@kragit 's post in the Pricing & Addons thread brought up an overlooked and important aspect of pricing:
That got me thinking though – some clients/partners/co-workers I
trust enough to allow access to the designer itself. I thought I’d just
add them as a collaborator and give them ‘admin’ access. From the look
of it, this isn’t possible – they can only have access to the editor.
Even if it was, $6 per collaborator makes this uneconomical right away.
and
If collaborators could have Designer/admin access and weren’t $6/user, there wouldn’t be a need for a single-site team setup.
I personally, couldn’t agree more.
I am also afraid that Webflow are under the presumption that users (clients) would only need CMS access - because they would never care to learn visual coding on the one hand, and because they may incur great damage if they try to do so, on the other.
While this is generally true, it does not go without exceptions and some omissions. There’s a segment of users who are both prudent and fairly smart to do minor changes without breaking anything. That segment might be tiny, but it does exist.
Then, any client, no matter competent or not, should have the psychological comfort of being able to access the Designer whenever she likes, no matter if she is competent or not. She might prefer to change the developer responsible for the site, or invite an additional developer to work on it, etc - she should have a collaborator access by default. (Elaborated in greater detail here: forum.webflow.com/t/pricing-marketplace-feedback/32366 and here: forum.webflow.com/t/client-password-on-personal-pro-accounts/8306).
And then, we have the strongest reason for an affordable pricing for a Designer collaborator - in some cases, a developer would prefer to work together with someone else, even if not at the same time. (Already requested here: forum.webflow.com/t/team-plans-pay-per-feature-possibility-to-edit-different-web-sites-of-the-same-account-simultaneously/17350) Why the need to go on the very expensive Team plan, if all you need is one collaborator for one web site?
There were some (haphazard) guesses in the Pricing & Addons thread, that Webflow removed the Personal Plan in an attempt to define its market better and become accessible only to high-quality, high-end designers. This is not only an unsubstantiated speculation (and a wishful rationalization of Webflow’s inability to come up with a clear pricing structure for so long), but it is outrageously flawed reasoning, as well. At the end of the day Webflow is inhibiting the organic advertising effect for Webflow by keeping it expensive for professional designers to invite fellow-professional designers to work together on a web site and make them acquainted with the platform this way.