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-
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…
