Selling Webflow Hosting to Customers

I’m a photographer transitioning into making websites and have decided to work with webflow as my platform. My intention had been to make everything from scratch, and I am still working on learning CSS and JavaScript, but I’ve read enough from seasoned web developers to see that even if one has those skills, that webflow can save a lot of time and frustration.

I had thought about making extra income hosting sites that I make. There are reseller hosting sites that are very cheap and I could host possibly 10 sites for $6 to $8 per month. But I also thought about all the hassle of setting up all the C panels and keeping track of everything. Also, I realize now in working on a website that I can make a change in webflow and instantly publish the change, instead of working offline and recoding a page and uploading it.

So I have two main questions.

If you’re selling your client on the idea of using webflow hosting, do they have any problem with the $12 per month hosting fee? Do you need to sell them on the benefits of hosting with webflow?

Do you feel there is room to mark up the hosting fee and make extra money? If so, what would be a reasonable fee? For example, the market I’m going after would be industries that have about 200 to 300 employees and might be doing $20MM in business, but their website needs are simple, basically a 5 page “brochure” with possibly adding some videos. Would a monthly charge of $25 to $35 for hosting be reasonable? Or would they shop around for something better? Or is that chump change? I realize if I were dealing with a mom and pop restaurant it might be a different story, and I would be interested in thoughts about pricing hosting for that type of business as well.

I usually charge 50 with CMS hosting for site maintenance and hosting. If you aren’t using the CMS, you can host elsewhere. The real power of the platform is the CMS and white labeling for clients.

What’s are the main reasons to use CMS? For the client to be able to make changes? Couldn’t we easily do that for them in a couple of minutes going through the editor? Or is there much more to it than that?

Since I posted the above I found some videos about collections. Can the user access the data from collections according to what they want? For example if there were a collection of employees, could the user ask for males or females, or by years of experience, or by location, etc? (Presuming of course the collection had these fields and corresponding data).

Check out the tutorial page to get familiar with the CMS. You can do anything you want with it, it’s fully custom. CMS & dynamic content | Webflow University

Thanks for the link. I looked at it and it was very interesting, but I couldn’t find an answer regarding general website visitors. Do they have the ability to control what items appear? For example if I have a collection regarding cities in the US and my fields include climate, economy, and population, would the website user be able to ask for those items according to their search criteria? For a numeric field, could they search by number, such as “greater than”, etc.?

Hey @vernon,

The webflow hosting can be a tiddly bit expensive, but it’s a great option if you don’t have skills in deploying your own server or implementing CMS functionality OR if you just want something super easy.

In most cases, your client won’t have an issue paying $12 per month + your markup, and you can let them know the benefits of hosting with ‘your service’ - monitoring, SSL certs, edit your content, cloud-based hosting (speed etc). You’re the salesman now, work out the value and see how you can sell that to your client.

If you think about most easy click mainstream hosting providers (godaddy) it’s about $120 AUD a year (Just hosting, nothing else) Agencies charge from pretty much $400 AUD onwards. You will have no issue sitting in between there where comfortable.

If they don’t want to edit their content, or they’re just not interested in paying in excess of $100/per year then look at deploying a static bucket on AWS. It’s really not that complicated and can cost you almost nothing. Then if they need changes in future you charge them your min hour rate.

BUT NOTE: The way you will make the highest margins is learning how to deploy your own web server and providing all the benefits that webflow hosting does (SSL /CMS etc) yourself. Y

This will take time to learn and commitment, but it’s a good long-term goal.

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You’d be able to manually create filters using multiple dynamic lists with those filters applied and showing/hiding them using tabs or interactions. Webflow is built to be completely modular so you’d have to get very familiar with it before you’d be able to take on this task.

Honestly what you described isn’t really cost effective for the majority of webflow’s user base. I find it’s far more time saving to simply host on webflow once you consider the cost of your time to manage an external server and even just the time to export and upload and make sure everything runs smoothly. Not to mention incorporating a 3rd party cms which, being with webflow since the very beginning, was the only option we had for a long time. And it was not fun.

What’s not cost effective? Hosting on AWS? Or eventually hosting with your own web-server?

If you’re referring to the own web-server, I agree it’s not effective for the majority of the webflows user base, but as @vernon has stated, he is looking at this as a business and is currently learning CSS / JS, hence my suggestion to eventually push towards running his own web server, as it yields the highest margins.

I think running your own web server takes more actual support and setup time and potential issues than simply hosting with webflow. When you factor in the amount of time you spend when on webflow it’s done for you, you are likely going to break even or come out behind on your own server long term. 20/month is so cheap for what you are getting with webflow, both hosting and CMS built right in.

@Vernon

As well as selling Webflow hosting, why not provide add-on’s? For example, your Webflow design expertise.

Think about how much your client is saving as opposed to hiring a full-time designer. $50k annual salary Vs $250-$500 per month hosting, maintenance and small design tasks.

I currently design for companies with $10M+ revenues and it’s fair to say they prefer to handle their own Webflow hosting because they don’t want to rely on a one man band or agency to power their most vital online destination.

That said, small business owners need the most help with getting online and utilising all of these amazing features to further boost their business revenues and longevity.

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