What 'open source' actually costs in a headless CMS

#What each one actually charges

Verified from each vendor's own pricing page on 17 August 2026. Prices change — check before deciding on them.

Three observations the marketing pages do not put next to each other.

Directus's free-to-paid step is $499 a month. Core gives you 3 seats and 25 collections; there is no $49 tier between that and Team, and SSO sits on the far side of the step. If SSO is a compliance requirement rather than a convenience, "free" was never the relevant number.

Strapi's hosted tier is per project. Ten client sites is ten subscriptions, each with its own request allowance and its own overage meter running independently. Self-hosting is genuinely free; the moment you want it managed, the unit is the project.

Sanity is not self-hostable at all. The client libraries are open source; the Content Lake is a hosted service. Nothing wrong with that — it just does not belong on a shortlist headed "open source" if what you meant was "I can run it".

#The cost that no pricing page lists

Self-hosting any of these means operating, at minimum:

Six services, each with backups, an upgrade path, a monitoring story and a failure mode. Cost this in engineer-hours per month and compare it honestly against the hosted tier before deciding that free is cheaper. Often it is. Sometimes it very much is not.

corpusctl ships that whole set as one deployment — PostgreSQL, Valkey, Typesense, Garage and nginx — with a self-hosted install available on the Enterprise plan. The constraint behind the list is a product rule rather than a pricing decision: no component in the stack is a third-party service billed per usage.

#Community size predicts your bad Tuesday

Pulled live from the npm registry, GitHub and Stack Exchange APIs on 17 August 2026:

The column that matters when something breaks is the last one, and these numbers do not all measure the same thing.

Sanity's 8.3 million downloads against 6,276 stars is a client library running in build pipelines, not a popularity score.

Payload's 44,000 stars against 79 questions is the shape of fast recent growth: enthusiastic users, thin troubleshooting corpus. At 2am the star count will not help you.

Strapi's 2,800 questions is the best number here by a distance, and it is the single strongest argument for choosing Strapi.

corpusctl is smaller than all of them, and there is no version of this article where that is not true.

#Licence questions worth asking before you commit

Can I fork it if the company is acquired? Not academic. Contentful is being acquired by Salesforce, and Payload has joined Figma. A permissive licence and a real community are what turn an acquisition into an inconvenience rather than a migration.

Can I run it for customers? BSL and SSPL restrict offering the software as a service. If you are building a platform, read this clause before you write code.

What happens if the licence changes? It has happened across the industry. Ask whether the version you have stays under its current terms.

Who owns contributions? A CLA assigning copyright to the company is normal and also means the company can relicense what you wrote.

#Choosing

Strapi if you want free self-hosting with the largest community. The default when nothing in your situation is unusual.

Ghost if the publication is the product. MIT, free, and unmatched on memberships and newsletters.

Directus if you already have a SQL database and want it wrapped rather than replaced — while noting the $499 step.

Payload if you are a Next.js team that likes config-as-code, with the Figma acquisition in view.

Sanity if editorial experience decides it and hosted is acceptable.

corpusctl if you want the whole stack self-hosted with no metered third-party service, several projects from one panel, and no read meter. Smallest community here; no marketplace; single-region edge cache.

Related: Headless CMS comparison · What is a headless CMS?