New feature: Whitelabel for CMS Hosting

Hi everyone,

We just launched the ability to whitelabel the CMS - that way your clients will see your agency’s logo (or their own) in place of the Webflow logo.

After you set up whitelabeling, you add content editors by copying the invite link:

Make sure you publish your site after setting up whitelabeling! Note - if you want to remove references to Webflow in the code, you’ll have to toggle that option in the Hosting tab of your site’s settings.

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Nice work @brryant and team! I was chatting with Nelson via support emails and asked about the promotion (as I just activated my CMS hosting last month after running into a few issues. Anyway for me to take advantage of this?

Yup - if you’ve already set up CMS hosting you can add whitelabeling now without cost :smile:

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Dare I ask how much it will cost after the promotion?

Yeah but apparently only if we sign up by the end of the year and only for one year. I can’t tell you all how excited I am about the CMS and now the white label feature but to find out there will be an additional costs for it is a big turn off.

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From the settings page:

Whitelabeled sites are an additional $10 a month on Starter and Personal plans, and $5 a month on Professional and Organization plans. (Only applied when hosting plans are set up.)

Hope this helps :smiley:

Ah ok that’s not bad guys! Good job. I’m 90% happy, just the export now! :wink:

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i am curious why you guys chose to charge additional for whitelabeling? we are already trying to sell clients on switching from wordpress…and convincing them to go with your hosting when most already have some kind of hosting service…and now we have to convince them to pay another $5? i could see if this was SSL. that makes sense to cost additionally…but a fee just to swap out logos?

it should be a part of the professional and team plans which are geared towards business customers. it is a feature that would help us better sell webflow to our clients. ultimately resulting in more revenue for you guys.

don’t get me wrong i love what you guys are doing but it kind of feels like nickeling and diming here.

this really lowered my perception of webflow’s brand and makes me worried about really building a business on this platform

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I suppose they need to come up with ways to bring more revenue in.

I understand it’s annoying, maybe a little greedy just to change the logo. I guess we can’t have it all.

Great Work on this guys!

I think the $5 to $10 dollar charge for white labeling makes a lot a sense to Webflow and to me as a Freelancer.

A big part of Webflow’s growth if from word of mouth and part of that word of mouth is the branded sub-domain and CMS back end branding.

Just like they charge you to replace the sub-domain branding for your custom brand domain they are going to charge you to remove their branding from the back end, to account for the lost exposure.

As a freelancer I see this as a value added feature for my clients who want their branding on the site. I would role the cost into a support agreement with them.

I never saw it as an opportunity to start a hosting company and I don’t think Webflow intended it to be that kind of feature.

Thanks for the features and keep up the great work! :smile:

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@AlexN I don’t even know where to begin with all of that. No one is starting a “hosting company”. That’s a big strawman. What some of us are doing is offering a one stop solution for our clients that WE handle. And if someone has a problem with us - the designers - making a few bucks from hosting, well, I have a few choice words for them in my head that I won’t type in here. It takes a lot of time working with clients on an on-going basis and we deserve to get paid for our work. Clients ask questions and need help on an on-going basis.

As for webflow losing exposure and revenue, I don’t agree. If the client hired us to create their site, the odds are they don’t need to know anything about webflow. IF webflow is worried about lost exposure, then that would indicate to me that they have ulterior motives and want our clients to move their site from our account to their own account. Can anyone else honestly give me any other reasons???

There may be a small percentage that might want to go directly to webflow, but again, they were already with webflow via their site that is on OUR account. We are the ones that stand to lose. None of your arguments make that much sense to me.

And the approval of them charging $10 more per site for a white-label was the icing on this cake. We are already paying a premium for the subscription fees, and then hosting and CMS fees. Are you seriously going to encourage them to charge us even more? Wow. Just wow.

I deal with bad arguments every day on YouTube. It would be nice to come here and not have to deal with that here.

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So far, I’ve been playing around with the CMS, but I’m only now building y first Webflow CMS project for a client. This particular client asked me what platform do I use and I had no hesitations or callbacks telling him that I use Webflow. I’m proud of it and I believe that it is my best option for building great websites.

If the client decides to take a peek into the Webflow pricing structure, it will find lower values than the ones I’ll charge him montly, but then you also have to value your work. If anything is broken, it will be you to contact the Webflow team to help you manage it… The client will want changes over time… Will have doubts about the CMS use, etc, etc, etc…
Personally, in such projects I don’t just make the website and hope everting goes smoothly and independently, so the value upon the Webflow pricing is my fee, for my job, for managing the client. If, despite the platform I use, a client doesn’t understands the value of my work, then something is wrong.

Wordpress designers also take charges for their websites maintenance… And from the common client you may already have heard “Wordpress is free” but there is no discussion upon what a Wordpress designer charges for it.

Although, I believe that the Webflow team should be more cautious about managing user expectations. I would expect some more information about planned/future features and a hint if those will be included under the platform or added as an extra charge. This would provide me a sharper picture on planning and a better sense of reliability.

Webflow is growing faster, so the sense of a small, “almost familiar tool” and community are being dissolved on its expansion… Please take notice on that and don’t let your users feel like they are not part of the product. We are on the other side of the game, but I like to think that we are still (and will continue to be) a part of it.

Just my 2 cents…

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Really big plus so thank you Webflow team for this powerful feature - Implementation however could have been different.

I don’t mind advertising Webflow in my projects, the naming of files, comments in code. I just don’t want Webflow to be the center of attention, I want my client to feel comfortable in a system that feel like it was built specifically for them. For example I would use the whitelabeling to brand the CMS with my client’s logo. I would actually still like to still see Webflow but much smaller and not the center of attention. Full whitelabeling (not a single reference to Webflow anywhere) could be still be an added cost for those who’d prefer it.

I also agree with most - If whitelabeling is costing $10, how much would a more complex feature cost in the future?

and SSL? To be honest this should be standard with any pricing plan and btw I still want captcha validation in my forms :wink:

What you guys need is more exposure - something the education sector could use. I can envision Webflow used as a learning platform for designers and developers trying to find the fine line between the abstraction and the code shortening that learning curve. An education plan should be made available for schools / colleges etc.

Stellar, thanks. The way it was worded made me think it was only for new CMS hosting plans and not existing. Cheers @brryant

So maybe I missed where it explicitly says this but is the price to add white label on a per site basis or on an account basis? If it’s a per site basis, I agree with some of the others that it’s a bit much. I’d gladly pay 5 a month to unlock white labeling account wide. Also, if it is per site, we need some way to bill our clients directly with white label as well. I really am not looking forward to have to shake down people for paying for their hosting indefinitely.

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Hmm … @DFink you are right … they didn’t explicitly say that the price for white label is per site. :stuck_out_tongue: I might have read too fast. Though, the context strongly suggests that a whitelabel feature … paid with the hosting plan for a site is $5 (each?) / month. :frowning:

Someone please clarify this and if not per site … please try to change the wording a bit for less confusion.

Cheers,

Diana :smiley:

@DFink @DesignerDiana - I believe it is per site… I originally though it was at the account level as well :frowning:

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Not too late for them to make it account wide instead of site wide. *crosses fingers

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I agree with that. I highly doubt it is account wide. They wouldn’t have put it as an option on the site settings, instead of the global settings.