Webflow Pricing to Value Ratio

Community resources Product feedback
1

I’m incurring nearly $60-70/m with 1 client on Webflow and I cannot give that client Admin access to their own site. Team plans are separate from personal plans? Does that mean you would bill me twice?

It’s too expensive for initial bootstrappers/startups. I would much rather prefer a pay-per-user model with $5/user every additional user. Admin access? Why would that not be included on a standard CMS plan? Clients want to change minor tweaks to their redirects/SEO/etc. that would honestly waste my time and they aren’t likely to pay large prices for those tweaks.

I’m having a hard time understanding the value of the Team plan? Unlimited websites? Is that if I have an agency and I’m scaling tons of websites? How many websites am I honestly working on at once? Unless it’s a digital marketing firm doing landing pages, 1 website typically takes some time to get right. What would be more important is Admin access, and better client communication features. (messages, emails, etc.)

I’m not getting the value I need from Webflow and the platform seems to be creating loopholes that push me to upgrade. Not a fan. It’s not cool. I have 1 client and am literally just trying to support myself at the moment. It’s super hard to do that when I spend hours in the Webflow forum, with tons of bugs, and am constantly asked to upgrade. Now I am potentially losing a client because of these issues…

My website continues to have bugs… I’ve missed blog post releases, lost opportunities, lost money, and am still paying premium prices for Webflow…? It’s a good tool, but I’m not sticking around if this continues.

Please make this fair. Web design isn’t the greatest business model to begin with… at least give us the value we deserve at the tiers we are paying for. As we scale the percentage is fine to rebalance… to begin with, it’s TOO HIGH.

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3

It’s really just a matter of “less bugs”, “more even-keel features per tier” (such as more than 1 admin on a side from the site dashboard), and “better per-site hosting prices”

4

I agree its too many invoices once or maybe more a month. Needs to be a
more simplified way of charging one solid price for everything. One for
business with certain features. One for small agency’s or freelancers with
standard features hosting included and one free account that you would have
to upgrade hosting like it currently is. But a better solution is needed
because it can tax if you aren’t really using it but you want to be able to
access your work whenever.

5

I have to agree, the pricing needs to change. This pricing is not sustainable and I am not going to charge my clients $40+ for hosting. And without hosting, you cant have the CMS. I really like Webflow. But if they want us to bring all of our clients to them for the services, they need to address this. I don’t know if the pricing is because they are out sourcing their hosting? IF they change it, I am willing to bring all 25 of my clients over.

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6

Pricing has always been a confusing and frustrating issue with Webflow.

However… I charge my clients enough to cover the Webflow fees… and my dedicated server fees.

All of my clients and a few freelancers are on my servers.

And I actually do run my own servers. I don’t outsource it. I’m the server admin.

7

Make sure you get some for yourself too!!

8

Hi @cjroe thanks for your honest feedback. I’d like to help and address some of these points you’ve brought up.

The recommended way to give access your clients is to add-on a CMS hosting subscription and add them as a Content Collaborator. You can also use our Client Billing feature to forward the hosting fees to them and add-on your own profit margin if you want.

Team plans have always been a separate invoice from other account plans. This gives the flexibility to pay for either a team plan OR an individual account plan. If you’re in a company that uses a team plan that you’re a part of but still want to do your own side projects/freelancing, you can also subscribe to an individual account plan and switch between your team and individual dashboards.

If your client understands Webflow and web design, you could always transfer the site to their own Webflow account when you’re done building the project for them. If they aren’t web savvy enough, then it is recommended you keep the site on your own account and let them edit it through the easy-to-use CMS editor.

If they need to edit SEO settings, they can do so from the CMS editor by:

  1. logging into the CMS editor
  2. click on the PAGES tab on the CMS editor bottom bar
  3. hover over the page they would like to edit
  4. click on the revealed SETTINGS button on the right
  5. edit their SEO or Open Graph settings
  6. click publish

If they need to edit the 301 redirects, we don’t have that option yet in the CMS editor, but it only takes a few seconds for you to do.

A team plan is great for those organizations that have multiple people needing to create/maintain/edit multiple sites at the same time. For example, how we, in the Webflow staff, use our team plan is we have our:

  • Education team and Support team updating videos and articles in the University website
  • Marketing team creating new sites for upcoming features and updating Webflow.com
  • I’m practicing rebuilds for the workshops
  • and others use it for quick prototyping

If you don’t need your individual account, but still want to be part of a team plan, you can do so while on the Starter (free) account plan.

If you only have 1 client, then I would suggest:

  • Stick with the starter plan
  • Add-on a CMS hosting subscription to your client’s site
  • Add your client as a Content Collaborator
  • Forward the hosting fees to your client with the client billing feature
  • add a profit margin to the client billing invoices

Once you get more clients, upgrade to the Lite plan if needed.

We understand that the platform has bugs and we take each bug report very seriously. We are doing our best to address each one as fast as we can. And just so you know, when our Webflow team also uses Webflow to build our own sites, so we feel the same frustrations over bugs as the community does.

Just keep reporting any bugs you see with as much details as possible (screenshots, video captures, steps to reproduce the bug, console logs) that could help our engineers find the root cause and a fix.

Hope this help clears up any confusions.

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9

Hey @PixelGeek, thanks for addressing my post in such detail! I appreciate all the feedback and do not mean to come off cheap, as I know all the hard work going into Webflow - and DO love the tool! :slight_smile:

I am currently on a Lite Plan doing exactly what you said with a $15 margin on the hosting (billed to client). However, the big issue I’m having is that I’m not currently big enough (from a branding/agency standpoint) to justify hiding all the Admin features from this client. They want to own it as an Admin and need to get into the Webflow Admin Settings like SEO, Forms, etc. I could transfer it to them directly but then I would lose the hosting fees. With that being said, I really have one question here:

How do you recommend that I provide this client with Admin access, without upgrading to a Team plan (incurring $84/m) and without transferring complete ownership (sharing to their Webflow account). Again, all they want to do here is update their SEO, Forms sections and view specific tabs in the Admin settings for the site. It’s no problem if they need to create a Webflow account, but how is this currently possible?

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SEO settings from the CMS editor:

  1. logging into the CMS editor
  2. click on the PAGES tab on the CMS editor bottom bar
  3. hover over the page they would like to edit
  4. click on the revealed SETTINGS button on the right
  5. edit their SEO or Open Graph settings
  6. click publish

Form data from the CMS editor:

  1. log into the CMS editor
  2. click on the FORMS tab on the CMS editor bottom bar

What other tabs does your client need access to?

11

They would most likely want all the other settings (Redirects, robots.txt, Custom Code, Versions). Mostly everything… but it’s strange because the hosting price will eventually show up and their compare that to what I’m charging and most likely see the margin. Not sure if that’s an issue or not.

I think I’m having a difficult time understanding the “mindset” behind this relationship. Am I the agency that is hosting their website for them (highly unlikely I can pull that off at the moment)? Or am I just a freelancer that created some templates and is now handing that off to their engineering team to inherit in house?

If the latter is the case, I’m fine transferring the site. But the question becomes, what happens if they need for a v2? Am I getting the transferred site back?

12

I think this might be a interesting topic to read about “Website Ownership”…? Who owns the website? Seriously. Is it the marketing team…? They aren’t designers… Is it their Head of Engineering? In that case, can he get a label as the “Owner”?

13

I’ve responded to your other post. lets continue that here:

In the end, your client owns the website and they can appoint anyone they deem necessary to own it.

14

The Webflow business model is broken because they trying to bring the DIY people and designers at the same time.

Let’s say that you buy a template and then you need that a freelancer or an agency make stuff that you can’t do but you don’t want to share your account for obvious reasons, so webflow say get a team plan but that’s a lot of money for 90% of webflow clients, I think a good solution could be an option to give access without showing your account personal details but the problems when you see that you don’t need to get a lite or pro plan.

Transfer is not a good option because you if you hire another person to make changes to your website the first one need to transfer to you and then you transfer to the other that will make the changes and then they transfer back.

The best solution is the ability to merge projects (The client give you a copy of their site and then you make all the stuff they need and once they pay you merge your version with the old one).

15

How about sharing sites like google drive - if your the person you shared it with makes changes then the admin has to approve the change before it’s implemented into your own copy

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16

I think this is pretty common and where most people start to scratch their heads with frustration. To me, as a building tool to export, I personally think it’s absolutely fantastic. But everything after that is third party (hosting, form handling etc) and considerably cheaper. I do have a few clients on webflow CMS though.

I’ve already said before on a lost account. The value is really is in the tool.

17

@cjroe I think at a certain point, maybe Webflow just isn’t for you. If you find yourself constantly posting long complaints in the forum, reporting bugs, and getting frustrated - perhaps you should move onto a different tool. No one is forcing you to use Webflow for Web Design - so you should take a long look into switching services if you are honestly unhappy with it.

I feel you are greatly disrespecting Webflow and all of their customers by acting like your exact scenario is the same for all of their thousands of customers. It may be a shock, but at the end of the day Webflow is a business, and their obligation is NOT to support you - their obligation is to support All their paying customers. So when you complain about how the tool doesn’t do exactly what you want to do, you should realize that Webflow has access to an enormous amount of customer data that you do not. This is what they will use to build new features and expand the product. The use cases of 1 customer does not trample the use case of thousands, or dozens, or even 2. When Webflow is making any decision, they are not asking “What does cjroe want us to do?”. They are asking “based on all of the customer data, metrics, surveys, feedback, interviews, analytics, etc, that we have - how should we proceed?”. This is followed by input from development, design, support, marketing, etc. all trying to strike a balance between everyone’s needs.

When you are coming up with “solutions” and stating things like, “simple”, “it’s easy”, “do it this way” - it can come off as naive to someone who works in a SaaS company supporting thousands of customers. Features, bug fixes, roadmaps, product updates, sales, marketing - everything needs to be balanced in a way to maximize ALL customer’s value (not even for right now - but also for the future), while balancing a finite amount of development power. This may mean that your particular scenario may be hurt by a minor bug that a client is still experiencing - however 20 other customers are being helped with development of another feature.

For me personally, I absolutely love Webflow and feel the value it provides is worth many times over what I pay. Seriously - this tools is the 1st of its kind. Yes there are bugs, features I wish would come out sooner, and some quirks - but this is true for all Web applications. The value I get out of Webflow greatly exceeds this. Writing an application like Webflow is quite an endeavour: Writing good code (like the Webflow app) that writes good code (like the clean code your website ends up with), is extremely difficult! Sometimes it’s on you to find the balancing act between pricing you are paying for professional tools vs what you are charging clients.

Again, at the end of the day if you feel Webflow is not providing you value, you should take your business elsewhere and use a different tool. That’s always an option.

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18

I’d like to correct this point.

Our obligation is to support ALL of our community members, whether paying or not, as best we can. The Webflow mission, since day 1, has always been to empower all designers to build awesome things.

But, as with every tool, there are pros and cons and no tool is the end-all-be-all solution to every use case.

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19

Thank you @PixelGeek - definitely misspoke(typed) there! I incorrectly related past experiences to this one. Thanks again for pointing out that correction.

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20

I like that idea. I think the collaboration between could definitely be improved. A “Revisions” tab would be amazing. At the top it could show emails on the account, and each revision under with the date approved, the approver, and a checksum of the changes. That would literally be game changing.

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21

Thanks for the comment @justin_c.

For starters, Webflow is a great tool (which is why I’m using it in the first place). With that being said, I am a paying customer, so I have every right to provide feedback… and if you know anything about SaaS or business this is typically measured by an NPS score. (How satisfied a customer on a scale of 1-10). That feedback is critical for the growth of their product.

Now, could I phrase things in a nicer way…? Sure, I’ll agree with that. But at the same time, I’m providing solutions as well – that could work really well (having been faced directly with the exact problem). So in a way I think you should take the good with the bad and accept that not everyone is going be happy when they are losing clients, money, and their time because a tool isn’t working the way it’s expected to. That’s honestly part of being in software in general.

I don’t want to turn this into an argument, but I am simply trying to voice my opinion and advocate for better solutions that would not just benefit me, but benefit all of web designers using the tool (considering I’ve been white-labeling huge sites in the field for 7 years and also understand what web designers need)

Overall, I think Webflow is a great tool and I hope to continue using it. I don’t want to come off the wrong way. I honestly am just here to help.

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