Craft CMS changed its licensing model from a one-off purchase to an annual subscription. If your site was built on Craft and you have not had this conversation with your developer, it is worth understanding what has changed and what the ongoing implications are for your costs.
For most of Craft CMS's history, a licence was a one-time purchase. You paid once, received the software, and could use it indefinitely. The new model, introduced with Craft 4 and extended through Craft 5, is subscription-based. The Solo edition remains free for basic sites, but most commercial sites with multisite, user management, or content staging requirements fall under the Pro or Team tier, which carry an annual fee.
If your Craft site was built before the licence model changed, your licence may have been grandfathered or you may be running a version that predates the requirement. However, if your site is eventually upgraded to Craft 4 or 5, the new licensing terms apply. Your developer should have factored this into any upgrade discussion, but not all have.
Craft's own licence fee is one part of the picture. Many Craft sites rely on third-party plugins that also carry their own annual renewal fees. These are typically modest individually, but a site with five or six commercial plugins can accumulate a meaningful annual renewal cost that was not necessarily communicated when the site was originally budgeted.
If you are running Craft CMS and are uncertain about your current licence position, the questions to ask are straightforward: What version of Craft are we running? Is our licence current? What plugins do we use that carry annual fees, and when do those renewals fall? A developer who has not volunteered this information is not necessarily being evasive. It is simply the kind of operational detail that does not always surface in normal conversations.
Treated as a platform cost, the annual fees associated with Craft CMS are not unreasonable for a business-critical website. The important thing is that they are budgeted for explicitly rather than discovered unexpectedly. If you are planning any Craft work this year, ask for a clear breakdown of the licence and renewal costs associated with the recommended configuration before the work begins.
If you want to understand what Craft CMS's new pricing model means for your site, get in touch with Karl.
Related Services
There’s no single answer to when you should upgrade your Craft CMS installation, but there are several clear signals that tell you it’s overdue. Most business owners don’t think about this until something goes wrong. By then, the upgrade is often more involved than it would have been if it had been handled earlier.
The question most business owners ask is some version of: what will this cost? When it comes to Craft CMS support, the honest answer is that it depends on factors specific to your site. But there’s enough of a pattern to give you a useful framework.
Most business owners have no idea what state their Craft CMS site is actually in. They know it’s working, they can add content, and the forms are submitting. Beyond that, it’s a black box. Problems can accumulate quietly over a long period before they become visible.
Most clients come to us when their site has started to feel like a risk rather than an asset. Whether the agency relationship has ended, an upgrade has been delayed, or the site has simply grown beyond what it can handle, a conversation costs nothing.
Get in touch with KarlTrusted by established businesses and growing brands across the UK
Expression 37 works with a small number of clients at any one time. These are some of them.
Karl founded Expression 37 in 2007 and has worked exclusively with ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS ever since. He does not take on work in other platforms and does not hand work to other developers. Expression 37 is deliberately small, because the kind of support that matters to clients with business-critical sites is specific to their site, not something that scales in the conventional sense. If you work with Expression 37, you work with Karl.
Find out how we workWorking with Karl on our ExpressionEngine website was an absolute game-changer for Define Creative. His expertise in translating our PSD layouts into a fully functional and visually stunning website was impressive. The meticulous attention to detail in custom HTML and CSS coding ensured that our brand identity was perfectly captured and maintained across all devices. The integration of ExpressionEngine has made managing our content effortless, and the user experience improvements have significantly enhanced visitor engagement. Karl’s commitment to performance optimisation has resulted in a smooth and efficient site that reflects our dedication to innovative design solutions. We couldn’t be happier with the final product and look forward to future collaborations!
Sarah Whitehead ~ Founder and Managing Director at Define Creative Design Ltd.
Define Creative