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Use to summarize this article
- Sanity has three plans: Free at $0 forever, Growth at $15 per seat a month, and custom Enterprise.
- Upgrading to Growth doesn't add raw capacity. API requests, bandwidth, and assets stay identical to Free. Growth buys permission to exceed those limits instead.
- An 8-person team on Sanity runs about $139/mo, versus $300+ on Contentful, roughly $349 on Storyblok, and $90 to $99 on Strapi Cloud plus a separate license.
- Viewers are free on every plan. Only editors, developers, and admins consume a billable seat.
- The build usually costs more than the license in year one, typically 8 to 14 weeks for a full Sanity project.
Sanity CMS has three plans. Free costs $0 forever. Growth costs $15 per seat a month. Enterprise is custom.
That sounds simple. It isn't quite.
Seats, usage overages, and add-ons all land on the same invoice. This guide breaks down every rate, verified directly against Sanity's own pricing page.
What Free actually includes?
Free doesn't expire. It's not a trial.
You get 20 seats, 2 datasets, and 10,000 documents. You also get 1 million API CDN requests a month, 250,000 API requests, 100 GB bandwidth, 100 GB assets, and 1,000 AI credits.
Real-time collaboration and visual editing are included too.
The real limits are in the workflow. Only 2 roles exist: Administrator and Viewer. Datasets must be public. No comments, no tasks, no scheduled drafts. Draft history only goes back 3 days.
What Growth changes, and what it doesn't?
Growth costs $15 per seat, up to 50 seats. Documents rise to 25,000. Datasets can go private.
Here's the surprise: API requests, bandwidth, and assets stay identical to Free. Upgrading doesn't buy more raw capacity.
What it buys is permission to exceed that capacity instead of getting blocked. Plus comments, tasks, scheduled drafts, AI Assist, and 3 more roles: Editor, Developer, Contributor.
Do the seat math first. Eight editors costs $120 a month. Fifteen costs $225. Forty costs $600, before any overage.
One more thing. Sanity's self-serve plans only bill monthly. No annual discount until you're on Enterprise.
What Sanity doesn't charge for?
Content types are free. Create as many as you want.
Locales are free too. Multi-language content doesn't add a line item on its own.
The real limit sits elsewhere: unique attributes per dataset. Free includes 2,000. Growth includes 10,000. Most teams never notice this ceiling until they're modeling something unusually complex, dozens of content types each with many fields.
What Enterprise adds?
No published price. The quote is built from four inputs: seat count, request volume, dataset count, and support level.
On top of Growth, you get SAML single sign-on, custom roles, an uptime SLA, a 365-day audit trail, and onboarding. AI credits jump from 1,000 to 5,000 a month.
Bring those four numbers to your first sales call. You'll get a sharper quote.
Sanity doesn't negotiate on Growth. It's self-serve, fixed at list price. Enterprise is different. An annual commitment, a multi-year term, or a realistic usage forecast all give you something to trade with.
The rates that actually drive your bill
Growth doesn't block you at the limit. It bills you instead.
These overages are metered in small steps. That's why Sanity stays cheap even when usage spikes occasionally, as long as your seat count stays low.
How AI credits actually get used?
Every plan includes a monthly AI credit pool. Free and Growth both get 1,000. Enterprise gets 5,000.
A query, your message to Sanity's Content Agent, costs 4 credits. An action, like a document search or a GROQ query, costs 2 credits. Asking it to "analyze 10 articles" runs roughly 28 credits once you count the query plus every action inside it.
Light, occasional use rarely exceeds the included pool. Bulk content generation or large-scale document analysis will.
3 quick mistakes to avoid
Counting viewers as seats is the biggest one. Viewer access is free on every plan. Only editors, developers, and admins cost you a seat.
Buying Increased Quota before checking which single meter is actually the problem is another. If only your API requests run high, the $1-per-25,000 overage is often cheaper than the full $299 bundle.
Forgetting occasional contributors is the third. A freelancer who logs in twice a month still occupies a paid seat.
The build cost nobody mentions
For most teams, the build costs more than the license in year one. There's no template waiting for you.
Four things happen first: content modeling, Studio setup, the frontend build, and migration if you're moving platforms.
Specialist agencies usually quote 8 to 14 weeks for a full build. That dwarfs $180 a year in license fees. Budget both together, not one against the other.
Migration is the piece teams underestimate most. Moving content between platforms without breaking existing URLs or losing search rankings takes real planning. It's not just an export and an import.
The same team, priced four ways
Headless CMS platforms are hard to compare directly. Sanity charges per seat. Strapi splits into cloud hosting plus a separate feature license. Contentful and Storyblok sell fixed tiers with hard caps.
Picture one team: 8 editors, 15,000 documents, 3 locales, 2 million CDN requests a month, 200,000 API requests, 150 GB bandwidth, 60 GB assets.
On Sanity, that's Growth at 8 seats, $120 a month, plus roughly $19 in overage. Around $139 total.
Contentful's free tier caps at roughly 10 users, 2 locales, and 100,000 API calls. This team clears that fast and lands on Lite at $300 a month flat, possibly pushing toward custom Premium pricing.
Storyblok's Growth plan runs around $99 a month for 5 seats. Eight seats and 3 locales likely means Growth Plus, closer to $349 a month.
Strapi splits into two bills. Cloud hosting alone runs $90 to $99 a month at this volume. Governance features need a separate license on top. Unlimited seats become the real advantage once your team grows large.
These are estimates from published rates, not quotes. Re-run them against your real numbers.
The gap comes from the overage model, not the sticker price. Sanity charges roughly $19 to go over. The others usually mean a bigger tier, billed every month after, whether you need the extra room or not.
That flips at scale, though. Forty editors on Sanity costs $600 a month before overage. Past that point, Strapi's unlimited seats start looking better.
What this looks like by team size?
Solo founder or two-person team? Free covers you completely. Public datasets aren't a real problem yet.
A five to eight person marketing team, the most common B2B profile, runs $75 to $120 a month on Growth before overage. The comments and scheduled drafts usually matter more day to day than the raw capacity numbers.
Publishing across several markets? You'll likely need Increased Quota fast, since document and request volume climb with every added locale.
Enterprise compliance needs, multiple business units, or a guaranteed SLA? That's Enterprise territory regardless of your actual usage, since SSO and audit trails don't exist on any self-serve tier.
Where a hybrid platform changes this?
Every platform above assumes your team is comfortable inside a developer-built Studio. None of them include a real, visual editing layer for marketers by default.
That's the gap platforms like BetterCMS are built to close. Instead of pricing purely around seats and overage, a hybrid, AI-native platform bundles a genuine visual editor alongside the same structured, API-first content model. For teams that want Sanity-level structure without a separate frontend build and a Studio only developers can use, that changes the total cost picture, not just the license line.
How Flowtrix approaches Sanity projects?
Flowtrix builds on Sanity for B2B SaaS, AI, and cybersecurity companies. The fit is usually the same: a fast, high-conversion frontend paired with a genuinely structured backend, built for deep resource libraries, multi-locale content, and relational data a standard CMS collection can't hold.
Every build starts the same way: content modeling and information architecture first, then a component-driven frontend with technical SEO and schema built in from day one. The platform decision and the build happen together, not as two separate projects on two separate timelines.
For the wider landscape beyond just Sanity, Flowtrix's guide to the best headless CMS platforms in 2026 covers the full field. For agencies that specialize in Sanity specifically, the roundup of Sanity development agencies covers who else builds on the platform.
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