Introducing the new Sanity Growth plan to serve collaborative teams (ssr)

Written by Magnus Hillestad

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Today, we’re excited to announce updated plans to make Sanity pricing simpler and more intentional to users at any stage. As we designed the new offerings, we kept a few core principles in mind:

• We want as many people as possible to use Sanity, every day. We love all users—especially those on our free plans because they deliver valuable feedback and contribute greatly to Sanity’s strong community.
• We want to increase access to the features we believe users will reasonably need at various stages of their journey: starting out, growing a team, or a scaled, complex organization.
• We need to build our business sustainably so that we can thrive and invest in continued development of Sanity for the long-term.

With our changes today, you’ll see increased usage limits on the Free plan and we believe you’ll find it easier to choose the right plan for your project. As your needs expand, it will be more intuitive to know when to upgrade to a paid plan—such as when you need access to more advanced collaborative features. At the same time, we’ve reduced the number of plans and made our product development more intentional for the segments we target.

New pricing overview

Starting today, Sanity offers three plans:

Free

• Best for solopreneurs or side-project tinkerers whether you’re experimenting or shipping production-ready experiences.
• What you can expect: Everything you need for core content management work.
• What you pay: Free forever.

Growth (includes a 30 day free trial, no credit card required)

• Best for growing teams who need to work together in real-time.
• What you can expect: More features increase collaboration speed and efficiency, as well as options to buy add-ons you may need as you scale.
• What you pay: $15 per user per month, plus add-ons to make the Growth plan flexible to your needs as you grow.

Enterprise

• Best for scaled teams with complex requirements.
• What you can expect: More mature security and compliance tools, SLAs, dedicated services, and support.
• What you pay: These plans typically start from $5-10k per month (but could both start higher) and scale depending on your requirements.

Summary of main changes

• Simplified plan options from 4 options to 3: Free, Growth, and Enterprise.
• More intentional rationale for where we release specific features.
• Visual Editing, Presentation (NEW) are now available on all plans, including free.
• Comments (NEW), AI Assist, and Scheduling are all released on the Growth plan.
• Increased cloud usage quotas for the Free plan.
• 30-day free trial of our Growth plan for all new projects, no credit card is required.
• Reduced the entry-level pricing for our more advanced Growth with per-user pricing.
• Adjusted pay-as-you-go pricing to support continued investment in the platform.

Sanity pricing philosophy and principles

Since our launch in November 2017 more than 500,000 people have tested Sanity and today, more than 100,000 people are associated with 80,000 active Sanity projects. Our customers range from one-person powerhouses to emerging teams to organizations with hundreds of users. They use Sanity to power their side hustles, startups, mid-market companies, and enterprises with bigger needs and expectations. We’re proud to have some of the most innovative developers and prominent brands in the world using Sanity to power the digital business.

We’ve always had a special eye for the solopreneurs and small businesses. Our community, which is brought to life by its tens of thousands of members, is a core part of our product—one of the things that make Sanity great!

We understand pricing changes are always a bit unsettling, especially for a solution like Sanity that sits at the heart of your customer engagement strategy. In this post, we aim to provide transparency about the rationale and motivations behind our changes.

Intentional development and packaging of new features

After releasing recent new features like Visual Editing and AI Assist as only available with the Enterprise plan, we realized we wanted to be more predictable and intentional on who we build features for, and release them to the plan that those users are most likely to use.

Our insight is that there is often a clear set of features that are fundamental to the good use of Sanity and those should be available for all. There is then another layer of features that are more relevant to growing teams and the collaboration they need. As teams reach this stage, we believe it’s appropriate to charge for their more advanced usage... And finally, there are some features that arguably only larger and more complex businesses need, for scaling, compliance, and security, and those plans we reserve for our Enterprise plan.

We’re super excited to showcase this intentionality by way of our latest releases: Presentation and Comments. Presentation, a core feature for working with structured content visually, is available on Free, Growth, and Enterprise. Comments, which supports in-context collaboration, is available on Growth and Enterprise.

And, we’re happy to share that we’re increasing access to more recent features:

• Visual Editing and Content Source Maps is now available on all plans, including legacy Free, Team, and Business plans.
• Embeddings Index API and Semantic Reference Search plugin are available on Growth and Enterprise (in addition to legacy Team and Business plans).
• AI Assist is now available on Growth and Enterprise (in addition to legacy Team and Business plans)

More accessible paid self-serve plans

As we analyzed our user base and feedback from customers about our previous Team and Business plans, we heard that $99/month was still out of reach for some users, often the solopreneurs and smallest companies. Looking across the market, we saw entry price points were at least $99, more commonly 2-3x that amount.

To meet the goal of making it easier for customers to upgrade to the paid plan benefits, while still charging a fair price for the value of these plans, we’ve moved away from the fixed plan price model. We believe the approach we’re introducing allows us to both increase access for smaller teams and maintain a sustainable business model so we can continue to invest in innovation and scale.

Our solution is twofold:

1. The base pricing for the new Growth plan is user-based, reflecting the core purpose of alignment with scaling teams. You’ll pay $15/user per month, so your investment in Sanity grows as your business does.
2. The Growth plan offers more options for add-ons so you can bolster the plan with what you need when you need it. Add-ons include dedicated email support, SSO/SAML integration, additional cloud usage quota, and additional datasets.

We believe this will make our Growth plan accessible to more customers while also letting you scale with your company.

Even more generous Free plan

We continue to recognize the power of a Free plan that lets you learn, experiment, and ship. As mentioned, with the new Free plan you get access to new features like Visual Editing, Presentation, and Content Source Maps (CSM)—we’re excited to see what creative ideas you have for CSM in particular!

In addition to those features, we’ve also increased cloud usage quotas for the Free plan:

• API CDN requests per month: from 500k to 1M
• API requests per month: from 100K to 250K
• Assets: from 5GB to 100GB
• Bandwidth: from 10GB to 100GB

To be transparent, we want to call out that the Free plan is now limited to 1 dataset, 10,000 documents, and 20 users. As you get to that scale, we believe you’ll be at the stage where features for collaboration become relevant, and you will need to upgrade to the Growth plan to go beyond these caps.

Not all changes are rosy

We started this post by sharing three core principles for our pricing updates. The third principle is "to build our business sustainably so that we can thrive and invest in the continued development of Sanity for the long-term.” This requires us to make adjustments to limits and overages that will likely increase the costs for some users.

Hard limits on some plan features

With the new plans, there is a limit on users, with a maximum limit of 20 users on the Free plan and 50 users on the Growth plan. That said, to make Sanity easier to use when collaborating with reviewers or stakeholders, we’re currently working on supporting unlimited “Viewer” users across plan types. This is critical for solopreneurs whose clients need to approve projects, and even more relevant as teams scale and cross-functional stakeholders need easier visibility of content.

Next, it’s no longer possible to purchase additional documents on the Free or Growth plans. The Free plan includes up to 10,000 documents and the Growth plan includes up to 25,000. Based on the current usage we observe, very few customers exceed these limits, and when they do, it is one of the best predictors of customer/plan fit. So in the new plans, the document limit is fixed, meaning you’ll need to upgrade to a new plan to increase your limit. The document limit is custom to your needs with the Enterprise plan.

As before, we have limits on datasets. Free plan users are now allotted 1 dataset with no option to purchase more. Growth plan users are allotted 2 datasets and can purchase up to 2 additional datasets as add-ons. As we have done historically, we align the webhooks available to the number of datasets you have.

Finally, Free plan users are no longer able to exceed the cloud usage overage limits (which have become significantly more generous, as outlined earlier in this post).

Increased overage prices

While our overage rates for API CDN and API requests (per month) and assets have not changed, the rate for monthly bandwidth overages has increased from $0.20/GB to $0.30/GB.

Legacy projects keep legacy pricing. Hard limits and increased overage pricing do not apply to projects that were created on legacy plans. If you choose to upgrade an existing project to one of the new plans, the new overage rate will apply.

We’re always iterating

A lot of thought into these new plans. We hope you find they achieve the desired goals: better-aligning value to the plans and simplifying the decision-making process when you’re setting up a new project.

While we try not to change our pricing too often as we believe predictability is important for our customers, we will continue to iterate and make adjustments to our plans when your feedback highlights good reasons to do so! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to pricing@sanity.io

In the meantime, check out our other exciting news today: the launch of Presentation and Comments!