Headless CMS pricing in 2026 has become one of the first questions founders ask me when scoping a new build. The honest answer is: it depends entirely on your user count, API call volume, and whether you can run your own infrastructure. This post puts Sanity, Contentful, Payload, and Strapi side by side so you can read across a single table instead of opening four browser tabs.

I'm not going to repeat the feature comparisons I've already written elsewhere. This is purely about money — what you pay at each growth stage, and what event forces you to upgrade.

The headless CMS pricing comparison table

All figures are in USD per month as of June 2026. Verify against each vendor's live pricing page before you sign anything — these platforms revise tiers more often than they announce it.

Reading the table honestly

Sanity is the most generous at the free tier for solo developers and small editorial teams. Three editors is enough for a founder plus one content person plus one developer. The problem is that costs compound: you pay per seat and per usage, so a mid-size marketing team of eight editors hits a meaningful monthly number fast. Sanity also has no self-host option — you are permanently renting their infrastructure.

Contentful looks cheap until you hit the Basic plan wall. There is no gradual ramp between the free tier and $300/month. That cliff is the single most common reason I see clients walk away from Contentful mid-evaluation. For a startup managing budget carefully, a $300/mo line item in month three of a new project is a real conversation. The flip side: Contentful's CDN and locale handling at the paid tier are genuinely mature, and large enterprise teams often find the flat pricing predictable at scale.

Payload is the outlier here because it is MIT-licensed open-source software. If you can self-host — and most teams with a competent developer can — the licence cost is zero. You pay for a VPS, a managed Postgres or MongoDB instance, and your time. For a small project that means roughly $10–25/month in real infra costs. Payload Cloud exists if you want managed hosting, but using it is optional. The tradeoff is operational overhead: you own upgrades, backups, and uptime.

Strapi follows the same model as Payload. The v5 open-source licence is free, self-hosting is straightforward, and Strapi Cloud is the optional managed layer. Strapi's Cloud entry point at $99/month is higher than Payload's $40, but Strapi has a larger plugin ecosystem and more established enterprise contracts if that matters to your procurement team.

Which tier fits which team size

Solo developer or two-person startup: Sanity free tier or self-hosted Payload. Both cost nothing until you grow. I usually recommend Sanity here because the zero-ops experience is valuable when you're also writing code and managing a product.

Five to ten editors, content-heavy marketing site: This is where the decision actually gets hard. Sanity starts costing $10–15 per editor per month above the base three. Contentful forces you to $300/month. Self-hosted Payload or Strapi stays near $20–40/month in infra if your team is comfortable running a server. If the client has no DevOps capability, Sanity wins on experience despite the seat cost.

Agency building for a client who will own the CMS long-term: I lean toward Payload or Strapi so the client never depends on a per-seat pricing model they can't control. Handing over an MIT-licensed codebase with a $15/month Railway deployment is a cleaner handoff than handing over a Sanity project where every new editor the client adds costs money they didn't budget for.

Enterprise with compliance requirements: Contentful and Sanity both have enterprise contracts with SOC 2 Type II and SSO. Strapi Enterprise adds audit logs and priority support. Payload is catching up on compliance certifications — worth checking their current status before scoping a regulated-industry project.

The real cost nobody puts in the table

Hosting and licence fees are the visible line item. The invisible one is migration cost. Contentful's data model is opinionated enough that moving off it later takes real engineering time. Sanity stores everything in NDJSON with a document-level graph, which is portable but still requires a migration script. Payload and Strapi use a relational database you already own — exporting your data is a SQL dump.

For a founder making this decision in 2026: price the three-year total, not the month-one number. If you expect to grow to fifteen editors, model the seat costs. If you expect to hire a developer who can maintain a server, model self-hosting. The right answer is usually one of two things: Sanity if you want zero infrastructure opinions and can absorb seat cost, or Payload/Strapi self-hosted if you want cost control and have engineering capacity to match.