to explain these price hikes to a hundred clients. It’s already at the absolute limit of what my clients would be willing to accept. Even if current customers were to be promised grandfathered pricing, I don’t want move away from Webflow for future websites and have further fragmentation of how we manage sites across different platforms, CMS’s, and hosting.
Is this a concern for anyone else? Does anyone have contingency plans? For piece of mind, I’m considering not bothering with Webflow even though I really want to use it! It looks like such a great product but I have business to run and that means maintaining reasonable control and certainty.
Problem is Webflow do not (are incompetent to) realize how important it is to explain that. They publish some entertaining articles such as design trends for 2017, instead of elaborating on their cost/ benefit proposition, just as you clearly did in your post.
All your excuses for allowing them to gouge us are pointless.
you don’t have to FTP? one click instead of what, 2 clicks? I don’t know what you find hard about FTPing, but it doesn’t cost $15/month
*managing servers? again… there is nothing hard about setting up domains and add-domains at godaddy… It is stupid easy. And I can host a ton of domains on one account = $10/month for 30 domains.
(of course these are not heavy usage or complicated… but shows how completely out of touch the prices for BASIC hosting at webflow are)
*If you are concerned about scaling, then you host with a scalable solution, and pay for that scalable solution as it is used or NOT used. 3$/month one month, $8/month when busy… $20/month if ridiculously millions of hits busy… not $15/month all the time.
We are already paying for design/account
So hosting is cheap… what are we paying for then.
The BILLING client? - that is paying for itself by taking a cut.
There is NOTHING we are not already paying for, this is an outright RIP OFF and there is no excuse or look how easy i can do this, that makes it worth $15 a month for a single BASIC hosting of a website.