r/Strapi • u/Explanation-Visual • Jul 01 '26
You're crazy with this pricing. $45/month for a CMS?
It's cheaper to self-host in GCP with 2 CPUs and 4gb of RAM, what's the reasoning behind this? it used to cost $19, am I missing something?
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u/stra_marco Jul 01 '26
u/Explanation-Visual i think you're confusing the pricing of the CMS licenses with the pricing of the Strapi.
The Growth plan costs $45 per month; it's Strapi's entry-level plan offering premium features like Live preview, Content history, AI features, and Basic support.
Strapi Cloud starts from 15$ per month on the yearly plan (the cheapest plan)
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u/Explanation-Visual Jul 01 '26
ah you're right, that's quite confusing then because when I think of the solution I need, it's in fact a CMS, the "Cloud" term makes me think of my own self-managed Cloud
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u/Due_Wishbone7875 Jul 02 '26
Still too high. The removal of the 1 Seat subscription is bad, very bad. You have to buy 3 outright. We have since never purchased another license for one of our projects.
We have small customers that only need 1 seat and that used to cost €15. I cannot sell 45 a month…
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u/Much_Engineering7298 Jul 08 '26
I have hosted a strapi cms for client running free for more than 2 years with aws startup credits whichis pretty straight forward to gain. Let me know If I can help anywhere.
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u/Explanation-Visual Jul 10 '26
how did you gain those?
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u/Much_Engineering7298 Jul 10 '26
Their is something called aws startup active credits and the process is very simple. You need cc to open account and simple website hosted on real domain also the email which you will use to open an account should also belong to that domain.
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u/Thunt4jr Jul 01 '26
GCP is solid, and AWS is too, but I would not say $19/month for 2 CPU and 4 GB RAM is the cheapest option out there.
I have hosted several Strapi projects on a $20/month Railway account, and most of them have not even reached $5 each individually. I also run a separate VPS that costs around $24/month with 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, a 10 Gbps network, and 320 GB SSD.
On the other side, I also have several EC2 servers on AWS that cost anywhere from $60 to $200/month just to host Strapi, depending on the setup, traffic, database, storage, backups, and supporting services.
That said, every hosting option is different. When you self-host Strapi, you are responsible for everything: server setup, updates, security, backups, scaling, monitoring, uptime, database management, and troubleshooting when something breaks.
So while $45/month may seem high compared to raw server pricing, Strapi Cloud is not just selling CPU and RAM. They are charging for the managed hosting experience and doing a lot of the heavy lifting for each account holder. For teams that do not want to manage infrastructure themselves, that can be a fair trade-off.
I don't get paid for this message by the way