corpusctl vs Strapi: one panel, N projects, no request meter

Overages: +$1.50 per 25,000 API requests, +$0.60 per GB of storage, +$30 per 100 GB of bandwidth. Extra environments are +$60/month on Pro and +$300/month on Business.

Read the header of the price column again: per project.

An agency with ten client sites is looking at ten separate subscriptions. Not ten spaces on one bill — ten projects, each with its own request allowance, its own storage allowance, and its own overage meter running independently. At Starter that is $350 a month before a single client outgrows 100,000 requests.

corpusctl does not have a per-project line because a project is not a billing unit. One panel, unlimited spaces, and a user carries a separate role in each space — editor for one client, owner for another, invisible on a third. Isolation is enforced by PostgreSQL row-level security, in the database, below the application layer where the mistakes happen.

#100,000 requests is smaller than it sounds

The Starter allowance divides out to roughly 3,300 requests a day.

A typical page renders from more than one call — the entry, the navigation, the related posts. At three calls per page view you reach the ceiling at about 1,100 daily page views. Then add the crawlers, the preview requests, the uptime monitor, and the front-end that forgot to cache during a deploy.

After that, every 25,000 requests costs $1.50. It is not a large number. It is just a number that goes up precisely when things are going well, and one you cannot forecast, because it is driven by strangers.

And on Starter, the instance sleeps when idle. That is a cold start on the first request after a quiet period — on the marketing site you are paying to make fast.

corpusctl has no request allowance because published content is never served by the API. Hitting publish writes the rendered content to an immutable, hash-addressed file in object storage and refreshes a manifest. The visitor's client resolves the slug to a manifest shard locally, then fetches that immutable address from the nginx edge cache — cacheable for thirty days, because the same address can never return different content.

Two HTTP requests, both from cache. Neither reaches the API. Neither reaches PostgreSQL. There is nothing to count.

#Self-hosting Strapi is free — and that is the honest comparison

If you self-host the Community edition, none of the above applies, and you should weigh that seriously. What you are then comparing is operational surface.

Strapi self-hosted gives you the CMS. You still assemble and operate the rest: the database, the object storage for media, a search backend if you need one, a queue for webhook delivery, the cache, the reverse proxy, and the upgrade path across major versions.

corpusctl ships the whole set as one deployment — PostgreSQL, Valkey, Typesense, Garage, nginx — with a self-hosted install available on the Enterprise plan. Every component runs on your own infrastructure. There is no third-party service in the stack billed per usage; that is a product constraint, not a current pricing decision.

Which of these is better depends entirely on whether you want to own that operational surface. Some teams do, and they should pick Strapi.

#The parts that only show up in month four

Turning a feature off. In corpusctl every feature is a module — media, search, webhooks, SEO, GraphQL, import, analytics. disabled preserves the data and resumes where it left off; uninstalled clears it and asks twice. A plan downgrade sets modules to disabled and never deletes data. That is a rule in the codebase, not a support policy.

What the client library imposes. corpusctl's block renderers ship with zero default styling — not one line of CSS. Any block type can be overridden, and an unknown block type is skipped rather than throwing. The core render tree is framework-agnostic; React, Vue and Next.js adapters are thin layers on top. A CMS that ships opinionated markup has not solved the "render the API response" problem, it has renamed it.

Webhook delivery. Deliveries sit in a durable queue with exponential backoff and jitter. If your receiver is down for an hour, the events are still there when it comes back.

Error codes. Every API error carries a permanent code (CORPUS_E_9127) and a documentation link. Messages are translated into seven languages; codes are not. Client code binds to the code, so improving a message never breaks an integration.

#Where Strapi wins

Community. Roughly 73,000 GitHub stars and 2,800 Stack Overflow questions against corpusctl's much smaller footprint. When you hit an edge case at 2am, the odds that someone has already written it up are dramatically better with Strapi. This is a real advantage and it compounds.

Plugin ecosystem. Strapi has a marketplace of plugins and providers. corpusctl has none — integrations are written against webhooks and the API.

Maturity. Strapi has shipped through several major versions with a large installed base. corpusctl is young; SSO and a contractual SLA are on the roadmap, which is the polite way of saying they do not exist yet.

Free forever, self-hosted. The Community edition costs nothing and always has. That is hard to argue with, and we are not going to try.

#The honest summary

Pick Strapi if you want to self-host for free, you value a large community, or you need plugins you would otherwise have to write.

Pick corpusctl if you run several projects from one place, want isolation enforced by the database, and want an invoice that does not move when a post does well.

Strapi Cloud prices taken from strapi.io/pricing-cloud on 17 August 2026, excluding local taxes. Prices change — check before quoting.

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