Contentful Pricing: Free vs Lite vs Enterprise - What You Actually Need

Hey folks, how's it going? How are you doing today? So, I'm glad you've jumped in here. I want to talk about Contentful pricing and I'm going to save you a lot of money. I guarantee it. So, let's start with the pricing here. It's nice and simple. It's only got three tiers. That's what you might think coming in here. That's not the case. And there's a lot more that's lurking below the surface like a shark. Let's start with free. So free is good. Everybody loves a free tier. Especially developers. We love being cheap, right? Um, free gets 10 users, two roles, two locales, 100K API calls a month, and 50 GB a month CDN bandwidth. Um, I'm going to say something controversial here. You can run most websites with these stats. Almost every website that we have and that we've built that's been well optimized sits below these stats. It's only the type of website that has, you know, like 50,000 users coming through a month, um, and starts moving into, you know, like higher tier, lower enterprise that really start not hitting these stats. However, there's only a couple of options here when you want something like internationalization because you'll notice the two locale on the three locale on light. So, if you are going for an internationalized website, you want to take a moment, pause, think about this, and see what you're going to do with it. It may be worth having an initial call with the sales team over at Contentful. But I want to go back for a second and show you one more thing. So, remember how I said the pricing is relatively simple? Well, this is the bit where it stops becoming simple. There is one starter space included. So, if you press this, you get a whole new pricing table. So, we're talking tables inside of tables at this point. However, I'm going to tell you the most important thing. So, ignore everything I've said so far. What you want to care about is content types. Now, you can see on the top line, it says 25 content types for the starter space and 50 content types for the light space. Okay, now, we're going to go flip back to the original pricing and we're going to see what you get. You get okay, you get one starter space, you get one light space, you get one starter space, you can have multiple custom spaces. For the sake of this, I'm going to call a space a database, okay, just for the sake of it. I know it's not exactly a fair comparison to make, but let's stick with that nomenclature because it's important. Now, if you look at this, you see the content type. So 25, right? Now, when we think about content content types. The easiest way to think of it is each unique repeatable document. Okay, repeat that after me. Each unique repeatable document. Um, so if you're thinking about a blog, that is a content type. So, one content type. Cool. Okay. Now, you might be wondering what happens with nested things where you can repeat them again and again. Well, that's two content types. Now, let me tell you an anti-pattern that we've seen firsthand and people screw this up all the time. You've got SEO inside of a page. You've got meta titles, you've got meta descriptions, you've got the open graph title, open graph descriptions. You might be tempted to go, "Hold up. We're going to use that across multiple pages. Why don't we make that a repeatable content type?" Okay, nice and simple. Don't do it. This is wrong. Very, very wrong. Okay, what you want to make sure that you're doing is you are building these long form, big chunky schemas for each of these content types. If you do what I've just said with SEO, Contentful uses these as repeatable pieces of data. Okay? Everything is repeatable. Everything is referenceable. So, what that means is if you put that SEO there, you're never going to repeat meta titles again and again and again, or it's very unlikely that you do that, because it's bad SEO practice. You don't want to have 10 of the same SEO titles across all of the website. You realistically have to have a one and done. However, now you've taken up two content types. And so, as you can see, this gets very tight very quickly. So, let me give you another example, which is page builder blocks. Now, with every single new kind of website that you want to build, you want to have pages where you can, you know, shuffle the blocks that exist inside of the page. Now, can you see where we're going with this? That's page, which is a content type. So, now we're up to two content types, and we want to have 10 page builder blocks. Cool. 10 page builder blocks. Well, hold up for a second. That means we're up to 12 content types. So, we've basically exhausted half of the available content types on the starter space or let me do the maths, a quarter on the light space. Okay? So, as soon as you go past that light space, that's come talk to sales. Come talk to us. You know what that means? Cash money, baby. So what you want to do is make sure that you are being very, very specific and you know, positioning the content types correctly when you build these kind of websites. So, building a blog again, there is another usage of a content type. What about authors? Okay, there you go. There's another content type. We're up to 13 content types. What about categories? 14 content types. I hope this makes a lot of sense. Uh, the records, you probably won't hit unless you're like, I don't know, news of the world or something. You're going to have 10,000 records is a lot of records. Uh, we very, very rarely see this unless you're doing something where it syncs data from another system and you're syncing it into Contentful. Then you might hit this record. Um, but effectively the 50,000 records you won't hit. Uh, workflows, nice thing. Uh, additional API usage, calls usage, this is great. Realistically, you won't hit anything else inside of here apart from these two and apart from the internationalization. Um, now that's essentially the two things that I would care about. There is also add-ons. So, I think if we go further down here, you move straight into the enterprise plan, which I'm happy to kind of talk about. I don't want to spend too much time on it today because realistically, you're not watching this video for enterprise plans. If you are, get in touch with me. You know, it's good. It's good. We want a little bit of cash money. So, uh, but yeah, essentially there is personalization, there is AI actions, and there is studio. I personally do not like studio. This is a personal preference. I am a big fan of things where you can do them programmatically or with AI. And I especially think this is going to be important coming into the next few years. But the personalization is very valuable because every single headless content management system is very difficult to build personalization for, and especially when it's not integrated. However, Contentful, I think, acquired, I forgot what company it was, but they acquired somebody at some point for the personalization. I've seen this firsthand. It is very nicely integrated. It's very, very good. So, if you are a big company going to Contentful and you are looking at the Enterprise Edition, the personalization and the AI actions are both very, very good features. I would honestly personally say skip the studio, um, because I'm not such a big fan of you know, like drag and drop, because you know, you're pretty much at the stage of Framer or Webflow at that point, and we both know their ass. Um, so yeah, essentially this is the pricing. If you have questions, drop them down in the comments below. I hope this has helped somebody. Give us a shout. Have a great day everybody. Bye-bye.