Introducing our 2026 pricing changes: more value, less problems

We are rolling out an update to our Professional plan that should tackle some of the most frequent issues that we've seen reported, while also trying to solve some of our internal issues to keep DatoCMS performant for everyone.

Overall, this is a plan adjustment to reduce the costs of what you cannot control (like end-user traffic), while reducing some of the compute-intensive features that should be used with more care.

Let's start from the good news!

Video: big price drop!

The biggest change is the big decrease of video costs. Thanks to the increasing usage of video across the entire user base, we are able to get a better agreement with Mux, and we are passing on the savings to you!

The Professional plan will include 50K streaming minutes (up from 9K!), and additional packets will give you 12K minutes instead of 9K, always for €9.

Another good news is that we are removing video encoding from the equation altogether. So no extra costs for video storage and encoding, it's on the house 🤝

API calls: CDA calls are 10x cheaper than CMA calls

Our philosophy has always been to try to keep things as simple as possible. To do that, we had one simple cost for API calls, both CDA and CMA. While this was easier to understand, it was a big compromise as CMA calls for us are much more expensive than CDA calls. Why? We cannot cache the former, while we are able to cache the read-only GraphQL calls of the CDA way better.

So we are now introducing a split in costs of CDA and CMA calls. The bad news is that CMA calls will become slightly more expensive, with extra packets at €9 for 100K calls. But the good news is that you will get 1 MILLION calls for €9 when using the CDA!

⚠️ Unfortunately, this change must be applied to existing plans as well.

For standard plans we are going to move the current allowance to CDA and add 10% for CMA. For custom plans we tried to minimize overages checking the last 6 months of usage, if you have any doubts contact support, we want to help by reducing overages and getting more predictable costs, we know that in the long run is going to be better for both of us.

CDA is where most of the overages are normally generated, so you should be able to get good discounts here if you want to move to the new plan.

But, if you want to stay on your current plan overages will be billed as they have been before.

Models, blocks, locales: what's changing

We have a recurrent issue with customers hitting the limit of block per record. This is frustrating for our users as they often need to change their approach to the content while having already committed a lot. It's not impossible but it's a bit of manual work that we cause for you.

So to try and minimize the issue we are going to increase the number of models included in the plans from 60 to 100. Since blocks are free while models are paid, we try to encourage you to use models instead, which scale better with links.

A bad news is around locales instead. Since blocks are multiplied by locales (normally), we are going to reduce the number of included locales down to 5. This is still very competitive, especially since DatoCMS is treating locales as first-class citizens, by validating content by locale, giving custom permissions and publishing state.

The block limit is adjusted to 500 blocks, calculated as approximately 100 blocks per locale. We're also improving our CMS warnings to help you stay within the limits or to contact us as soon as we can guess it might be problematic.

Bad news: environments and projects

Unfortunately we have one straight-up bad news: environments.

We have been very generous in the past by giving 8 environments included in each project. But things have escalated and we are now reducing this to provide a sustainable and fast platform for all users.

The fork of an environment is a very heavy operation that duplicates all the entries of your project. It's very close to a project duplication. Unfortunately, we realized that this was too much technical and performance complexity affecting the platform for all users, so we are reducing the number of environments from 8 to 3, while giving you the option to buy extra ones at €39/month. With the same rationale we are increasing the cost of extra projects within the subscription at €39/month.

What About Existing Plans?

As always, your current plan remains unchanged, with one exception: the CDA/CMA split. Unfortunately we cannot avoid this change, but we are adding 10% more calls to existing plans, so it should be a net positive.

If you want to upgrade to the new plan, you should be able to do it on your own from the dashboard.

If you need any help to change plan or if you have any doubts around the details, just write to us at support@datocms.com