Strapi 2026 Pricing: Free Self-Hosted vs Paid Cloud Tiers Explained
Strapi's 2026 pricing divides into two models: a free, MIT-licensed Community edition for self-hosting and a managed Strapi Cloud offering with three paid tiers starting at $29 per month. The self-hosted route carries no software costs but requires paying for infrastructure such as a VPS, managed database, and object storage, with realistic monthly costs ranging from $10 to $25 for a single production environment. Strapi Cloud handles deployment, SSL, storage, and updates automatically, but charges overages at $0.25 per GB above plan limits and counts staging and production environments as separate projects against a plan's quota. Teams commonly move to Cloud when DevOps capacity is limited, when handing off projects to non-technical clients, or when managing multiple environments on self-hosted infrastructure becomes burdensome. Conversely, organisations often revert to self-hosting once they reach the Team tier at $299 per month and begin weighing that fixed cost against the effort of running their own stack.
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