Serous: is webflow pricing too aggressive for resellers or do I need to step my price expectations across the board?

I started working with a WordPress theme in 2011 for my photography and immediately got requests to make websites for friends and family when everyone found out I could “build a website”, which then turned into a side hustle opportunity all within 1 year.

…after 5 years if insanity, from switching between WordPress to wix, then back, then settling on HTML templates, then going back to WordPress and dealing with Karen’s … I made the choice to start a reseller hosting account *Using WHMCS in 2016 to manage all my clients and begin making residual income.

Now my philosophy is that my “hosting” (which is just reselling) is actually private, in other words, I hand select every client, and I don’t publically offer or accept random users or accounts.

This allows me to have full quality control of my cluster knowing randoms aren’t ruining things. Additionally, I’m backed by one if the few awesome companies that aren’t sold out to EIG, so even on shared hosting, there are less than 10k of provisioned customers, unlike the millions of customers that are over provisioned on traditional hosts.

Those two things combined, along side me personally designing every clients site ensuring full optimization and quality control over plugins, having light speed cache, and cloudflair, allows me to offer essentially the best possible speed and reliability among traditional hosts. I’ve never had any substantial outages, and I’ve never had a clients site go down, infact, my biggest client (a town newspaper in GA) receives roughly 120,000 - 300,000 hits a month uploading 2-3 articles a day using divi extra, and not a single hiccup in 2 years.

Yet, I still arrive to be even better, and this is where I turn to webflow.

Unfortunately, the model I’ve adopted which has worked extreamly well for me (because I’m in charge of site design) is simple: 9.99/mo for basic site, 19.99/mo for commerce or forums or essentially anything requiring more database tables, automation or user interaction.

A year ago I saw the superio potential of webflow, but unfortunately it’s been impossible for me to graft webflow into my Buisness, the price cuts into my bottom line and beyond, and I can’t remodel or justify the cost for some of my client base, so what gives???

As shitty as this sounds, I find my self still needing to rely (sadly) on WordPress as I can adapt and pivot with what curve balls clients request if me and save time (plugins), but to my knowledge, there are substantially less available integrations with webflow, and deciding to take the leap on webflow with a client is simply a loose loose for me,

  1. I will no longer make hosting income because I simply can’t markup their price, it’s fair as is but not for me reselling trying to make income off my hosted clients.
  2. Lack of webflow platofrm knowledge on my part.

This makes it really hard for me to integrate with webflow… Am I the only one that feels this way? Or should be reconsidering my expectations where 29.99 is the new “LOWEST” plan cause that’s what it will take for me to be profitable here…

Hosting costs aside, you need to ascertain whether or not Webflow is going to be a good fit for the types of sites you produce. It is not well suited to all projects. Have you used Webflow much yet? You’ve come from building your own sites from scratch you might not be ready for some of the limitations (thread here that lists them). That said, for marketing brochure style websites Webflow is amazing. You can always pay for a pro plan and export your non CMS sites to host them elsewhere and avoid hosting fees.

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Don’t worry about charging more to host if you are personally managing their account. Look at it like host fee + account management fee = total monthly fee.

Webflow pricing is perfect for individuals, but not for managers or resellers. There was talk about it a few years ago when I joined, not sure what happened. There is opportunity for an amicable partnership here, but it doesn’t seem priority anymore.

You have to look at the pros and cons for yourself to see what works and don’t work. I like Webflow, because I spend less time coding and more time designing. The down side is the price for e-commerce, while it lacks things that are now common and even found in Wix and Godaddy. I used those two as examples. Because they’re not at the top of the tier for designing, imo. But thehy do offer, membership and more options for merchants. I was going to use the Webflow e-commerce for my client. But when we’d bumped into those two walls. I had to abandoned it, go back to the CMS version and use a 3rd party e-commerce. Snipcart or Foxy. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if Webflow’s e-commerce weren’t so high, with the lack of common feature. That’s a turn for me. And with all of these current updates. To me, that is more priority. Membership and being able to use other merchants. My client uses, Authorize.net. Webflow only offers Stripe and Paypal. And if you’re doing high volume sales. Those two can freeze your account, to see if there’s something fishy going on. Authorize.net,you don’t have to worry about that headache. Come on Webflow. Catch up.