On May 13, 2026, Webflow rolled out its latest pricing restructure. The main change: the old CMS plan ($23/mo) and Business plan ($39/mo) have been merged into a single Premium plan at $25/mo annually.
If you're a Business plan customer, that sounds like a $14 drop, but don't be fooled — this is a price increase masquerading as a price cut.
The Premium plan includes 50GB of monthly bandwidth, half what the Business plan had. It's actually $45/mo to go back to 100GB. Webflow is banking on the fact that most users don't know to care about bandwidth until it's too late. It's historically been the top reason businesses have had to upgrade from CMS to Business. It sneaks up on you.
This is the same playbook from July 2024, when Webflow slashed bandwidth limits by 75–80% across every paid plan without touching the price. The old Business plan had 400GB. After the cuts, it had 100GB. Recovering those 400GB costs $120/month in add-ons — a 4x increase for identical service.
Bandwidth is cheap everywhere else. Bunny.net's high volume pricing is $0.005/GB. AWS CloudFront starts at $0.085 after a massive free tier. Cloudflare delivers it unmetered on most products. Webflow's bandwidth add-on structure implies roughly $0.40 per GB — up to 80x what bandwidth actually costs on the open market!
Around the time the July 2024 cuts hit, a post by Nico from Failory went viral, sparking a real conversation about Webflow's pricing model. Instead of offering a reasonable metered overage fee, Webflow's system was designed to instantly trap users in a massive gap between a $39/mo plan and a 5-figure Enterprise contract paid upfront.
No one expects them to pass through infrastructure costs at wholesale. But when you're charging nearly two orders of magnitude more, it's hard to hide your intention of using bandwidth as a lever to push customers toward Enterprise.
The Photoshop for Web Designers
I've been a Webflow customer for more than a decade and Floresta is a Certified Partner. It's been arguably the most powerful visual website builder of the last 10 years — one that, instead of abstracting away the code in favor of ease-of-use, turns code into an interface.
When Webflow started, the landscape was clear. You could build your own website from scratch, use an intuitive but limited builder like Squarespace or Wix, or go with the dominant choice for most businesses: WordPress. It really came down to: do I use a template I can edit myself, or do I hire a developer and rely on them for everything?
Webflow filled that gap. It was to web development what Photoshop was to graphic design — a professional tool that raised the ceiling for what was possible. You could hire someone to build something custom, then maintain it yourself once it launched. Squarespace-level ease of use. WordPress-level flexibility.
The audience that became most captivated were designers and developers just getting started. Webflow was advanced enough that if you were new to web development, it actually taught you how HTML and CSS worked. That community went on to champion Webflow as a product and now it's virtually the default if you're a serious business in need of a website. Enterprise-grade, powerful, modular, built for entire teams.
And that's where the problem starts.
The Pivot Nobody Announced
By 2022, Webflow had raised $120M at a $4 billion valuation. At that round, they proudly boasted that Webflow's enterprise segment had grown six-fold in a single year. Their taste of Fortune 500 companies became their goal: chase enterprise.
In 2024, Webflow rebranded itself a "Website Experience Platform" and had a record revenue quarter. But don't forget they laid off 8% of staff that same year.
The target customer shifted from the designer building client sites to the marketing team at a mid-market SaaS company. Enterprise became the goal. The Designer — their core tool, the thing that made Webflow what it is — did not get meaningfully better.
AI Is a Trojan Horse
At Webflow Conf 2025, the company positioned itself as a "prompt-to-production agentic solution." They started breaking up with developers and courted marketers into believing they could build with AI instead.
About a week before the May 13 announcement, I posted a prediction: Webflow would use AI as the "value added" justification for a price increase, even for users who never touch it. I see this pattern everywhere. Adobe, Spotify, Google Workspace. Services launch, acquire customers, then raise prices under the cover of AI features nobody asked for.
Looks like I was right 🤷♂
Every major Webflow add-on — Localization, Optimize, Analyze — is sold separately. But the new AI credits are baked into every Workspace plan whether you want them or not. They cover things like generating copy, CMS items, and AI code components. They could have made it an add-on like everything else. They chose not to. An easy scapegoat to justify higher prices.
The irony? Webflow still needs developers to build the complex things that justify enterprise contracts. They use the community for credibility, then market AI as a way to bypass that same community.
Devs Are Breaking Up Too
Webflow knew its community was more than a user base. Every agency that built its practice on Webflow was also their sales team. Every designer who recommended it to a client was doing marketing Webflow didn't have to pay for. That's the deal with tools you love. You become an evangelist.
But the people who used to be Webflow's loudest advocates are quietly looking at exit plans.
Timothy Ricks unveiled a vibe-coded prototype he made in days that's a clear evolution from Webflow's UI. Framer is building tools that are actually designer-focused. Agencies are offering productized migration services out of Webflow. Barely a week goes by without someone in my feed posting about using AI to migrate off the platform.
I'm joining them. I started rebuilding my own website in Astro. Not because I hate Webflow, but because they clearly want Fortune 500 customers. Since I'm not one, why should I think they'll care about my needs?
What are the Webflow alternatives in 2026?
The alternatives are more viable than they've ever been. The dissatisfaction with Webflow created real demand, and the market responded.
Squarespace
If you're just a person needing a simple website: go for a builder like Squarespace. It'll look simple, but if all you need is something, it does the job fine. Save your money.
Framer
The most direct replacement for design-led marketing sites. Their interface looks like Figma, and client editors get free seats. Considering Webflow's new prices, Framer's cost is hard to argue with:
- Basic plan ($10/mo) includes CMS
- Pro plan ($30/mo) has twice the bandwidth of Webflow's Premium
For most marketing sites, it's more than enough.
Code You Own
Frameworks like React and Astro are real options now that visual developers can use AI to transform designs into code. Open, full-control, better performance. The only downside is the loss of visual editing — but with AI, that gap closes.
WordPress
Still hosts 43% of the web. The Automattic vs. WP Engine war left it wounded but not dead. If you need a deep plugin ecosystem and don't mind the maintenance overhead, it's still a serious option — especially for content-heavy sites that would hit Webflow's limits.
AI Builders
AI builders like Lovable, Bolt, v0, and others aren't quite there for production. Better for prototypes, MVPs, and internal tools, but they're moving fast. What's an experiment today could be a real website soon.
What This Actually Means
Webflow is a venture-backed company with a $4 billion valuation and a mandate to grow into that number. Enterprise is where that growth lives. The bandwidth pricing, the feature deprecations, the AI positioning — they're all coherent once you understand who they're optimizing for.
But they owe their growth to a community that loved the Webflow product, not the company.
The designers and developers who made Webflow a household name aren't going to storm off overnight. Switching costs are real. But the enthusiasm is gone. And enthusiasm, it turns out, was doing a lot of work.
