Sanity vs Payload CMS vs Storyblok: Pricing Comparison 2026

Sanity, Payload CMS, and Storyblok are the three headless CMS platforms I quote most often when scoping Next.js projects in 2026. Pricing is almost always the first question, and the answer is genuinely different depending on team size, content volume, and whether you want managed hosting. This post compares the published numbers from each vendor's pricing page at the time of writing (and clearly labelled estimates for self-hosted infrastructure) — check the vendors' pages before you commit, because all three have changed their plans in the last couple of years.

How each pricing model works

Before the table, a quick structural note because the three models are fundamentally different.

Sanity charges per seat on its paid plan, with usage quotas on top. The Free plan gives you up to 20 seats, two public datasets, 10,000 documents, 250k API requests and 1M API CDN requests per month, 100 GB bandwidth, and 100 GB of asset storage — no overages, you upgrade instead. Growth is $15 per seat per month (up to 50 seats), raises the document limit to 25,000, adds private datasets, and bills pay-as-you-go overages for requests, bandwidth, and assets.

Payload CMS is open-source software you self-host. The software itself is free under MIT. "Pricing" means your infrastructure bill — a Vercel, Render, or Railway deployment, a Postgres or MongoDB database, and object storage for assets. Payload Cloud, Payload's managed hosting, paused new project deployments after Payload joined Figma in 2025 (existing Cloud projects keep running), so for a new project self-hosting is the realistic option. If you self-host well, Payload can be genuinely the cheapest option. If you are sloppy, the ops cost adds up fast.

Storyblok charges by plan, with a seat allowance per plan. The free Starter plan includes one seat (up to two at $15/month for the extra seat), 100k API requests, and 100 GB traffic per month. Growth is $99/month ($90.75/month billed annually) with 5 seats included and extra seats at $15/month up to 10. Growth Plus is $349/month ($319.91 billed annually) with 15 seats. Premium and Elite are custom-priced. The seat allowances mean team size decides your tier quickly.

Side-by-side pricing table

Infrastructure estimates for Payload self-hosted: a small Railway service (~$5–15/month, billed per resource), Neon Postgres (free tier or usage-based Launch), and $1–5/month of Cloudflare R2 for assets — roughly $20/month if you stay small. A more serious setup (bigger database, preview deployments, Vercel Pro seats) runs $50–100/month.

What actually triggers an upgrade

Sanity upgrades from Free are usually triggered by needing private datasets, more than 10,000 documents, or headroom beyond the free request and bandwidth quotas (Free has no overages — you upgrade instead). On Growth, cost scales with seats plus any usage overage. A marketing site that fetches server-side and leans on the Next.js cache usually stays well inside the request quotas. Where you do get hit: live preview and real-time features that bypass the CDN, or lots of client-side GROQ queries. Sanity's pricing page lists Growth overages at $1 per 25k API requests, $1 per 250k CDN requests, $0.30 per GB of bandwidth, and $0.50 per GB of assets.

Self-hosted Payload scales differently: the trigger is your own comfort level with database ops and keeping up with Payload releases, not a billing threshold. Your infra bill grows with traffic and storage.

Storyblok upgrades are mostly seat-triggered. Starter tops out at two seats; Growth covers 5 included seats and up to 10 with paid extras; past that you're on Growth Plus at $349/month — a significant step. If you're building a site that an agency will hand off to a large client team, budget for the tier that covers the full headcount from day one.

Total cost of ownership over 12 months

Here's a realistic scenario: two developers, three marketing editors (five seats), a production site, and a staging environment.

• Sanity Free: $0/year if public datasets are acceptable and you stay within the free quotas — staging uses the second dataset.
• Sanity Growth: 5 seats × $15 × 12 = $900/year, plus any usage overage. Staging uses the second dataset (private, if you need it).
• Payload self-hosted: Railway + Neon + R2 ≈ $50/month × 12 = ~$600/year (estimate). Add dev time for ops — patching, backups, migration scripts.
• Storyblok Growth: 5 seats are included, so ~$1,089/year billed annually ($1,188 billed monthly).

For a solo founder or two-person team, Storyblok Starter and Sanity Free are both usable. Past ten people, Storyblok jumps to Growth Plus; Sanity Growth grows linearly at $15 per seat; Payload gives you a zero-seat-cost self-hosted option if you have the ops maturity.

Which to pick based on budget constraints

Under $50/month total: Sanity Free plus your hosting, or Payload self-hosted on Railway. Sanity wins on zero-config; Payload wins if you need SQL or custom auth. (Vercel's Hobby plan is for non-commercial use, so budget Vercel Pro for a business site.)

$50–$150/month: Sanity Growth for a small team (e.g. five seats = $75/month) or Storyblok Growth ($99/month) if you want its visual editor. Most real projects live here.

$150–$400/month: Larger Sanity Growth teams, or Storyblok Growth Plus if you need its 15-seat allowance and higher quotas.

Over $400/month: You're looking at Storyblok Premium/Elite or Sanity Enterprise. At this scale, seat count, roles, and environment limits matter more than per-unit costs — get quotes from each vendor directly.

The short version: Sanity is cheapest for small teams and stays predictable at $15 per seat. Payload wins on long-run cost if you're self-hosting and have ops capacity. Storyblok wins on editor UX, and its included seat allowances can make it competitive for mid-size teams.