Is Contentful free? What it actually costs in 2026
Contentful's Free plan is $0 forever: 10 users, two roles, two locales, 100,000 API calls and 50 GB of CDN bandwidth a month, one Starter Space. Lite is $300 a month; Premium is quoted.
Free has hard caps — no overages, API calls stop at 100K. Lite ($300 a month) allows 20 users, three roles, 1 million API calls and 100 GB of bandwidth with paid overages ($5 per extra million calls, $0.15 per GB). An additional Lite space is $850 a month.
What the free tier actually includes
- 10 users, 2 roles (Admin, Editor), 2 locales
- 100,000 API calls and 50 GB of CDN bandwidth a month — no overages
- 50 MB asset upload limit; one Starter Space
Where the wall is
API call 100,001, or the third locale. A public site with a modest audience burns 100K delivery calls in days unless everything is statically built; Lite is the next step at $300 a month, from zero.
After that: Lite $300 a month (20 users, 1M API calls, 100 GB bandwidth, overages $5 per 1M calls and $0.15 per GB); additional Lite space $850 a month; Premium by sales.
Can you self-host Contentful? No — cloud only
Contentful is hosted only. Directus, Payload and Strapi are the self-hostable headless CMSs compared here — no API-call meter.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you are enterprise and need the compliance envelope, SLAs, roles and audit logging — that is a real product and the open options cover it partially at best. Stay if editorial teams across several countries depend on the localisation workflow, which is more mature than anything here. Stay if the free tier still covers you. And stay if nobody wants to run a database and an application server, because a self-hosted CMS is one more thing that can be down at 9am.
What you are locked into
Moderate, and concentrated in the model rather than the text. Entries export as JSON through the CMA API, so the words come out. What does not come out cleanly is the content model — field types, validations, references between types and localisation settings — which has to be rebuilt in the new system, and every front-end query written against Contentful's API shape needs rewriting. Teams with a simple blog migrate in days. Teams with deeply referenced multi-locale models are migrating a schema.
If you would rather not pay: Markdown files in Git
Markdown files in Git
For developer-owned content, the CMS may be the thing to remove.
Free. There is nothing to host.
See all 5 Contentful alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from Contentful's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-27 — 24 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.