Is Contentful free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
The free tier covers a small project. Lite is around $300/month, and Premium is quoted and commonly reaches five figures a year. Three separate meters run at once: users, content records, and API calls — so a site that gets popular can raise its CMS bill without anyone adding a single article. Figures checked 2026-08-05.
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
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Contentful before you commit. More headless cms decisions on Macrostack.