Webflow is phasing out client billing

I don’t want to have to pay for my clients subscription upfront, if the client doesn’t pay then I will have to follow them up.

Is there an integration with Bonsai that will automatically cancel the clients hosting if payment is not made?

@Kwalker1995 - Nope, that is not a capability. Something you have to manage yourself.

agree 100% – this move is very bad and only serves Webflow’s interests and not it’s users. I have been a very strong advocate for Webflow up until this point but this has burned me badly. I want nothing more to do with this platform. I honestly hope there’s a mass-exodus off the platform so Webflow realizes what a bad decision they have made.

oh and the $50 credit per site to do this migration to Bonsai or whatever is a joke. Like $50 does not even come close to what it takes to explain all of what is happening and why I now have to set up X number of webflow accounts for clients so I can transfer their sites to them. Can you tell I’m disgusted?

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As such as strong advocate on the platform I’ve watched and enjoyed your content for years @pixelgeek but this change is not healthy at all for the company or its users. its straight up wrong and I truly hope you see that someday. Good luck to you sir, you’re a great dude, but please don’t insult us by saying Webflow is listening. I won’t agree with ya until I see this get walked back and Webflow apologize for doing this to all of us. Seriously.

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Last week a client contacted me to build a website. After I explained everything that we would need to do (third party systems) to have a subscription plan, bookings, videos, and other things, she said, “Wix offers everything in one subscription, no third party needed”. After using WF for more than 5 years, I had no idea that Wix offered so many things. And today, after I realise the Billing Client is going away (I never thought that I was going to say it), but I will look into Wix platform. Don’t get me wrong, WF is excellent to build beautiful websites. All these years, I always waved the WF flag for this. But I am getting convinced that, nowadays, clients need a functional website, easy for them to manage with all they need in one place. And unfortunately, WF is still only about having a beautiful website and nothing more. With Billing Clients gone, I will have to create an account for all my current clients, migrate their sites and lose my profits. I created a Bonsai account but cancelled it straightway, I am not going to use it. It is just nonsense. So, I am unsure if I will build future websites on WF. I will start looking for alternatives.

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Joao, I had the same experience with a client before Editor X came out. They needed a membership site with multi-lingual, events, CRM, etc. WIX had it all at no extra cost so I built their site in WIX. It was kind of a miserable experience though. Some things just didn’t work right - simple things like auto-margin to keep boxes symmetrical with different length text, constant fail to save edits and disconnects during editing, and non-editable CRM auto replies that made no sense to customers. So much of their help sections were also out of date and were not accurate. I swore I would never use WIX again.

Fast forward a couple years later and now we have Editor-X. It is definitely a major improvement over the vanilla WIX designer but still falls short of Webflow imo, although I did consider switching to it. I am not an award winning designer and most businesses don’t care about the fancy stuff anyway. I imagine WIX is totally fine for many small business owners (which I believe is also their target). But, the issues I experienced years ago were such a huge turn off to WIX for me. And, I don’t think many of those issues have improved with threads like this still popping up: https://community.wix.com/partners/forum/technical-talk/serious-malfunctions-in-editor

If they ever improve their connectivity issues and the CMS component (I love Webflow’s CMS and I think it makes it easier for client’s to update their own site) seems like it would be a no-brainer to jump to Editor-X. Just be wary of the issues you might experience.

I’m still hanging on to Webflow for now - but, like you, looking elsewhere too.

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Thanks a lot for your feedback regarding Wix! I was indeed apprehensive about building anything in Wix. And your feedback will save a lot of my time! I didn’t know about Editor-X, I just had a look, and they look very promising! I will give it a try!

I feel very sorry that I am looking for alternatives, as along 5 years of working with Webflow, I kind mastered their tools, and I am very familiar with everything. So it would be a waste of knowledge to move to another platform. But, I don’t see another solution.

Again, thank you a lot for your reply!

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Sad to see Client Billing get phased out, will be awkward to figure this out with customers. I have some basic questions I still do not get. Is this how things will work moving forward?

PHASE OUT CLIENT BILLING

  1. Cancel Client Billing Per Project (1 by 1) — We first need to go to each individual client project and cancel client billing.
  2. Cancel Webflow Client Billing — Once all individual projects have no client billing, we can remove client billing from our Webflow account (it can no longer be enabled after that).

HOW DOES IT WORK FOR NEW PROJECTS?

  1. Pay Webflow First — We need to first pay for all hosting fees directly in Webflow (our upfront expense)?
  2. Get Reimbursed — We use a third-party payment system (Bonsai) to get our reimbursement for site hosting from clients?

There is no link between Bonsai and Webflow? We need to handle this manually and separately Or am I missing something?

Damn, had to get a client set up today, guess this will throw a wrench in that plan, or will have to use our own CC to get that going =(

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Considering the same, team looking into this now.

It’s a shame - as a small agency, we rely on external partners to charge our clients directly for their services, and not just for liquidity reasons. It is more transparent and much less bureaucracy for all parties involved. The excuse regarding “developing our own financial service” doesn’t count - hundreds of competitors offer similar options, or at least the option to add multiple credit cards.

We recently chose Webflow as a tool for the future for this reason as well. We are now rethinking this.

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Damn Webflow, you really did us dirty here… hopefully this is the last feature you remove cause I know myself and a lot of other designers are one step away from switching to another website builder…

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I’m going to go ahead and add my hat to the ring of people who are disappointed by this switch.

I only use webflow for clients where the service makes sense over hand-coding their sites, which fortunately for me is currently 1 active client and one more being built at the moment.

I feel like I can safely pivot away from Webflow at this point but I feel so much for those who have many clients or are doing all of their work solely through Webflow.

It’s kind of a shame because I’ve always found webflow to be a decent service, albeit with a few drawbacks, but from now on I’m not even going to consider it as an option for my future clients.

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I’ve been using Webflow for what, coming on 7 years now. I’ve seen quite a lot unfold over that time.

Whilst I have really enjoyed using the platform, I have been losing faith in it over the last couple of years. As others have mentioned, there are many unsolved feature requests, some of which have been there for years, and it seems that updates aren’t frequent at all anymore. I have no idea what Webflow are doing behind the scenes, if they’re doing a complete re-write of the software, if they’re having difficulties internally with team and resource management, I don’t know.

I really don’t want to have to be looking to 3rd parties for resources and solutions like Finsweet all the time for workarounds to existing problems or limitations with Webflow. Or paying for things like https://www.jetboost.io/ to extend it’s functionality. It has become too much of a maze, and there has been very little (visible) progress for some time now.

Now I’m having client billing taken away from me, apparently so that Webflow can free up resources / team members internally to work on other things. I would rather pay a little extra on top of my Webflow subscription to have access to client billing, than I would pay for and manage an entirely separate platform (Bonsai) that I don’t need.

Work on what other things exactly? How many people and how much resource will you be freeing up as a result of this? Sad to say, I don’t trust what you’re telling me, and am all too familiar with the smoke and mirrors of the corporate world. At least give transparency to the people who have funded and supported your platform consistently for years.

Sigh. I hope it’s worth it Webflow, because if this goes, and the development of new features / wishlist items continues at the pace it has (Design Responsive Websites - Webflow look at the list here and see what’s happened in the last 12 months…), I’ll be looking for alternatives, and thinking about getting out.

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Would it not make sense for webflow to simply allow for different payment methods for individual workspaces in your account. For example, you create a new workspace for Client X, add your team / projects for that client to the new workspace and enable a different payment method for that workspace?

The majority of my webflow work has been for larger agencies who had team accounts that I worked from. I only had one small client page hosted from my account that I had to transfer over to a new webflow account, but I can imagine this being a major hassle for folks having to migrate over a large number of sites!

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This is a step backward. We’re still fairly new to Webflow, but have been actively selling clients on it for ease of use, billing included. Separate billing for each project is basic functionality that teams obviously relied on.

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While quite disappointed by client billing phasing out soon. Would it be doable to use membership beta as a way of replacing client billing ? Can we set the pricing in USD even though I’m in Europe ( checking conversion rate isn’t fun ) ?
This will involve creating a lot of different hosting tiers to match Webflow plans. How many tiers of memberships can we set up with the current beta ? Can a client subscribe to multiple membership at the same time ?
We’ll still require third party like Airtable to organize all that mess. Not really fond of doing Webflow’s work of selling their own hosting plans and paying transaction fees on top of that.
Feels like Webflow could offer lifetime membership features to agencies / freelancers who dedicate in selling their hosting.

oh boy, this is definitely a deal breaker for me

As someone who has set up billing for clients with no commission built in, this is simply a way for me to extract $240/year with the added benefit of more hassle.

I’m wondering if anybody has the perfect user flow on how to manage this transition. I read about 50% of the comments here but was wondering if now in August, anything had changed regarding the phaseout.

@webflow, I understand that handling money for designers must be very time consuming or intricate for your accounting department, however this move feels like you took control from the designers’/developers’ hands, and I can’t help but wonder if you weighed all your options before you pulled the trigger. I’ve seen companies execute on decisions that they thought was the right path forward, only to see them implode soon after.

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