What Webflow changed this year
Webflow changed its pricing in May, and the change is now reaching most of the sites still on the old plans. The CMS and Business plans were merged into a single Premium plan at $25 a month billed yearly, the Basic plan went up by a dollar, and paying month to month became noticeably more expensive: Basic went from $18 to $25 a month and the old CMS plan from $29 to $39. New sites have paid the new prices since 13 May, most existing sites moved over at their first renewal after 29 June, and sites managed in Freelancer or Agency Workspaces move over from 16 November.
It would be unfair to Webflow to suggest that everyone pays more, because some customers, particularly those on the old Business plan billed yearly, will pay less, and several limits went up at the same time. The price of any one plan isn't really the point I want to make, though. A price rise, a price cut or a new bandwidth limit is a decision someone else makes about your website, and on an all-in-one platform you have very few ways to respond other than paying or rebuilding.
That is why I think your next renewal is a good moment to ask whether the platform you started on is the one you want to keep growing on.
Webflow is a good place to start
Webflow is fine as a starting point, and there are businesses I would still point towards it. It puts a visual builder, hosting and a CMS in one place, so a small team can get a well-designed site live without hiring developers or thinking about servers. If your site is a handful of pages, a blog and a contact form, and one or two people look after it, that convenience is worth paying for.
The trouble tends to arrive later, and quietly. Everything you build on Webflow, from your page layouts to your CMS collections and interactions, lives inside Webflow, which is part of what makes it easy to begin with and part of what makes it hard to leave. Moving off it means rebuilding the front end rather than exporting it, so the longer a site grows on the platform, the bigger that rebuild becomes.
Where Webflow starts to pinch as you grow
As a business grows, the website stops being one person's job, and you start to want different teams working on different parts of it: marketing on campaign pages, someone in product on documentation, a regional team on their own market. Webflow can do this, but each person needs a seat on your Workspace, and the features built for several teams publishing side by side, such as publishing workflows and page branching, sit on the new Team plan, which starts at around $2,500 a month.
This is where Sanity is a great choice. Sanity Studio is the editing environment your team logs into, and because we configure it for your business rather than handing you a generic one, each team sees the content it looks after, laid out in the way it works. Several people can edit at the same time without stepping on each other, and the structure of your content (products, case studies, locations, team members) is defined once and reused wherever it appears on the site.
Languages are the other place the costs add up. Webflow's Localization add-on is charged per language, per month, on top of your site plan: $9 per locale on the Essential tier, which covers up to three, or $29 per locale on Advanced. With Sanity, multilingual content is part of how we model the site from the start, and we build it around your languages and the way you already work. If you have translators and a workflow they rely on, we build the Studio around that workflow. If you don't, we can build in AI tooling that drafts translations for your team to review, guided by your brand voice so the Japanese site reads like your company and not like a machine.
For a full walkthrough of how we approach the move, see Webflow to Sanity migration.
What control looks like with Sanity and Next.js
I'm not going to tell you Sanity will never raise its prices, because no software company can promise that and Sanity has its own paid plans. What changes is how much of your site depends on any one company's decision. With Sanity and a custom build on Next.js, your website is made of separate parts: your content lives in Sanity as structured data you can query and export, the site itself is Next.js code that belongs to you, and it runs on a host you choose.
That separation is where the control comes from, because if a hosting bill goes up you can move the site to another host without touching your content. If you ever decide Sanity is no longer right for you, your content comes out as data and the front end stays as it is, so you replace one part rather than starting again. On Webflow, the design, the content and the hosting are one product, so a change to any of them is a change you accept or a rebuild you plan.
It also means your website is something you own in a practical sense. The code sits in your repository, the content sits in your dataset, and no platform decides which features you're allowed to have on your current plan.
Adding what your business actually needs
The other advantage of a custom build is that it's easier to add functionality that you control and that is bespoke to your business. On Webflow, anything beyond pages and CMS content, such as a booking system, a client portal or a quote calculator tied to your CRM, usually means embedding a third-party tool, which brings its own subscription, its own design limits and its own login for your customers. On Next.js, we build those features into the site itself, so they look like the rest of your brand, work the way your business works, and grow with it.
This matters more as you grow, because the features that set a business apart are rarely the ones an off-the-shelf app was designed for. A booking flow that matches how you actually schedule appointments, or a portal that shows clients exactly the documents they need, is far easier to build when the site is your own code.
For your technical lead: the front end is a Next.js app that reads content from Sanity through GROQ queries, with draft mode and Sanity's Presentation tool giving editors a live preview of unpublished changes. Custom features run as server-side routes in the same codebase, and Sanity webhooks can trigger rebuilds, notifications or syncs with other systems when content changes. There is no plugin marketplace to work around, and nothing stops you adding a database or an integration when you need one.
Starting a new site? Start on something you can grow into
If you're considering a new site, it's easier to start on a platform that can be grown into later down the line than to move once you've outgrown the first one. A migration from Webflow means rebuilding the front end, mapping every existing URL to its new home with redirects so you keep your search rankings, recreating your SEO fields and metadata, and moving form handling somewhere new. None of that is unusual work, but all of it is work you avoid by starting in the right place.
A Sanity and Next.js build costs more to set up than a Webflow site, and I'd rather say that plainly than have you discover it in a quote. What you get for the difference is a site that doesn't need replacing when you add a second team, a second language or a feature nobody sells as an app.
Is now the right time to move?
Your renewal date is the natural point to decide, because it's when the new pricing reaches your site and when you're about to commit to another year or another month. If you need time, Webflow lets existing sites switch to yearly billing before the change to hold their current plan for another year, which turns a rushed decision into a planned one and gives you a year to scope a move properly.
Staying on Webflow is a reasonable choice if your site is small, one or two people edit it, and you have no plans for more languages, more teams or features of your own. If any of those are on your roadmap, I'd look at moving before the site grows further, because every page and collection you add now is one more thing to migrate later.
If you'd like to talk through what a move would involve for your site, our Webflow to Sanity migration page sets out how we do it.
