Hidden Costs of a Pure Headless CMS

Headless CMSs promise innovation, omnichannel content delivery, and the flexibility for developers to use any framework of their choice. However, marketers may not get the best authoring experience with pure headless CMSs. And if they do, there are also other hidden costs to contend with.

In this blog, we’ll highlight some of the hidden costs of a pure headless-only CMS and what enterprises should look for instead. 

What Is a ‘Pure’ Headless CMS?

A headless CMS is a content management system with a back-end repository separated from the front-end presentation layer. This allows the CMS to deliver content to different channels instead of just a single channel like a website. The back-end handles the storage and management of content while connections to different front-ends (desktop, mobile, smart TV, display signage, etc.) are made using APIs.

However, the first iterations of the headless CMS were built by developers for developers. They allowed developers to use various JavaScript frameworks on the front-end to build their digital channels but also offered only abstract form-based authoring and had no instant preview for content authors. 

Compared to the traditional CMSs, which offered WYSIWYG editing and previews, the headless CMS, while promising for developers, was a significant loss in efficiency and ease of use for content authors. 

Today, this type of headless CMS is known as a pure or simple headless-only CMS. Many of these tools have begun slowly adding new authoring features, including previews and visual editing capabilities to enhance the content authoring experience. However, despite this, there are other drawbacks, particularly around the total cost of ownership, that enterprises still need to consider. 

Breaking Down the Hidden Costs of a Pure Headless CMS

Most enterprise martech buyers are aware that pricing is more complex when it comes to software. However, with content management systems, particularly pure headless CMSs, pricing can spiral out of control much faster than many would like. 

While SaaS companies will need to charge increased prices for more usage, with many pure headless CMS vendors, the jump in price is often not proportional to the increase customers make in API calls, content assets, number of websites, locales, or other factors. Here are some of the areas where hidden costs can spring up.

License Costs

Every SaaS solution will have a license cost to use the software and receive support and updates. However, many pure headless vendors don’t offer straightforward license costs and can charge additional fees based on the number of users or seats required. Simply onboarding another team member to your content team could cause an unexpected monthly or annual bill increase. 

Website Costs

CMSs are meant to power websites; for larger enterprises, that might mean tens or even hundreds of websites and microsites that form their digital portfolio. Some vendors only allow companies to have a limited number of websites or content projects on their platform, and impose increased costs as the number grows.

Locales

Multinational brands serving diverse regions and languages must also consider the additional costs and complexities involved in supporting multiple locales and translating content into various languages. Many headless vendors charge additional fees based on the number of languages that content must be translated into.

Content-related Costs

A headless CMS must handle the storage of thousands of content assets and support extensive content entries, such as pages on a website or mobile app. Some platforms may limit the number of entries allowed under a specific license or pricing plan, while others may charge extra fees if the entry limit is exceeded.

API Usage

APIs are crucial to any headless CMS, enabling seamless communication and data exchange between systems. This allows you to pull data from your CRM or eCommerce tools and integrate it into your CMS. However, vendors often limit the number of API calls, or the rate of API calls permitted each month.

Traffic and Bandwidth

Scalability is a requirement for most enterprises focused on growth and innovation. However, many pure headless CMS vendors force customers to pay for their success by imposing traffic and bandwidth limitations.

Training, Development, and Integration Costs

While several pure headless CMS vendors have begun to add new features to better support marketers, for many of them, the learning curve means that companies will need to invest heavily in training, development, and integration with other tools to maximize the complete marketing capabilities of their solutions. 

Authoring Productivity

An often overlooked hidden cost of working with a pure headless CMS is the negative impact on authoring productivity. With limited content authoring tools, content teams can’t work as efficiently as they would like and may struggle to build the right type of experiences for their audience. 

Many pure headless CMSs may offer WYSIWYG editing and even live previews. However, this isn’t in-context editing, which forces content authors to use a separate screen or tab and switch between them, slowing down productivity. Additionally, the lack of customizability and APIs for the authoring systems in many platforms can limit the options for an improved content editing experience. 

Microservices Complexity

Another hidden cost of pure headless CMSs is related to the microservices complexity that often occurs. Several enterprises adopt a composable approach to building their tech stacks using best-of-breed tools. However, the composable approach can also have downsides (slower performance, more vendors, etc.), and with pure headless CMSs, those downsides are often greater. 

The composable approach involves combining various microservices into one system. However, a pure headless CMS is only one simple microservice that handles content management but lacks other capabilities such as content targeting and personalization, search, video management and delivery, and digital asset management. This forces enterprises to add other tools to handle this shortfall, forcing them to manage multiple vendors, contracts, and additional costs. 

Read More: Composable Software: Are There Potential Downsides?

Operations Strain

Many enterprises must support multiple environments for staging, production, and testing/quality assurance. However, with pure headless CMSs, this can be a challenge. If the SaaS vendor doesn’t support this, operations teams need to build custom scripts and leverage any potential APIs and databases or give up on having multiple environments, which places additional strain on operations and developers. 

Maintain a Lower TCO with CrafterCMS

CrafterCMS is an enterprise-grade headless CMS that offers features and pricing tailored to your needs, enabling you to maintain a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) without hidden expenses.

Ease of Use For Content Authors

CrafterCMS offers user-friendly tools for creating, updating, and publishing across any digital channel. Content teams can enjoy drag-and-drop experience building, WYSIWYG and in-context content editing, live multi-channel previews, and more to compose seamless digital experiences. This improves productivity while removing 95% of the content editing and publishing bottlenecks typically found in headless CMS platforms.

Freedom for Developers

Developers can build websites and apps using an open-source, Git-based headless CMS with REST or GraphQL APIs. Developer teams can choose any UI framework for the front-end, like React or Freemarker or others, and extend the back-end with Groovy or JavaScript (Node.js, Next.js, etc.). Leverage the full range of content APIs, and even script your own APIs as well. This freedom results in over 40% improved developer productivity when crafting content-centric digital experiences.

Composable CMS

CrafterCMS is a composable content platform that seamlessly connects to various systems using robust REST APIs, SDKs, and GraphQL. In addition, CrafterCMS also offers built-in functionality, including search, basic digital asset management, server-side rendering, content targeting, personalization, Groovy scripting, and more, to reduce the number of tools that need to be added to the tech stack. 

As an enterprise decoupled CMS, where the content authoring system is completely separate from the content delivery system, composability extends to both systems as well. This means that you can compose tailored authoring experiences as well as end-user experiences, to drive both employee productivity and customer engagement.

Additionally, CrafterCMS's Marketplace offers over 60 plugins, add-ons, and solution blueprints to streamline the creation of your content management experience and end-user sites and apps. By leveraging these prebuilt plugins and integrations, you can customize your CMS to meet your specific needs, minimizing the need for expensive custom development while boosting functionality.

Built-in Search

CrafterCMS’s built-in OpenSearch integration offers significant benefits for content editors by enhancing the search and discovery process during content authoring. With the powerful search capabilities built into the CMS UI, editors can easily search through vast amounts of content within CrafterCMS’s Git-based content repository, locating articles, images, or media files quickly. This feature boosts productivity, allowing content creators to find and update relevant assets efficiently, reducing the time spent navigating through multiple pages or folders. By simplifying content search and retrieval, CrafterCMS helps content teams maintain consistent, accurate, reusable and up-to-date content.

At the same time, for developers CrafterCMS's OpenSearch integration offers a super convenient and powerful search API that can be seamlessly used to build search-enabled websites and applications. This eliminates the need to rely on third-party search solutions (that you must buy and integrate if just using a pure headless CMS), simplifying development and reducing costs. The built-in search API allows developers to quickly set up advanced search functionality, like filtering and full-text search, across different types of content. This makes it easier to deliver powerful search experiences to end users of your websites and other digital experience apps, improving the overall usability and functionality of digital platforms built on CrafterCMS.

Value-Based Pricing

No single pricing model fits all enterprises because as your success grows, so do your needs. CrafterCMS offers flexible, cost-effective plans that allow you to start with the right price and model for your business, scaling predictably as you grow. Unlike other vendors, we don't penalize your success with unnecessary costs. With CrafterCMS, you only pay for what you use—no hidden fees or artificial tiers pushing features you don't need.

Our Pay Per Use and Pay Per Compute plans include unlimited API calls and API call rates, making it easier for companies to predict their monthly expenses. The Pay Per Compute plan also eliminates restrictions on the number of projects, authors, content objects, and other constraints.

Plugins, Simple SDKs, APIs, and WebHooks 

CrafterCMS offers several out-of-the-box plugins that simply need to be configured. If plugins aren’t sufficient, CrafterCMS offers a robust development platform with APIs and webhooks to integrate with any external system, language, or tech stack. 

CrafterCMS’s integrations can work with both authoring and delivery use cases. Content authors often want to write content directly in Crafter and build workflows. Whereas other headless CMSs only focus on consumption and delivery APIs, several complex content needs require content in multiple areas, and Crafter supports that with web hooks for authoring, deployment, and delivery. 

Learn More

Knowing how to calculate the total cost of ownership of an enterprise software solution can help to avoid several unexpected costs. Learn how to calculate TCO for a headless CMS and avoid the hidden costs of simple headless-only solutions.