Finding a fair pricing model is challenging.
It’s challenging for WordPress products like themes and plugins, but especially for SaaS and hosting services, where regular costs exist to keep the lights on.
We are no longer a new startup and can bootstrap the entire service without external investment.
This also means we can offer a fair pricing model as we don’t have to please investors.
Price per site
People use millions of pricing models in the hosting space by storage, usage, and traffic, including countless paid add-ons for essential features like backups or SSL.
I’m a minimalist, and having an easy-to-grasp pricing model gives me peace of mind.
We won’t offer a serverless price-as-you-go and post the 7-figure bill on X plan – I hope you don’t mind!
The base price will be $19/month/site – affordable enough for everyone but also ensures we won’t have to declare bankruptcy anytime soon.
What’s included in the price?
Each site on Simply Static Studio includes:
- a fully isolated environment
- daily backups + 14 days retention period
- up to 5 GB of storage
- unlimited bandwidth
- managed server (we handle updates and maintenance)
- SSL
- CDN (for the static site)
On top of that, you will get all the features we have already showcased in our announcement post.
Wholesale Prices
The more websites you create and run on Simply Static Studio, the cheaper it gets.
- 1 site = $19/month/site
- 2 – 9 sites = $18/month/site
- 10-25 sites = $17/month/site
- 26-100 sites = $16/month/site
- 101+ sites = $15/month/site
On top of that, we will also offer a 20% discount when choosing the yearly plan.
This means saving up to 41% on the highest bulk plan and yearly payments.
Price Increases
Price increases will happen over time, and I don’t want to hide this.
However, we will follow the same approach we successfully used with Simply Static Pro – we will grandfather the price for existing customers if there aren’t external factors requiring us to do differently.
External Factors?
Suppose the server prices go up by 250% because of increased demand and less availability—we can’t bear this forever, so we would have to raise the prices.
Fair Use Policy
We opt for a fair use policy to avoid confusing you with too much technical lingo (Who can even estimate their bandwidth usage?!), but we want to keep it fair for everyone.
Bandwidth
We already mentioned the unlimited bandwidth, and while we stand behind that, we have to ensure it’s not abused by big players using our smallest plan to run their websites.
If you run a website with millions of monthly visitors, you will likely no longer fit into the starter plan.
However, we won’t disable your hosting if you exceed the limit. We’ll opt for open communication and reach out individually if necessary.
Storage
5 GB per site is a soft limit – nothing will happen immediately once you reach it.
We might even adjust the included storage if many early adopters exceed it.
We needed a number to start with, and we will watch the early access closely and adapt if needed.
As we continuously optimize how we store and leverage data (Hello, auto-transfer for media files to our CDN!), your websites will naturally get leaner over time, and the need for more storage will become less significant.
Backup Retention
Like our storage approach, the current backup solution isn’t set in stone.
We do daily backups (every 24 hours) and hold backups for up to 14 days. If we see the need to increase the defaults, we will do so.
GDPR & CCPA
We aim to be 100% GDPR and CCPA-compliant.
This is important because we are legally required to be GPDR-compliant and because it follows our ethos of delivering secure and privacy-friendly software to our customers.
It’s also another factor why we opted for a per-site pricing model.
You might have noticed the trend of hosting being offered based on the number of visits. This seems fair initially, but it is nothing less than tracking your customers without their consent, thus violating GPDR and CCPA.
That’s it for today!
I can’t wait to open up our early access program to everyone on our waitlist and start getting feedback!
