The three headline prices are $15 per seat per month for Sanity Growth, $199 per month for Hygraph Growth, and $0 for Payload’s self-hosted software. They measure different things, so they can’t be compared directly. Sanity charges per seat and adds quota overages. Hygraph charges a flat plan fee with project quotas. Payload charges nothing for the software, but you pay for the infrastructure and the work of running it. This guide uses vendor pages retrieved around October 5, 2026. Prices and limits change, so check the live pages before you commit.
Pricing at a glance
| Vendor | Entry pricing published | Cost model |
|---|---|---|
| Sanity | Free: $0. Growth: $15 per seat per month. Enterprise: custom. (Sanity pricing) | Per-seat pricing plus monthly usage quotas. Paid projects can be billed for overages. Add-ons are sold separately. |
| Payload | Self-hosted core is free, open source and MIT licensed. Enterprise (dedicated support, hosting, SSO, visual editing and other advanced features) has no public price. (Payload get started) | $0 license. You pay for hosting, database, file storage, email and CDN, plus operations labor. |
| Hygraph | Hobby: $0. Growth: from $199 per month. Enterprise: custom. (Hygraph pricing) | Plan fee with quotas for entries, API calls, asset traffic, seats, locales and environments. Growth overages are charged. |
Sanity: seats first, then quotas
Plans and add-ons
Growth costs $15 per seat per month, so cost scales with headcount. The pricing page lists up to 20 user seats on Free and up to 50 on Growth. Listed Growth add-ons are:
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- Dedicated Support: $799 per month
- Increased quota: $299 per month. This extends quotas to 50,000 documents, 5 million API CDN requests, 1 million API requests, 500 GB bandwidth and 500 GB assets.
- Extra datasets: $999 per dataset per month
Source: Sanity pricing. The retrieved page was a Chinese-language URL variant that displayed prices in dollars. Check how pricing is shown for your locale.
What happens at the limit
Sanity’s plans and payments documentation (last updated September 23, 2026) says each project has monthly resource quotas. Paid Growth and Enterprise projects with a card on file are billed for overages. Free and Growth Trial projects don’t allow overages for several listed resources, so they hit hard limits instead. Metered dimensions are API requests, API CDN requests, asset storage, bandwidth, datasets, documents, non-admin users and Sanity Functions compute.
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Billing follows calendar months. Plans are billed in advance, and the previous month’s overages are charged alongside the new month.
Hygraph: flat plan, project quotas
Figures below come from Hygraph’s pricing page. Enterprise values are thresholds or “up to” limits, not a guaranteed bundle, and the page content may have changed since it was crawled.
| Limit | Hobby ($0) | Growth (from $199/month) | Enterprise (custom) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entries | 1,000 | 10,000 | 1,000,000+ |
| API calls | 500,000 | 1,000,000 | 50,000,000+ |
| Seats | 3 | 10 | 200 |
| Locales | 2 | 3 | Up to 80 |
| Asset storage | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Maximum upload size per asset differs by tier. Growth API operation and asset-traffic overages are charged after the billing cycle, at $0.20 per 10,000 API operations and $0.20 per 1 GB of asset traffic. On Hobby, usage is blocked until the next period. A credit card isn’t needed to sign up for Hobby, per the pricing page FAQ.
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Payload: $0 license, real infrastructure bill
Payload describes its self-hosted software as free and MIT licensed. No current managed-hosting price appears in its official getting-started or deployment material, so don’t rely on old or third-party figures. For enterprise, ask the vendor.
The deployment documentation names what you need to budget for:
- App hosting: providers named include Vercel, Netlify, SST, DigitalOcean and AWS.
- Database: required for production.
- Persistent file storage: upload adapters include AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Uploadthing and Vercel Blob Storage.
- Email provider and CDN: also needed in a typical deployment.
The documentation lists these components but gives no total cost. Add maintenance, backups, security updates and engineer time to the estimate. The advantage is that seats, entries and locales aren’t metered by the CMS vendor.
How to estimate your own cost
- Count seats. Sanity cost grows by $15 per seat per month on Growth. Hygraph Growth includes 10 seats, and Hobby includes 3. Payload doesn’t charge per seat.
- Forecast usage in each vendor’s units. Sanity meters API requests, CDN requests, bandwidth, assets, documents and datasets separately. Hygraph meters entries, API calls and asset traffic. Don’t compare headline numbers across vendors. Convert your traffic forecast into each unit.
- Price the overage case. Work out what a traffic spike costs on Sanity Growth or Hygraph Growth. On Free or Hobby, a spike may block functionality instead.
- Add structural needs. Check locales (Hygraph Growth lists 3), extra Sanity datasets at $999 each per month, and Hygraph environments.
- Price governance and support. SSO, roles and permissions, backups, SLAs and dedicated support often push a team into custom Enterprise pricing, and no representative amount is published. Sanity’s Dedicated Support add-on is $799 per month on Growth.
- For Payload, price the stack. Add hosting, database, storage, email and CDN, and decide who is on call.
Which model fits which project
- Small editorial team, modest traffic: Sanity’s per-seat pricing scales smoothly. Check the quota dimensions against your content size first.
- Many editors, predictable fee wanted: Hygraph Growth bundles 10 seats at $199 per month, but verify entry and API limits.
- Developer-led team with ops capacity: Payload removes the CMS license and per-seat charges, and moves the cost into infrastructure and engineering.
- Heavy multi-locale or compliance needs: expect to contact sales at Sanity and Hygraph. Payload enterprise is also sales-led.
The Bottom Line
Payload is cheapest only if you can absorb the hosting and operations work. Sanity suits teams whose cost should track headcount. Hygraph suits teams that want a fixed plan fee with clear quotas. Run your seat count, content volume, locales and traffic through each vendor’s own units before choosing.
Quick Recap
Best Value
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
