Sanity vs Payload CMS vs Strapi: Pricing Comparison 2026

Sanity, Payload CMS, and Strapi are the three headless CMS options that come up most often when a Next.js team is scoping a new project in 2026. Each has a free tier, each can power a production site, and each will cost you something different once you cross a threshold. This post puts the pricing side by side so you can see where the bills actually start.

Why pricing for these three is hard to compare directly

The billing models are structurally different. Sanity charges on hosted infrastructure — API requests, bandwidth, and seats. Payload charges nothing for the software itself; you pay for wherever you host it. Strapi has both a self-hosted open-source edition and a managed cloud product. That means a like-for-like comparison requires you to pick a deployment scenario for each, not just copy numbers from a pricing page.

I'm going to compare three scenarios that actually come up on client projects:

1. Solo developer or small startup — one editor, moderate traffic, no dedicated DevOps.
2. Small agency or product team — three to five editors, high-traffic content site, staging + production.
3. Growing company — ten-plus editors, multiple projects, compliance requirements starting to matter.

Side-by-side pricing table

Scenario 1: solo developer, small project

Sanity's free plan is genuinely usable here. Two users and 10k CDN requests per month is tight for a busy site, but fine for an early-stage product or portfolio. The real limit is bandwidth: 10 GB goes fast if you're serving unoptimised images directly from the CDN rather than using @sanity/image-url with format and size parameters.

Payload on a $5–10/mo VPS (Fly.io, Railway, or a small DigitalOcean droplet) is cheaper in raw dollar terms — essentially free software plus a few dollars of compute. The trade-off is you're now responsible for uptime, backups, and upgrades. For a solo developer comfortable with that, Payload wins on cost at this tier.

Strapi Community Edition on the same $5–10 VPS gives you the same equation. Strapi Cloud's Starter plan at $29/mo is more than either of the above, so most solo devs skip it.

Winner at this tier: Payload or Strapi self-hosted (near-zero licence cost). Sanity free plan is competitive if you want zero infrastructure work.

Scenario 2: small team, production + staging

This is where the pricing gap opens up.

Sanity Growth at $15/mo per project means $30/mo for production and staging as two separate projects (Sanity doesn't have native environments — a common source of confusion). Add three editors above the included seats: $10/user × 1 extra = $10/mo. Realistic total: $40–50/mo, not counting asset bandwidth overages.

Payload self-hosted on a $20–40/mo managed Postgres instance (Railway or Neon) plus a small compute node: roughly $25–45/mo total. Payload Cloud is in beta/early GA at the time of writing — pricing is per-project and has been competitive, but check the current rates before committing. Backup strategy is your responsibility.

Strapi Cloud's Pro plan at $99/mo includes three environments and five users. That's genuinely easier than self-hosting, but it's meaningfully more expensive than either Sanity or Payload at this scale. Self-hosted Strapi with a managed Postgres: $25–45/mo, similar to Payload.

Winner at this tier: Payload self-hosted if your team has DevOps comfort. Sanity Growth if you want a managed platform without surprising bills. Strapi Cloud is convenient but overpriced relative to the alternatives until you're closer to the Enterprise tier.

Scenario 3: ten-plus editors, growing company

Sanity's per-seat cost compounds. Ten editors on Growth: 8 additional seats × $10 = $80/mo in seats alone, plus the $15 base, plus likely multiple projects. A five-project team pays $15 × 5 = $75/mo in project fees. Realistically $150–300/mo before you hit Enterprise conversations.

Payload at this scale is still just infrastructure cost. Ten editors change nothing about the licence. A production-grade setup on Railway or AWS with managed Postgres, Redis for jobs, and a CDN in front: $80–150/mo depending on traffic. No per-seat tax.

Strapi Enterprise starts around $1,800/mo and is aimed at companies needing SSO, audit logs, and SLAs. That's a significant jump. Self-hosted Strapi with ten editors: still just infra cost, same as Payload.

Winner at this tier: Payload or Strapi self-hosted on raw cost. Sanity becomes worth the premium if the managed hosted experience, real-time collaboration, and CDN asset pipeline save engineering time that would otherwise go to infra maintenance.

What actually triggers an upgrade on each platform

• Sanity: Exceeding 2 users, hitting the 10k CDN request cap, or needing more than 10 GB asset storage. Most sites hit the request cap first.
• Payload: Nothing triggers an upgrade in the licence sense. You upgrade your hosting when you need more CPU, memory, or Postgres connections.
• Strapi: On Cloud, needing a staging environment ($29/mo per additional env) or more than the included seats. On self-hosted, nothing — until you need Enterprise features.

The real cost question

Payload and Strapi self-hosted are cheaper in licence terms, sometimes dramatically so. But they're not free. Someone has to handle database backups, version upgrades, and on-call when the server runs out of disk space at 2 AM. For a team with a dedicated engineer, that cost is negligible. For a founder who just wants the CMS to work, Sanity's managed hosting is often worth the seat fees.

If I'm building a client project where the client will manage the CMS long-term without a developer on retainer, Sanity's hosted model reduces operational risk enough to justify the cost over self-hosted Payload or Strapi. If I'm building something for a technical team that already runs managed infrastructure, Payload on Railway is hard to beat on total cost of ownership.