@Revolution I’m doing business similar to yours and stay busy.
I guess that I see your point about pricing to some degree but I’ve presented it to three small business clients so far and not a single one questioned it. In fact the two that were excited about getting away from Wordpress thought it was a good deal. If you compare to quality, managed Wordpress hosting like WPEngine the Webflow is a good deal.
I suppose if one provides hosting and manages sites through a service like Bluehost (just picking one at random) at a very cheap price then yes it cuts into profit. However, the quality, speed and such of Webflow CMS hosting seems really worth it to me.
I’ve got to say that $20 per site is definitely too much for CMS hosting. Here in Australia that’s over $27 a month - it leaves no room for mark-ups and positions webflow as a particularly expensive solution.
I think the best pricing structure for hosting would be something similar to the pricing for basic webflow access - ie different plans that give you a number of cms sites, and the more expensive plans give you more sites at a cheaper rate per-site.
For example
1 hosted cms site - $20/month
Up to 5 cms sites - $65/month
Up to 10 cms sites - $100/month
Up to 20 cms sites - $150/month
Up to 50 cms sites - $250/month
This kind of structure would still mean webflow makes good money from people with one site, but it also gives incentive to developers to build more and more sites on webflow, which is ultimately going to make webflow more money and make it a much more appealing platform for developers.
In my particular case I can’t use webflow cms for the vast majority of client work - it’s far too expensive. But if you had a tiered pricing structure similar to the above I would definitely use webflow for 95% or more of all of my future projects.
It’s an awesome tool that you’ve created, all that’s missing is an elegantly structured pricing strategy that enables people to start using it in larger volumes.
Let’s hope you can come up with something soon, as I’d love to start sending more money your way, and I’m sure I’m not the only one
I totally agree with you. Being in Brazil and having our currency in lower rates right now makes me think how can I be transparent with clients and sell the CMS to them without risking the negotiation and margin profits. Sadly we have to deal and plan currency fluctuations.
Is there a way to have a discount on year billed hosting plans? Let’s say it costs 5/month or 50 billed per year. Same for the cms hosting, I think that would give foreign users a better deals with clients as well.
Yeah probably. Every pricing structure will have people who think it’s too much. I guess they need to find that balance point where they can attract a lot of customers with lower prices but still make good profits. They are a business after all. But they sure need to do something to make this more affordable or they’ll miss out on a ton of customers.
I’m glad I found Webflow and it saves me lots of headache. But the pricing is a bit weird and difficult to grasp.
I’m not a designer and don’t have clients. All the 4 sites I use webflow for is mine.
I do not want a webflow.io subdomain so I don’t care for the free option. All I want is a robust and easy to use system for all my sites.
First I thought that when I sign up for the personal plan. What I can see is that it includes custom domain hosting. But when I wanted to add a custom domain, I had to pay extra.
And that’s not all, now with the CMS - which I want to use, I had to pay another $20/each site. On the CMS plan first I was told by your staff that blog posts are unlimited but then I read that Dynamic Content Item limit is 500. Your staff wasn’t able to tell me whether that’s applicable to blog posts.
There are so many complications with your features and pricing!
It could be dones so much easier.
Why not do something like Ghost Ghost(Pro) - Official managed hosting for Ghost All their plans include hosting by default and I just need to decide how many websites I want to add and how many pageviews. Simple.
Not a single, respectable web designer believes this for a second. Wix fills in a gap of ‘I don’t know how to build a website but I heard this ‘wix’ thing is good.’ type of clients. Hard ‘the future’ in the slightest. Feel free to point to a single business that makes ‘significant’ money while being successful using a Wix-created website.
This is true. It’s not easy but we all learn to sink or swim in this.
Agreed. While I have no kids, I’m also not going to beat myself to death just to make ‘good’ money. That’s just not smart.
I have never described myself as a ‘respectable’ web designer, I simply use online systems like Wix, Webydo, Webflow etc to make websites for my customers, people who otherwise would have real difficulty making their own website. You may critisise Wix clients, but I have done over 300 websites for these people over 6 years and, like it or not, they exist in the real world. There’s plenty of those businesses who make good money from their websites, even when not using experts of your caliber to make them - me included.
These systems, Webflow included, allow people to run beautiful, useful websites and that’s no bad thing, whatever your views on respectability…
there - thank you!