Grow bigger with the Developer edition
The entire searchable Spotify catalog within the Contentful web app. Automatic updates to an Algolia search index. A CLI tool for managing content types. Our developer community continues to extend Contentful in the most unexpected - and delightful - ways. Not to mention that the free plan has also helped our users to master new technologies, turn early ideas into polished products, and bootstrap young businesses into profitable companies.
We like seeing these determined individuals succeed and want to broaden the opportunities provided by the free plan even further. Hence, our decision to drastically increase the API limits across all plans. The number of included API calls went up by the factor of 20 on the free tier, which is now called the Developer edition. We also bumped the number of included users and added support for locales in the Developer edition of the product. We hope that these changes will give much more people a chance to build amazing online experiences without worrying about the underlying costs.
All we ask in return is for you to help us spread the word about Contentful: add a small "Powered by Contentful" logo to the footer of your website, the credit section of your mobile app, or link to our website in the Readme section of your repo. This way, everybody wins.
More control & transparency
Another big shift in our pricing model is motivated by the desire to give you greater control over your costs. We realized that our past decision to use API calls as the key driver of a monthly bill led to a lot of frustration among paying customers. People on the business side - long used to measuring resources in pageviews and visitors - struggled to understand what API calls are. By contrast, developers had no problem understanding the concept but agonized over the number of API calls they might generate in a given month.
Fear no more. Under the new pricing model, your monthly bill is determined by three easy-to-predict metrics: records, users, and spaces. API calls and bandwidth metrics are still there, but with more generous limits, 98% of customers would never have to worry about hitting these. Even if you happen to belong to the remaining 2%, we have great news for you: we are slashing the rates for additional use of the platform, which should give you peace of mind in dealing with unexpected traffic spikes.
There are some minor changes too. We tweaked the number of roles and locales available on individual plans to keep them in line with actual usage patterns we observed. Again, we hope that this will bring additional flexibility to using Contentful on the self-service tier.
No change for existing customers
For our existing customers, you are free to use your current plans for as long as you want. However, if you find the new plans more to your liking, you can easily upgrade by going to the Billing section of the app. Keep in mind though; the switch cannot be reversed: once you leave the legacy plan, it is gone forever.
