![Headless CMS Pricing [2026]: Free-Plan Traps and Real Costs](/assets/posts/harucms-price-hikaku.png?v=5b481cf8)
- headless CMS pricing — what it means
- Headless CMS pricing is the cost of using a CMS that delivers articles and images over an API. On top of the base monthly fee, it is set by a combination of usage-based limits and ceilings — data transfer, API request count, number of sites (services), and number of members. What really moves the total is structural: whether going over stops the service or simply bills you, and whether adding sites means adding contracts.
Hi, I’m Masato. I started out as a Webflow specialist and now spend my time chasing the leading edge of AI.
When you choose a headless CMS on price, deciding from the “from ¥X a month” on the official site alone will very likely go wrong. The reason is simple: headless CMS pricing is determined by the monthly fee multiplied by the structure behind it. In this article I lay out the real figures for the main Japanese services as of August 2026, then organize how to choose without regret, by scale.
Note: this comparison includes HaruCMS, which we develop and have already released. All figures for other services are based on publicly available information from each company’s official site and documentation.
The big picture: pricing for the main Japan-made headless CMS services
| Service | Free plan | Paid plans | What you are billed on |
|---|---|---|---|
| microCMS | Yes | ¥4,900/month (Team) / ¥75,000/month (Business) / Enterprise | Data transfer, API calls, member count. Contracted per service (site) |
| NILTO | Yes | ¥19,800/month (Starter) / ¥49,800 (Team) / ¥98,000 (Business) | API request count, number of spaces |
| Craft Cross CMS | No | From ¥40,000/month | — (successor to Newt, enterprise-leaning) |
| HaruCMS | Yes | ¥980/month (Solo) / ¥2,980 (Studio, unlimited sites) / ¥9,800 (Business), tax incl. | Number of sites, members, storage. Pageviews and transfer are not billed |
| Newt | Service ends on 2026-11-24 (migration guide here (Japanese)) | ||
Trap 1: free plans stop
The limits on free plans are placed not on storage but on delivery. That is where production sites run into trouble.
- microCMS free: 20GB of data transfer per month. Go over and the API stops immediately — you either upgrade or cannot fetch your articles until the next month. On an image-heavy site, a few tens of thousands of pageviews a month can reach it
- NILTO free: 100,000 API requests per month (officially estimated at around 20,000 pageviews). Go over and you are restricted
- HaruCMS free: designed not to stop you on pageviews or transfer. Custom domain delivery, however, starts from the paid plans
If your site “might go viral occasionally” or has traffic you cannot predict, choose while picturing what actually happens when it stops — namely, the article area of your site goes blank.
Trap 2: the step above the cheapest plan is a cliff
The Japanese price ladder has a fault line in it. At microCMS, the plan above ¥4,900/month is ¥75,000/month. At NILTO the paid entry point is ¥19,800/month to begin with. The demand in between — “¥4,900 isn’t enough but I can’t pay ¥75,000,” meaning a genuinely usable plan in the ¥1,000–3,000 range — was a blank space for a long time. HaruCMS is designed to target that band (¥980 / ¥2,980). The safe way to pick an entry plan is to look at what the next plan up costs once your site grows.
Trap 3: more sites means more contracts
This is the one that hits production companies, freelancers, and businesses with multiple brands hardest. microCMS states in its official help that when a production company deploys it per client, a new service contract per client is the rule (bundling multiple services into one contract is Enterprise only). So ten projects means ten contracts, at roughly ¥49,000 a month. NILTO’s Team plan (¥49,800) covers up to ten spaces.
By contrast, a design that allows unlimited sites on a single contract (HaruCMS Studio, ¥2,980/month) keeps the monthly fee fixed however many projects you add. The gap in monthly cost can exceed an order of magnitude, so if you are running multiple sites, compare this point before anything else.
How to choose by scale, without regret
- Personal blogs and small sites (up to ~10,000 pageviews/month): any free plan will do. Pick one whose future paid tier is cheap (the ¥980 band) or one with plenty of documentation (microCMS)
- A single corporate site (up to a few hundred thousand pageviews/month): microCMS Team (¥4,900) or HaruCMS Solo/Studio (¥980–2,980). If transfer volume looks likely to grow, lean toward the side that doesn’t stop
- Media and high-traffic sites: transfer-based billing makes costs unpredictable, so compare — on measured numbers — either a structure that doesn’t bill on requests and transfer, or a plan with high ceilings (NILTO, microCMS Business)
- Production companies and multi-site operators: an unlimited-sites model (HaruCMS Studio, ¥2,980) wins overwhelmingly on total cost. Start by taking inventory of your existing contracts
- Enterprise: choose on SLA, permission management, and support structure. microCMS Enterprise, Craft Cross CMS, or HaruCMS Business (¥9,800, invoice payment supported)
One more thing: does your site really call the API a lot?
A note on the premise of your estimate. A site built with static generation (SSG) in Astro or Next.js calls the API only at build time. However many tens of thousands of readers arrive, requests to the CMS do not increase. With that architecture you can effectively ignore API request ceilings, and the only thing that matters is image transfer volume. Conversely, an architecture that calls the API on every view — SSR, or client-side fetching — grows requests in proportion to pageviews. Before you look at pricing plans, confirm which of the two your site is: that is the surest first step toward an estimate.
Related reading: Newt migration destinations and alternative CMS comparison (Japanese) / The complete guide to Newt’s shutdown and migration (Japanese). If you run multiple sites, consider HaruCMS, which we develop (unlimited sites on one contract, from ¥980/month). It is already released and usable right away on the free plan. Right now, the first 100 people to start using it get half price for life (open until either 100 people sign up or 2026-11-24, whichever comes first).
FAQ
What is the going rate for a headless CMS?
As of August 2026, paid plans from Japanese services start between ¥980 and ¥19,800 a month, while plans meant for serious production use run ¥40,000–75,000 a month. Realistically, budget ¥1,000–5,000 a month for individuals and small sites, and ¥20,000 or more a month for full corporate use.
Can I run a commercial site on a free plan?
Every provider allows commercial use under its terms, but in practice you need to watch the limits. microCMS’s free plan stops the API past 20GB of transfer per month, and NILTO’s free plan restricts you at 100,000 requests a month. For a commercial site with unpredictable traffic, choose a plan designed not to stop, or assume a paid plan from the start.
What is data transfer, and why is it billed?
It is the volume of data — API responses (your article data) and images — sent from the CMS servers to your readers’ browsers. Most CMS platforms run on clouds such as AWS, where data transfer (egress) costs real money per gigabyte, which is why transfer becomes a billing axis. Services built on an edge CDN (such as Cloudflare) incur no such transfer cost, so they can price without using transfer as a billing axis.
Wouldn’t an overseas CMS (Contentful, Sanity, Strapi) be cheaper?
Their free tiers are generous, but the metered calculations are complex and exposed to the yen exchange rate. With self-hosted Strapi, the labor of server operation, updates, and backups becomes the real cost. Add in an English-only admin interface, and if your content editors are non-engineers, a flat-rate Japanese service usually gives you a more predictable total cost.
