Pricing for the Online Editor has come up a lot since the v2 announcement, so I wanted to share where we’ve landed. It’s one-time pricing with lifetime updates, no subscription. Two plans, both per domain:
Free — included with Elements, unlimited domains. For personal sites and small projects. All Elements CMS components, the WYSIWYG Online Editor, one content folder, one resources folder, one user.
Solo — $99 per domain. For individuals running their own site.
Studio — $199 per domain. For agencies, client sites, and power users.
The free version of Elements CMS (components and the free Online Editor) stays free. Solo and Studio are upgrades when you outgrow the limits of the free tier.
Full breakdown of what’s in each plan is available on the plan comparison table, or you can read more on the blog (which is powered by Elements CMS 2):
all pricing is per domain. So if you wanted the AI features, it would be $199 per site. You can also mix and match. Go Solo $99 on one site and Studio $199 on the other
The ability to style the Online Editor so it more closely matches your, or your clients, branding.
Up to this point, I thought it was a pretty good deal overall … but treating subdomains as separate domains is where it starts to feel a bit disappointing … but that’s life.
thanks for the clarification. I was afraid I’d get this answer. This isn’t good news for developers and agencies. That means you often need two or more licenses instead of just one. Typically, when working with clients, you use a subdomain to build and test the site, and then go live on the main domain at the end.
In my case, that would mean I’d need a license for every template I develop, since my templates are always hosted on xyz.weaverpixel.com - assuming, of course, that the free version isn’t sufficient for the template. And I have a few in development where I’m certain I’ll need to switch to one of the paid plans.
I hope you’ll reconsider as especially agencies will probably not jump over to Elements with this licensing.
This will work just fine, you can transfer the license from the dev domain to the new domain when it goes live.
The free version of the CMS will also work for a blog so it might be that you don’t even need to buy a license.
We tried to make the cost of the CMS very competitive, if anything we underpriced it and scraped subscriptions to avoid backlash from customers… I’m actually concerned about the sustainability of our pricing, but it seems whatever we price things at we can’t win.
It was absolutely not my intention to criticize the pricing. As a business, you have to make money—that’s the primary goal.
But you can structure the pricing in a way that allows you to earn even more. I know of examples of another CMS that starts with T, where agencies have sold over 70 licenses to their clients because the pricing model works well for agencies and developers.
For simple blogs and CMS applications, the pricing model is fine, but when it comes to larger e-commerce projects or major client CMS projects, the recently released pricing model simply reaches its limits and ends up with you shifting licenses back and forth and losing track of everything after a while.
Why don’t you just include subdomains in the most expensive tier, call it “Agency,” and everything’s fine. Then there’s also a reason to buy the most expensive model.
Sorry if I’m being a pain in the ass again
but I like to see Elements growing
@WeaverPixel, We’re discussing this internally now. If we add support for sub domains, it’ll probably have an impact on pricing, i.e. the price will increase for the Studio version.
How about just adding a higher priced “Agency” with sub-domain support? That way those of us who are interested in the AI integration and do NOT care about sub-domains can still have the very reasonable price of $199.
It was always a strength of the whole Elements development process that users can give feedback even it was not always what you would like to hear
I personally have no problems with paying a higher price and the product perfectly fits my needs. Others may see it different. In case of the CMS it hurts only once
Also, one other thing I noticed is the competitions sub-domain support is only for development. If the sub-domain is used as a production site, then it requires a separate license.
Maybe this is more a misunderstanding than anything else.
From an agency’s point of view, the pricing model is naturally a bit more difficult this way.
For example:
As an agency, I create all my projects under a subdomain of my main website.
But that means I would now need to buy a license for every potential client, even before I know whether they will actually want the CMS in that version or not. And if they then decide they do want it, I would have to buy another license again for the client’s actual domain so that the project can run under their domain.
That leaves me with a license that I can’t really make much further use of — except perhaps for a new test project under the same subdomain. But if I’m working with three or four clients at the same time, I would also need a separate license for each of them.
So I think that’s why it’s a bit unfortunate if subdomains are treated as completely separate domains.
surely you would need to know if the project/client wants the CMS before actually using the CMS?
Yes, if the client decides they want a CMS, you’d have to purchase a license (or just use the Free plan if you don’t need the paid-for features)
Also, you can easily move licenses between domains by simply deactivating the license on the test domain and transfer it to the new domain. You’ll be able to manually deactivate a license by clicking a “Deactivate” button in the Online Editor admin area.
Having said the above, and as Dan mentioned above, we are considering how we could allow a single license to be used on sub-domains as well, but that might come with an increased cost (we are already undercutting the competition by a long way).
thank you for sharing and making this known
