Webflow pages vs. webflow projects

Design help General
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First, kudos. Webflow is badass- it’s actually helped me understand CSS better. Since logging on for the first time a few weeks ago I’ve become a power user. I use it all day, every day. As a designer, it’s totally replaced photoshop for me - no small feat.

Now to the problem:
So I’m building a site & seem to have hit a 10 page limit. I was under the impression that as a paying member, I would have unlimited pages to work from, and a limit of 10 projects. As a user, I equate “projects” to “websites” and “pages” to well…web pages.

Am I missing something here? Is the $20 per month plan really just 1 site with max of 10 pages (or 10 one-page sites)? Am I using webflow wrong and creating multiple website projects without knowing it?

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Hi @Todd I’m glad you’re finding Webflow very useful. :slight_smile:

For Personal Plan you get 10 sites and each site can have a max of 10 pages per project. The Professional Plan you can create unlimited sites with unlimited pages.

Let me know if this helps! You can also PM me if you have more specific questions.

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Hi @thesergie, thanks for the quick response. Not completely sure how to PM via Discourse. Gotta say, I didn’t know pages would be limited when I signed up for the paid version - it’s really disappointing.

As a user, the initial onboarding was great. I watched all the tutorial videos, got to test webflow out first hand on a couple of pages, hit that initial paywall of two pages and converted to the $20 per month plan. Perfect. I didn’t mind the limited demo because I expected the roadblock. Demo’s are free, the full service is not. Totally cool with that.

But now I’m a paying customer. A part of your growing community. All I want to do is build my one site, start to finish. At the $20 per month level, I expect a limit on the number of projects - but you HAVE to have an unlimited number of pages for those projects. Allowing me to have 10 sites/projects is great, but if I can’t fully finish one, I’ll never do another.

You’re forcing me into “OH NO” mode, where I now have to figure out a workaround. I don’t want to be there. Worse case might be to look into other companies. I do my research, I know there are half a dozen or so other companies that kind-of-sorta offer the same functionality to some degree. But fuck them, I chose you guys. I think $20 per month justifies me being able to finish the project I’ve started. It’s a bad surprise. Stop it.

With that said…what do I do? How can I work around this problem you’ve created for me? I won’t pay $42 per month (or $420.00?) to finish one site.

Help me make webflow a permanent tool that I want to use daily.

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+1 on removing the 10 page/site limit for Personal accounts, I hadn’t caught that either. If you must limit the total number of pages, It would be a lot better to make it 100 pages distributed as the customer sees fit between their sites. That way someone who just wants to do a single 11 page site isn’t boned.

I can imagine that distributing pages model might be complex to manage, but even 5 sites with unlimited pages each would be better than 10/10.

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In theory, from what I can tell you can get extra pages by duplicating the site that has 10 pages, then making your changes to whatever pages you want. Then DO NOT clear unused styles. That way the styles from the original pages, plus the styles from the new pages will be in the duplicated site CSS. Then you can simply name the pages in the duplicate site whatever you want and link to pages in either site. When you export just use the CSS and and assets from the duplicated site instead of the original and consolidate all your html pages into the same folder. Once its set up, it should be easy to make any modifications. For linking to any page you can simply use the /home to refer to any page in either site.

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Thanks for the think-through, that makes sense.

For our part, it’s pretty attractive to have webflow host our site on our domain just to minimize steps in the workflow. (Obviously we don’t have much js going on; it’s a pretty straightforward brochureware site that will just be evolving frequently.) Right now it’s under 10 pages so none of this is affecting us, but I can see how it could get to the point that it might.

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@Todd thanks for your response. I totally understand where you are coming from and I am considering everything you are saying. On average how many pages would you have for a project?

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To be safe I would like to have 30-40 pages because some sites have a lot of sub pages like single team pages or if you are showing all what a product can do, help pages this will not be on very site so I don’t think webflow servers will have a problem with this. But it’s up to you.

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Hey @thesergie. Hard to give an average page count since every project is different. Glad that @DFink has a work-around, but the fact that a work-around exists is telling.

As a quick aside - I like the “10 page limit” banner you guys added today, though I would turn it on 100% of the time since only those who hit 10 pages will ever see it. It’s still “surprise, time to pay more!” Show it to the us on first login & maybe let us “x” out of it if we choose. Also, I really think the 10 page limit should be included on the pricing page. As time goes by, more and more people will be shocked by it’s existence.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about this today and I’ve decided to include my specific use-case here. I know you guys are busting your asses and sometimes get so deep in the code over such a long period of time that you may lose sight of who your users are and how a newbie user approaches your service. Hopefully this can help put things in perspective.

I’m a startup founder in NYC building my business. Our MVP backend is built on rails and since my background is in art & design, I’m hooking up the frontend myself. I used to just do the .psd’s and hand it off to a frontend dev, but I’ve wanted to learn HTML/CSS for a while, need to save some cash and help my small & bootstrapped team. And heck, my wife and I learned rails earlier this year via General Assembly - so screw it, let’s go full stack!

Now here’s the thing. I’ve got the main visitor “marketing” site to do, the login & onboarding process, the user pages & account pages, the admin…everything. I signed up for the $20 per month plan since I’m rational and want to test a new service before I dump cash for an entire year. I know going in that these designs will take me several months to complete. As a new user, if I like the service over the next few months it’ll begin to make more sense to convert up to the next stage - the $16 / $192 package.

If I run out of projects (ie. a project for the marketing site, the login user path, the admin etc), I’ll convert to the $35 per month plan and so on. Simple.

From my perspective, the current user experience is similar to if I signed up and paid the monthly subscription fee to Adobe for Photoshop CC only to find out that it limited me to 10 layers. That’s ridiculous and laughable to think about, yet it’s the experience you currently have. Also notice that I’m not complaining about the price, just the placement of it in my user lifecycle.

I can tell by using your product every day that you guys have put an incredible amount of thought and time into it. And you guys are doing a great job, it’s hard to complain about anything when you only launched multiple pages a few weeks ago. Most of the bugs I run into are small, but keeping projects limited to 10 pages makes Webflow a toy and does a HUGE disservice to the amazing high quality production tool that it really is.

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Hey Todd, thanks for your feedback and explaining further. We’re going to consider everything you’re saying and we’ll get back to you about this. I’m sorry for any frustration this has caused!

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Hey Todd, we’re going to make some changes to the page limit. We agreed that 10 is too limiting. We decided to up our page limit to 20 pages for each project on the personal accounts. We don’t want to have such an extreme roadblock for most web projects. This change should take effect soon. We will also communicate this in our pricing pages so our users don’t find any surprises. We will also add a counter in the pages panel showing you how many pages you currently have and how many you have left.

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@thesergie Thank you guys soooo much. This will make a huge difference! :slight_smile:

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Hi @thesergie just checking up on this feature. Any projected date for this to go live?

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I agree the page limit is too restrictive. Even 20 pages is a “strange” limit - I can’t understand why there would be a limit on pages anyway - is it due to storage, performance, something else? I also understand the project limit - but there’s not a downloadable design tool (Dreamweaver, etc) that limits your number of pages like this.

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@thesergie Just saw the update. You guys ROCK. :slight_smile:

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Still not grasping the reason to limit pages, maybe an explanation would help some of us out. I mean for the same price I can access all of Adobe CC, mockup/design an entire site with unlimited pages forever using any one of their tools and not think twice about it. Or Macaw.

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Yeah, I have to agree. The page limitation per site is odd to me. This just doesn’t seem like something that should be limited. In fact, it may be a deal breaker. It’s a shame, I like Webflow - A LOT. But as jwburkhard mentions, you can get all Adobe CC software and other software without page limitations. Some sites simply have a lot of pages for variety of reasons.

Please, consider removing page limits from this absolutely phenomenal (Webflow) program. Otherwise, thank you so much for the work, skill, and thought that you put into Webflow.

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@jwburkhard @Jesse - Thanks for raising your concerns, I’ll do my best to explain :blush:

Hosting Overhead - you may not know it, but Webflow takes snapshots of your website periodically as you work. This means backing up every page you have in your site, assembling them in a package, and sending them along to a secure hosting environment that supports 99.999999% uptime. We do this because it’s important that you never lose any work, and we want to provide a safety net in case you break something in your site. This gets more computationally and resource intensive the more pages you have on your site. We’re trying to optimize this to make it easier for us to perform snapshots, but we have so many other features to work on!

Webflow isn’t a CMS (yet) - Having > 30 static pages (Personal) is an anomaly for a static site. We have higher page limits on our Professional plan (80 pages) and Team plans (100 pages), so the flexibility is there if you want to create sites with that many pages. If you need a site with hundreds of pages, then I’d recommend another tool to design and curate them.

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I think I would go bananas if I had to create an 80 page static site lol… :smile:

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@brryant - Thanks for your quick and informative explanation. I don’t want to push this too much, but I do hope this changes in the near future. I do not see Webflow itself as being limited - it’s great. But, the page limit is … well … limiting.

I’ll give an example. One site that I would like to convert to Webflow (but will be hosted separately), provides online support for people participating in classes (currently 5 classes). Each class has 8 or more pages of support material. For the classes alone, this adds up to 40 pages. Things add up quickly. Webflow can handle this easily, and it offers flexibility and customization that many CMS services do not have. The limitation in this case, is the number of pages.

It would be a shame to use another program when Webflow is so AWESOME and useful. It also becomes awfully expensive to go up in plans just because of page limitations.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I understand. You have your reasons for using this model, as you described above. Hopefully, the conditions for this model will change for you, thus allowing page limitations to be dropped or modified.

Please, understand that I sincerely appreciate Webflow and it’s team.