Contentful pricing in 2026: every plan's limits, the 2024 changes and what teams move to

The short answer

Contentful sells three plans: Free (USD 0, for learning only), Lite (USD 300 a month) and Enterprise (custom). Lite includes 20 users, 3 locales, 1 million API calls and 100 GB of bandwidth a month, but its space holds only 10,000 records and 25 content types. The one way to grow on Lite is a Lite Space for another USD 850 a month, which lifts records to 50,000. After that, the next step is Enterprise (Contentful pricing, read 17 October 2026).

The price of Lite hasn't moved since 2024, but what it includes has. When Contentful replaced its Basic plan with Lite on 18 November 2024, monthly API calls went from 4 million to 1 million and bandwidth from 1.5 TB to 100 GB. The Free plan went from 3 million API calls to 100,000 and is now limited to testing and learning (Contentful usage limits).

Teams that outgrow Lite and don't want Enterprise usually look at Sanity, Storyblok, DatoCMS or Hygraph, or at open-source Strapi and Payload. For a 10-person team with 30,000 entries, the plans with a fixed published price run from USD 0 in licence fees (Payload, self-hosted) to USD 1,150 a month (Contentful Lite plus a Lite Space); Hygraph would need its Enterprise plan. The tables below show every limit side by side.

This guide is about Contentful's cost and what leaving it takes. For a feature comparison of the main headless CMSs, see Sanity vs Contentful vs Payload.

Contentful's plans and limits today

Every figure below comes from Contentful's pricing page, its usage limits (version of 14 August 2026) and its technical limits, read on 17 October 2026.

The space is where content limits live:

Four details in the fine print matter more than the headline price:

• The Free plan can't run a business site. The usage limits say Free "may not be used to support commercial use cases", and Contentful reserves the right to suspend accounts that do.
• Records means entries plus assets. Contentful's help center gives the formula as entries plus assets, and says there's no built-in alert when you approach the limit (Contentful Help Center).
• Cached requests don't count. Contentful says cached CDN responses don't generate API calls, and its own example puts 50 million extra calls at about USD 250.
• Each content type holds at most 50 fields, and paid plans can send 78 delivery API requests a second per space (55 on Free).

Contentful's owner also changed this year. Salesforce completed its purchase of Contentful on 1 September 2026 and says Contentful will be integrated across its Customer 360 platform (Salesforce). The announcement says nothing about prices, and the plans above were unchanged on 17 October.

What changed between 2024 and 2026

Contentful launched its Free and Lite plans on 18 November 2024, replacing the Free and Basic plans it had sold since February 2023. Comparing the archived 2023–2024 usage limits and an archived pricing page from September 2024 with today's:

The Free plan changed more. Contentful's Free plan FAQ lists the changes: 10 users instead of 5, only Admin and Editor roles, 100,000 API calls and 50 GB of bandwidth a month (down from 3 million calls and 0.85 TB including the free space), one less environment and one organization per user. Existing Free accounts moved to the new limits on 30 April 2025. Contentful offered 50% off Lite for six months to Free customers who upgraded by 28 February 2025.

What this means for a budget: the same USD 300 now buys a quarter of the API calls and a fifteenth of the bandwidth, and any set-up with more than two spaces needs Enterprise. The usage limits say legacy plans keep their legacy limits, so check which plan your organization is actually on before you assume the new numbers apply.

What pushes teams past Lite

API calls rarely force the upgrade. At USD 5 per million, a site making 6 million uncached calls a month pays USD 25 in overage (5 million over × USD 5). Bandwidth is similar: serving 400 GB of images costs 300 GB × USD 0.15 = USD 45 extra.

The limits that do force a move:

1. Records. Composable pages use records fast. A page built from one page entry, six section entries and three images uses 10 records, so 1,000 such pages fill the Starter Space's 10,000. Lift it to 50,000 with a Lite Space and the bill becomes USD 1,150 a month, or USD 13,800 a year.
2. A fourth language. Lite stops at 3 locales, and adding a Lite Space doesn't add locales. With field-level localization, every language lives inside the same entry, so languages don't multiply records; Contentful's entry-level strategy, one entry per language, does (Contentful docs). Either way, the fourth language means Enterprise.
3. A second site or brand. Lite allows two spaces in total. A third means Enterprise.
4. Single sign-on or custom roles. Both are Enterprise-only, and many companies' security reviews require SSO.
5. Environments. The Starter Space has 2, a master and one sandbox. Teams that want a separate environment for each pull request run out quickly.
6. Content types. 25 on the Starter Space is tight for a site with many page templates, components and settings types.

Contentful doesn't publish Enterprise prices. Its pricing page says they're shaped mainly by the number and complexity of your use cases, so get a written quote before you assume the next step.

Alternatives, with the same limits side by side

We read each vendor's pricing page on 17 October 2026. Prices are list prices in US dollars except DatoCMS, which publishes in euros.

What the table leaves out:

• Overages are cheap almost everywhere. Sanity charges USD 1 per 250,000 extra CDN requests and USD 0.30 per GB, Storyblok USD 10 per million requests and USD 75 per 250 GB, Hygraph USD 0.20 per 10,000 operations or per GB, DatoCMS EUR 9 per million delivery calls and EUR 29 per 150 GB, and Strapi Cloud USD 1.50 per 25,000 requests and USD 30 per 100 GB.
• Free tiers differ in what they allow. Sanity Free gives 20 seats and 10,000 documents but only Administrator and Viewer roles and public datasets. Storyblok's free Starter is described as being for testing and personal projects. DatoCMS Free stops at 300 records and Hygraph's Hobby plan at 1,000 entries.
• Counting rules differ. Contentful and Hygraph count assets as records or entries. DatoCMS counts content records and puts files under a separate 500 GB storage limit. Storyblok counts stories and assets separately.
• Sanity bills self-serve plans monthly only, and charges nothing for locales as long as each dataset stays within its attribute limit.
• Hygraph's Enterprise price is the one alternative that's public as a range: its FAQ says Enterprise plans typically run from about USD 32,000 to 300,000 a year.

Open-source alternatives

If the goal is to stop paying per record, the open-source options move the cost to hosting and maintenance:

• Strapi's Community edition is MIT-licensed with unlimited content types, locales, roles and usage when you host it yourself. Live Preview and Releases need the Growth licence, USD 45 a month with 3 users plus USD 15 per extra user (Strapi pricing). Strapi Cloud starts at USD 35 a project a month on a Starter plan that sleeps when idle.
• Payload is MIT-licensed, and Payload says it runs anywhere a Next.js app can run. Payload joined Figma, and deployment of new projects on Payload Cloud is paused, so plan to host it yourself (Payload).
• EmDash, which we use for dardo.studio, reached its stable 1.0 on 28 September 2026 as a free, open-source CMS built on Astro (Cloudflare). It's young, with a small plugin ecosystem.

What a 10-person team with 30,000 entries would pay

Same team on each: 10 people who edit or build, 2 languages, about 30,000 entries plus 5,000 images, monthly list prices.

Licence fees aren't the whole cost. Self-hosting means someone patches, backs up and upgrades the CMS, and every move has a one-time migration cost, covered next.

What it takes to leave Contentful

1. Export everything

Contentful's contentful-export tool (also the contentful space export command in its CLI) writes one JSON file with content types, entries, assets, locales, tags, webhooks, roles and editor interfaces. Two settings matter:

• downloadAssets saves the actual files. Without it, you get asset metadata and links to files that still live on Contentful's CDN.
• includeDrafts adds unpublished entries, which the default export leaves out.

The tool doesn't export space memberships, strips webhook credentials, and custom UI extensions have to be rebuilt.

contentful space export --space-id <space-id> --management-token <token> --download-assets --include-drafts

2. Map the content model

Each Contentful content type becomes a schema, model or collection in the new CMS. Decide early how languages work: with Contentful's field-level localization every locale sits inside the same entry, while some systems keep one document per language. References between entries need to survive the move, so map IDs before you import anything.

3. Convert rich text

Contentful returns rich text as JSON, an abstract syntax tree of nodes rather than HTML (Contentful docs). Every embedded entry, asset and inline link inside it has to become the destination's equivalent: Sanity's Portable Text, Storyblok's rich text, DatoCMS's structured text, or HTML or Markdown for Strapi and Payload. This is usually the largest single task in the migration.

4. Use the importers that exist

• Sanity publishes an official contentful-to-sanity tool that exports a space, generates the Sanity schema and prepares a dataset to import.
• DatoCMS has an official CLI plugin that imports a Contentful space's models, records and assets, or only the schema.
• Storyblok publishes a tutorial with a migration script that exports with the Contentful CLI and imports through Storyblok's Management API; it notes that rich text and linked entries need custom logic.
• Hygraph offers a migration guide as a downloadable ebook.
• Strapi and Payload: we didn't find an official Contentful importer on either site, so plan on a script that reads the export JSON.

5. Rebuild preview and front-end queries

Your site's queries are written for Contentful's GraphQL or REST APIs and its SDK, and its live preview is wired to Contentful's preview API. Both get rewritten for the new CMS. If URLs change while you do it, add a redirect for each one: our redirect map generator builds the list from your sitemap.

How long it takes depends on the number of content types, how much rich text embeds other entries, and how many front-end templates query the CMS. Count those three before asking for quotes. Our guide to website migration costs has published prices for comparison.

Should you stay?

Stay on Contentful when you need Enterprise governance anyway, you already run Salesforce and the integration helps you, or your site fits comfortably inside Lite's 10,000 records and 3 locales.

Leave when you're about to buy a Lite Space or negotiate Enterprise only to get more records, a fourth language or a third space. Those are the limits the alternatives above sell for a fraction of the price.

If the front end is moving too, our comparison of Astro and Next.js covers which framework fits a marketing site or a product.

What to do next

1. Open your Contentful organization's Usage page and write down records per space, locales, environments and monthly API calls and bandwidth.
2. Find your nearest limit in the first table, and price the same numbers on two alternatives from the side-by-side table.
3. Run contentful space export with --download-assets now, even if you stay. It's your backup.

If you want Dardo to plan or run the move, see our headless CMS development and website migration services.