Webflow Optimize and Analyze pricing is insane

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I just watched the Webflow Conf, and like every year, I’m genuinely excited about the new features. The engineers have outdone themselves once again, delivering incredible tools that could take our websites to the next level. But then comes the inevitable letdown — the pricing.

We wait, hoping for something accessible, only to be met with pricing that’s way out of reach for 99.9% of Webflow’s current user base.

Take this basic setup as an example:
CMS Hosting: $29/month
Localization: $9/month
Analyze: $39/month
Optimize: $299/month

Total: $376/month — and that’s just on the low end.

How do I justify this to a client, especially when we’re talking about small businesses? The value of these features is undeniable, but the cost makes it feel like Webflow is catering to a completely different audience now. For a lot of us, this feels like a greedy corporate-driven move that’s moving away from the users who helped build the platform’s success in the first place.

It’s becoming harder and harder to recommend Webflow to smaller businesses when competitors offer more affordable alternatives. If this continues, more designers are going to jump ship.

Am I tripping or? Maybe Webflow should use their own Optimize feature to track how many users bail after seeing the price lol! :sweat_smile:

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A lot of freelancers make the mistake of evaluating costs in a personal-finances context, e.g. “would I / could I afford $X”. I know because I did it for at least a decade. Businesses don’t think that way. To a business, that $376 is a couple of sales, or 15 mins of a doctor’s work, or a single premium car wash.

Especially once a business has employees, they’re paying $50k to $100k per average employee. The website is an employee too… and it has a very specific job- sales and information.

If it does its job very well, It’s exceptionally worth it.

Compared to the fees you’re used to paying, the sticker shock is real, and the new features look ridiculously overpriced- but have you looked at industry A/B platform pricing?

“Optimizely” doesn’t publish pricing on their site anymore. They’ve replaced it with a “request pricing” button. Google and other sites indicate-

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There are many other choices, Webflow’s blog has an article on this too. In general, the pricing is not cheaper, though some like VWO and Sumo have a free plan to trial the product which I personally require when setting up a new client - they need to see what they’re getting, and I need to know if it meets their requirements.

I want to add an important note here- which is that nocode is expensive. It’s expensive because the code doesn’t disappear, it’s just engineered into the SaaS platform rather than built by your dev team and supported by your ops team. It’s a convenience, and a pricey one.

if your clients balk at the price, your best bet is to look for other platforms that offer the feature / price balance they’re looking for. If you know how to code, the options grow dramatically because you can build your own solutions based on Zaraz or Posthog which are cheap but very developer-oriented. You pay those feature-delivery costs in hours rather than dollars.

I’m exited about what Optimize promises- full designer integration for the variant setup, dynamic ongoing optimization based on user behavior. The pricing is on-par with industry pricing. If it’s very well built, it could mean that one site auto-optimizes for multiple markets, languages, locations, device types, someday maybe even demographics if e.g. FB oauth login and Google oauth login are supported. It has exciting potential as Webflow pushes this direction for the future.

This is where I feel Webflow sales could do a much better job of equipping and training freelancers and agencies in the Webflow platform. The big problem is that we can’t sell what we can’t see. Currently there’s no way to learn Optimize, test it, see results, give a client a tour of an Optimize-enabled site…

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Fair comment on the industry pricing for a/b testing but I had hoped Webflow would make this an affordable option for small businesses and make up the €€€ by pricing to sell at volume to their existing customers.

As it stands, most of my clients are SMEs, and none of them will sign up for it at that price point. I’m not even going to ask as i know the answer.

The reasoning behind the A/B testing doesn’t stack up when looking at analytics, the pricing is crazy and doesn’t make any sense when you have access to GA-4 for free.

Pity i was looking forward to both but priced like that they won’t be something i use.

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the average revenue for a small business in america with at least one employee is over 1 million. the average spend for marketing is around 4%-12% of annual revenue. a couple hundred bucks per month for analytics on arguably the most important sales and marketing tool any small business can have is cheap. it goes back to understanding what the client values. if they value data that can drive sales and increase reach then what business would not invest into that?

if your clients are focused only on price then, with the kindest of hearts i say, find better clients. or build a low cost solution for entry level clientele until they can build up their revenue. maybe GA4 with custom dashboards.

i’m not a big fan of price increases from a product i’ve used for a long time either. but that’s just the way to game is played. offer your product for free to get buy-in, increases prices and add features over time, then find the right target market that is willing to pay the price that will help the business grow far into the future. the same things we should be doing with our clients.

it’s also important to set the right expectations with your client. if you use a product like webflow to build their site you MUST expect price changes and additions/subtractions of features as possible. any regular business understands this because they have to calculate COGS and participate in the supply chain. tools like Webflow are a developer’s COGS and within that supply chain prices can change up or down.

sell value. not price.