Headless CMS Pricing 2026: The Complete Breakdown (Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, Storyblok, Payload, BaseHub)

The real cost of a headless CMS is rarely what the pricing page shows. Seat fees, bandwidth overages, API call limits, asset storage, and the cost of the engineering time needed to wrangle each platform's quirks all add up. At WebVerse Arena, we budget CMS costs for every client project and have built up a detailed picture of what each major platform actually costs at small, mid, and large team sizes. Here's the complete 2026 breakdown across the seven platforms we work with most: Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, Hygraph, Storyblok, Payload, and BaseHub.

Sanity pricing in 2026: The Free plan covers 2 non-admin users, 1M API CDN requests/month, 10GB bandwidth, 5GB asset storage, and up to 2 projects — adequate for a developer prototype or a personal site, not for a production project with a content team. The Growth plan at $99/month gives you 5 projects, 20 users (including 3 admins), 100GB bandwidth, 20GB assets, and unlimited API requests subject to fair-use throttling. The Business plan at $949/month adds SSO (SAML), custom roles, 20 projects, 200GB bandwidth, and a formal SLA. Custom Enterprise pricing above that. Hidden costs to watch: Sanity charges for bandwidth overages at $0.10/GB above the plan limit — a high-traffic site serving large images through the Sanity asset CDN can add $30–$150/month in bandwidth charges that aren't visible until the invoice arrives. The Asset API for image transformations consumes API request quota — a site with significant image traffic should audit its `@sanity/image-url` usage to avoid hitting the 1M request ceiling on the Free plan.

Contentful pricing in 2026: The Community plan is free with 5 users, 25K content records, 2 locales, 2M API calls/month, and 1 sandbox environment — sufficient for a small site or a proof of concept. The Basic plan at $300/month raises limits to 25 users, 50K records, 10 locales, and 5M API calls, but removes the sandbox environment (critical for teams with staging pipelines). The Team plan at $800/month re-adds sandbox environments and adds Roles & Permissions and Scheduled Publishing. Enterprise is custom — $36,000/year is a realistic entry point, with large deployments reaching $100,000–$300,000/year. Hidden costs: Contentful's content record count (the number of published and unpublished entries) is its most common pricing trap — a B2B SaaS documentation site with 200 articles, 50 authors, 300 tag entries, and supporting metadata entries can easily hit 25K records without a large site. Locale add-ons above the plan limit are charged separately on legacy contracts. The Compose add-on (page builder) is additional cost at the Enterprise tier.

Strapi pricing in 2026: Self-hosted Strapi (open source, MIT license) costs $0 in platform fees — you pay only for infrastructure. On Railway at $5/month compute + $5/month PostgreSQL, a Strapi instance handling 50K API requests/day runs comfortably. On Hetzner CX21 at €3.79/month + managed PostgreSQL at €4.90/month, you're under ₹1,500/month for a production-grade Strapi deployment. Strapi Cloud managed hosting: Starter at $29/month (1 project, 10K API calls/day, 10GB storage, shared infrastructure), Growth at $99/month (unlimited projects, 50K API calls/day, 50GB storage, dedicated containers), Pro at $399/month (custom domains, priority support, 200K API calls/day). Hidden costs: Strapi's self-hosted model pushes infrastructure and maintenance costs onto you — database backups, SSL certificate renewal, security patching, uptime monitoring. For a lean agency team, this overhead is non-trivial. Budget 2–4 developer hours/month for maintenance if you're self-hosting on a VPS.

Hygraph, Storyblok, and Payload pricing in 2026: Hygraph (formerly GraphCMS) positions as a federated content graph platform — its Community plan is free with 2 users, 1M API operations/month, and limited content stages. The Growth plan at $299/month adds 10 users, higher API limits, and content stages for staging workflows. Professional at $799/month adds 25 users, SSO, and priority support. Hygraph's strength is its native GraphQL-first API and its content federation for pulling external data sources into the content graph. Storyblok is the visual page builder CMS — its Community plan is free with 5 users, its Starter plan is €99/month (10 users, 1 space), and the Team plan is €269/month (25 users, multiple spaces). Storyblok's strength is its Visual Editor, which lets marketers see content changes in context without a separate preview setup. Payload CMS (open source, TypeScript-native, self-hosted) is free under the MIT license — it's the closest thing to a Strapi competitor that is TypeScript-first from the ground up. Payload v3 (released 2024) supports Next.js App Router natively and runs inside a Next.js project, making it the most developer-elegant self-hosted option for teams already building on Next.js.

BaseHub and true cost at scale: BaseHub charges $30/month per repo (project), with the Free plan covering 1 repo at no cost. For an agency managing 10 client CMS instances, BaseHub costs $300/month minimum — compare this to Sanity's $99/month Growth covering 5 projects, or Strapi's $0 self-hosted across unlimited projects. The per-repo BaseHub model is economical for a business running a single primary site but expensive for multi-project agencies. Comprehensive cost comparison for a team of 8 content editors, 3 developers, 2 projects, English + French content, 50K API requests/day, 30GB assets, staging environment: Sanity Business $949/month. Contentful Team $800/month (2 locales, no overage). Strapi Cloud Growth $99/month × 2 = $198/month, or self-hosted on Railway ~$40/month. Hygraph Growth $299/month (per space, so $598/month for 2 projects). Storyblok Team $269/month (covers multiple spaces). BaseHub Pro $30 × 2 = $60/month (no SSO, limited at this tier). Payload: $0 platform fees, ~$30/month infrastructure.

Pricing traps to watch across all platforms: (1) Bandwidth overages — Sanity and Hygraph both charge for CDN bandwidth above plan limits; a media-heavy site with image-heavy content can generate $50–$200/month in overage charges not visible on the pricing page. (2) Seat fees — Contentful Enterprise and some Storyblok plans charge per-seat fees for content editors; a 20-person editorial team adds up fast. (3) API call limits — Storyblok and Hygraph meter API operations differently from bandwidth; high-traffic sites with server-side rendering and no caching layer can burn through daily API quotas in hours. (4) Locale pricing — Contentful charges for additional locales on legacy contracts, and Hygraph's locale model has limits on lower tiers that surprise teams building multilingual sites. (5) Asset storage — Sanity's 20GB asset limit on the Growth plan is genuinely limiting for a media-heavy brand; overages at $0.25/GB/month accrue fast. (6) Preview environments — Contentful charges for additional sandbox environments above the plan limit; teams that need per-branch preview environments either pay for higher tiers or build workarounds. At WebVerse Arena, we include a CMS cost projection in every project proposal so clients understand the 3-year total cost of ownership, not just the month-one invoice.