Can you give me a little help on this?
New clients of me are thinking of a new website.
I say it will costs 26,50,- dollar (This is 20,- plus 6,25 dollar for using the designer 750 dollar- : 120 sites)
The 20,- dollar i because when they order will be in the house, and i have time… its middle 2017
The prices will be raised to 20,- dollar.
But now clients are telling me its 16,- dollar!! because its on the website of Webflow!
Please understand that you are not a consumer product, but a business product!
Normally i count 50% extra but that would be to much, i will not have any orders than…
20,- dollar is already so and so much here in Holland where normal hosting cost 24,- euro a YEAR!!!
Dnt’ forget: We need to earn money as designers…
its terrible for me as designer that i can not count a little profit on the hosting…
i do understand all… except this pricing of you.
i can’t imagen new designers are coming in at this moment.
Everyone i tell about you are talking about the high prices… to high to work with…
and i really wish you the best future… buts its gonna be so hard…
Hmmmm… I just told my first every webflow site client that adding a 4th editor account would be more than double the cost for hosting. $20/month, + another $24 for them to have more than three people using the CMS. They were spechless. Of course they now share the three logins between people.
It is absurd that it costs that much. But, how necessary is it to have multiple accounts? I mean, what is it used for that it is so critical to have more than two accounts?
Although it was difficult to understand most of what you said, I agree that Webflow is taking away its own profitability. Their web hosting is not good enough to justify as much as they try to. Especially when you consider the massive limitations of Webflow, it’s not worth it. At this point, they might as well charge $35/mo for hosting >_>
Webflow is not a style product. Webflow is not only for big design firms. Webflow is not like Apple. Webflow is not transparent enough. I would love to work with Webflow to fix these issues, but we just have to face the fact that the people who make these decisions at Webflow will hurt themselves one way or another.
Just because Webflow looks good, and the design of their website and some marketing strategies are great and most of it is on point does not mean it will maintain profitability if the service itself does not focus properly.
I’m upset because business is hurting, and Webflow now costs more in the longrun than other methods. I want this service, but it costs too much.
All the websites I seen so far does’t need a super hosting and that’s one of the reasons clients start thinking, why I need to pay 20 a month when I see 20 year with other hosting providers?
Other thing is that webflow is becoming an end user platform rather than a web design tool for designers and devs, I don’t want to sound like a hater but I don’t see 500,000 designers, I see 500,000 customers that opened a webflow account because they think is like squarespace or similar!
Yup. And there is no way to design large websites because Webflow is still too limited. Yes, you “can” do anything, but it’s much easier, faster, and better to just do it in a more traditional way. Not only that, most of these clients don’t get tens of thousands of views in a month. Generally it’s hundreds or thousands.
Maybe Webflow thinks its not our concern… but it is…
We want to work, and we want to produce sites…
Webflow is thinking of bigger clients… but go for smaller clients.
Lets say:
In The Netherlands (as big as Los Angeles) there are 1.100.000 companies
and 900.000 small company websites.
only 10.000 websites are from bigger companies.
I sold 4 websites to bigger companies that 2 lets say 4x20=70,- euro a month.
i sold 50 websites to small companies that is 50x10,- 500,- a month.
plus 100x 6,20 for the designer is 51,66 a month…
So please let it stay 10,- dollar for “team” designers and let us make a profit of 4,95 dollar to retire at 1000 sites…
That gives us the right spirit!
I have to agree with Koen here, I’ve had the feeling for a while now that Webflow is really focusing on the US market.
We have in the Netherlands a couple big hosting company’s and a LOT of small ones that are offering hosting for prices in the range of 24euro and - 60euro a year… and sure the hosting of webflow is faster and scales with 1 or 1000 visitors a month but in reality these client just dont care about that!
The hosting they payed for years already is stable and secure and fast enough for them, so why pay $20 a month instead of 5 euro’s.
Of course there are some points that we need to consider with it like the SSL and the CMS / Editors included with the hosting, but in the end it doesn’t add up with the benefits from traditional hosting.
And even if i somehow managed to convinced them to use the webflow hosting i have to disappointing them the moment they ask for something as simple as uploading a PDF file to there website…
Also just for reference ALL dutch hosting is including email (incl webmail) and connected with the mayor Datacenter hubs in Europe. Tier 3 or even Tier 1.
Well, here we are 4 years later and Webflow pricing is still a mess. It’s disheartening really because Webflow was positioned at one point to disrupt the design industry if they had just focused on developing their product and not selling add-on services and overpriced hosting.
Still no ecommerce.
Still can’t export CMS data, let alone import anything.
One designer was able to use the CMS API to import ALL of his WordPress blog posts into Webflow dynamic collections. I wish I could show you the site, but I don’t have permission.
I could have bet money that I knew you would respond to this thread touting the CMS API. This isn’t a solution for designers, this is a solution for developers, which in turn isn’t what Webflow is marketed towards in the first place.
Take any other top tier CMS (WordPress, Squarespace, Perch, Craft, Statmatic, Grav, Ghost, Drupal) and compare them directly to Webflow when it comes to just one feature, exporting site content. It’s almost a single click process in all cases to export content directly in JSON or XML format which can then be used to transfer data to other platforms if needed.
Your solution has me writing custom API requests to extract data from your CMS. This is laughable and nobody outside of the Webflow cheerleading team takes this seriously.
Let’s change directions and go to querying data from Webflow. The ability to Search. Something every other CMS platform offers for free, with ease, isn’t available as a native function on Webflow. The current solutions are either extremely hacky or expensive, using third party services. Search isn’t hard, especially when you control the pipeline.
Webflow pricing is out of control and doesn’t sustain a growth model for the future. It’s predatory towards new designers and its geared towards taking advantage of users that want to use the Webflow tool and feel they don’t have any other options.
Where will Webflow be in 2020? Will it still exist? How can we be sure of that? Why should designers/developers build their business around a SAAS/PAAS that isn’t transparent with their future plans and is trying to crowdsource ideas for development?
I am also very interested in the plans and pricing. I am a designer/junior developer starting my own business and was very excited when I found Webflow! I am really enjoying the ease and flexibility of it and am excited about the CMS and hosting. I would love to offer webflow sites to all of my clients HOWEVER I am concerned with the cost of hosting. On the one hand, it is similar to Squarespace pricing which is kind of an easy sell for someone who might consider Squarespace. On the other hand, I would like to be able to resell at a profit! With wholesale prices already at the high end AND the prices listed on the website, it makes it difficult to do so. I wish they would just market Webflow to designers and keep the wholesale prices hidden. It would be much easier to get on board if, for instance, prices were 10/14 instead of 16/20 and were not all over the site for clients to go find easily. I’m not trying to trick anyone, but I can’t sell something that is already expensive and marketed to both individual users and designers. And it really seems unreasonable that I have to pay a monthly fee myself AND try to sell an expensive product. I can only cover so much of the cost before clients say “well I can get $2/month hosting over here” or “but I just looked on the webflow site and it says it’s only this much”. Otherwise the cost is coming out of marking up my design and site set up fee, which is one time, or overcharging for maintenance they may or may not want. Anyway, long rant. I’m still considering Webflow but these are major concerns for my business model!
Overall I am Ok with webflow personally - it’s good software, and new features will continue to come. But I get some people feel they would like to see features come a little faster (more webflow developers = more income to cover costs). I feel the same too, but I also know some features are complex to implement.
I would agree that Webflow’s target market should be designers / agencies first. Some business with the web skills would still be customers, but it’s not a product for “DIY” users who are new to web - there are already plenty of templated products in that space that target end users.
I think Webflow are introducing volume discounts soon, and for some there is already a 50% discount off hosting - that will work for me.
For an agency with two designers, they may go for the Team Plan, we did. That costs $70 a month (if paid annually) which I can live with. However, there is no ability to do annual client billing and obtain annual billing discount - that needs to be fixed. Also, it would be good to have the ability for two people in Team to work on the same website, just not same page.
Webflow allows designers to produce higher quality websites that look the way they envisaged. In my experience, That rarely happens when you hand off a static design files to a developer (it’s just never as pixel perfect). So what’s the alternative for a designer who wants max design flexibility and the client site to look perfect? Other similar solutions are not quite the same as webflow. Anyway, Is $20 really such a big amount for someone running a business when you consider what is actually included? It’s important to compare apples with apples when comparing to other hosting costs and educate customers,. but, volume / multi-site discounts will give designers the ability to be rewarded for bringing more business to webflow and make a few dollars. I am sure that will help, and then it’s up to each of us to decide to keep the margin or pass onto their clients.
More transparency please. Yes, I agree here too. The wishlist is a step in the right direction but there is more that could be done. This can be fixed and I for one believe Webflow has the real potential to have a very bright future. So I remain positive and believe in the Webflow team to listen, learn, react and move forward as they have done in the past.
Email. I used to offer this. Now it’s either Office 365 or GMail. From experience, email can create a lot of support calls, fast when there is an issue. Better to let the big guns deal with this (you can still bill for config), and of course loads of software plays nicely with Gmail and Office 365. Better that Webflow focusses on those lovely wishlist featues we all want and are eagerly waiting for.
My advice for all is keep learning how to code because sadly at some point we hit the wall of reality.
And don’t sorprice if one of this days webflow remove the possibility of code export because it’s trying to create a bubble like apple.
And for importing a blog in to webflow web need a developer? So funny, you only need one in very specific situations like importing products from a ecommerce platform to another.
And the free ssl which is not free because you can have one for $10 a year.
Webflow we are not haters we love you but you take advantage of this love.
And please I want the old webflow that was building the best tool for designers and devs because now you want to be like squarespace
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I agree that bulk discounts will be very helpful for me once I get to that point! I think Webflow provides an amazing software for what it is and it really does provide something that is unique. I don’t think there is a better alternative and don’t want to complain in a way that is not productive. My only concern is that they market Webflow as a way to easily pass on the costs to your customer and mark up the hosting, and I don’t think it is so easy for me at this point. I appreciate that Webflow staff monitor and respond to this forum and I hope that they find this feedback useful for the future of the software!
you have to think big… think global, but act local.
1000 small sites are easy to build and easy to sell.
a large website costs 40 or 60 hours… and are difficult to sell, because we have our limits with Webflow.
Lets help the Webflow team, and lets all make a deal!
Lets say that we are with 300 designers… lets make a promise we are find another designer… if Webflow make a deal on the bigger plans!
More money does not mean more income…
there is a simple thought on this… but all companies are afraid to lower their prices to earn more…
I don’t quite agree with many of the sentiments here. If a website costs hundreds (or thousands) of dollars - the 20$/month really shouldn’t scare off potential clients. I understand that there’s hosting out there for 2$/month - but you get what you pay for. Wordpress.com’s business hosting is 25$/month (WordPress Cost | WordPress Price | Compare Our Plans). I think clients should understand just as long as you give them a clear reasoning for the costs (CMS hosting, SSL, fastly CDN, etc). At least in my experience I haven’t had any clients balk at the cost of hosting.
I also love how Webflow is not only focusing on designers but expanding the product to be a full fledged CMS that small-mid businesses use.
Remember Webflow is a product that’s a few years old, and continuously upgrading. I’m no blind fanboy, but until they give me a reason otherwise I will defend their product as it’s been a godsend for me. I feel a lot of these responses are along the lines of “I pay money, so why can’t you do everything single thing I want?”. This is software folks, nothing is as cut and dry as you’d believe.