Discussion on potential unexpected costs of using Sanity CMS due to API usage.

i’m evaluating CMSs for a project and i like the look of sanity but am a bit wary of the pricing.
specifically, i’ve seen various discussions in here about people unexpectedly burning through all their API usage due to e.g. the studio making lots of API calls when editing, and when i checked the stats for my test account a while ago they were definitely much closer to the usage limit than i would expect, given the small amount of testing i had done

i know its tricky as every site is different, but was wondering if anyone could say whether they were surprised by the costs of sanity compared to what they expected? basically i am comparing to fixed price solutions like Storyblok and Dato, but its hard to advise the client without really understanding how much usage editing specifically will generate

When launching a new website, content editors typically create a lot of content in a short period, creating a spike in API requests. Plus I'm usually still fixing last-minute bugs, running the website locally and making additionnal requests. So the month of the launch some of my projects neared the API limit.but the following months, it flattens again.
Keep in mind that it only costs $1 per 25k additional API Requests per month.

I would rather worry about bandwith usage if your websites have a lot of images! Here it's important to take the time to optimize and lazy-load images.

yeah i thought the free limit was 10k but now i see it was 100k so i feel a bit more at ease about that

yeah, image bandwidth is definitely another factor but i find that easier to estimate as i can look at current usage on the existing site

also paying for more image traffic is usually fine as it means the site is being visited more 🙂 whereas paying for more edit traffic is a harder concept to sell to the client

true

i guess it’s probably possible to proxy the images yourself if you are so inclined - personally i think its probably easier to just pay for the bandwidth

thanks for the advice!

To add some context: We're planning to move most of the studio activity to websockets and look at other ways of decreasing its usage. We don't want people to refrain from using the studio because worrying about API costs.

ah that’s good to know, thanks !

i guess ultimately i really like Sanity as an option but would hate to push it to the client and then find we are paying hundreds a month to run it (they are a small business)… the API usage thing is my only real concern in that regard so if its something you are looking to address that is great 👍

Yeah, I don't think you should have to worry too much about it

that’s good to know, thank you 🙂