Craft Cloud Pricing and the Real Cost of Craft CMS Hosting for One Site or Twenty

Craft Cloud is the hosting platform run by Pixel & Tonic, the company behind Craft CMS. It is priced unlike any VPS or panel: a flat fee per project, with the Craft licence folded in, a CDN, image transforms and static caching included, and no server to log into. For one site that can be a good deal. For an agency with a dozen client sites it is usually the most expensive way to host Craft, and the difference runs to five figures a year.

Every figure below was read from craftcms.com in October 2026: the Craft Cloud plan page, the Cloud FAQ and the Craft licence pricing page. Server prices are DigitalOcean Basic Droplets in a US region, which we track on our DigitalOcean pricing page.

Craft Cloud pricing at a glance

Extra bandwidth costs $25 per 50 GB on both plans, and extra asset storage is sold in add-ons from $10 to $100 a month. Additional domains cost extra. Craft says it does not use metered billing beyond those add-ons, so the bill is predictable. There is a free trial on Team and Pro.

How much does Craft Cloud cost per year?

Craft Cloud costs $1,440 a year for one Team project or $2,880 for one Pro project at monthly rates, and $1,320 or $2,640 when paid yearly. That covers hosting and the Craft licence for that one project. Plugin licences are still bought separately in the Plugin Store, and every additional site is another project and another subscription.

What the Craft licence costs if you host elsewhere

The licence is the part of the Craft Cloud price people forget to subtract. Off Craft Cloud you buy it yourself: Craft Solo is free for one account, Team is $279 per project and Pro is $399 per project, each including a year of updates, then $99 a year for updates after that. On Craft Cloud both editions are free to use while the project is hosted there.

So the fair comparison is not $120 against a $12 server. It is $120 a month against a server, a panel and a licence that costs $279 in year one and $99 in every year after.

Craft Cloud vs your own server, priced for four real setups

Year one totals, including the Craft licence on the self hosted side. The panel column uses Laravel Forge (Hobby $12, Growth $19) and DeployManage (Starter $59, Growth $129). Servers are DigitalOcean: $12 for 2 GB, $24 for 4 GB.

From year two the licence line drops to $99 per site, so the self hosted totals fall again: ten sites cost $1,794 a year on Forge and $3,114 on DeployManage, against $14,400 on Craft Cloud.

Two honest readings of that table. First, for a single site Craft Cloud is cheaper than DeployManage Growth, and Forge Hobby on a $12 server is cheaper than both. If you run one Craft site and nobody on the team wants to touch a server, Craft Cloud is a reasonable buy and you get the CDN and image transforms without configuring anything. Second, the per project model is what makes Craft Cloud expensive for agencies. At ten sites the gap is about $10,000 a year in favor of your own servers, whichever panel you put on them.

When Craft Cloud's bandwidth limit changes the math

Team includes 250 GB of bandwidth a month and Pro 500 GB. A busy Team site that serves 400 GB pays for three extra 50 GB blocks, $75, so the month costs $195. A DigitalOcean Droplet includes its own transfer allowance (4 TB on the $24 plan, read on DigitalOcean's pricing page), so the same traffic on a VPS usually costs nothing extra. If your sites are image heavy and you do not put a CDN in front of them, check last month's bandwidth before you pick a plan.

What you give up on Craft Cloud

Craft Cloud is serverless. Its FAQ is direct about it: there is nothing to SSH into, images are built on every deploy and the filesystem is ephemeral. It does not run Nginx or Apache, it supports MySQL 8.0 and Postgres 15 but not MariaDB, and it has no automated rollback. Regions are Oregon, Quebec, Frankfurt and Sydney, so there is no US East option for clients whose visitors are mostly on the East Coast.

For many marketing sites none of that matters. It matters for a Commerce store that needs a custom PHP extension, a site with a plugin that writes to local disk, a client contract that requires hosting in a specific region, or an agency that wants the same deploy process and access across Craft and Laravel projects.

Is Craft Cloud worth it for agencies?

For most agencies with more than three or four Craft sites, no, because every site is a separate $110 to $240 subscription. Craft Cloud makes the most sense for an in-house team with one important site, or for an agency that resells a premium hosting plan and wants Pixel & Tonic's infrastructure behind it. Agencies that would rather put the savings into the client work, for example a conversion audit of the landing pages the site was built to sell, usually end up on their own servers.

On your own servers the work Craft Cloud does for you comes back to you: atomic releases, shared upload folders, php craft up on each deploy, a queue runner and SSL. That is the job of a panel. Our Craft CMS deployment page shows how DeployManage runs it on DigitalOcean, Hetzner or AWS servers, including the deploy script and the folders to share. If you only need a cheap panel for one or two sites, our Laravel Forge alternative page compares Forge, Ploi and DeployManage tier by tier, and sites built on Statamic have their own guide on Statamic hosting.

How Craft Cloud compares with Servd

Servd is the other Craft specific managed host. Each Servd plan covers one Craft install, like Craft Cloud, but the plans are sized by resources: 2, 3.5 or 5 CPUs, 5, 10 or 15 PHP workers and 2, 5 or 10 GB of asset storage on Starter, Enhanced and Pro. Servd includes staging, atomic deployments, a dedicated queue runner in its feature list, and US, EU, UK and Canadian regions. It does not include the Craft licence, so add $279 or $399 for the first year. Servd's prices load in the browser and were not quoted on a page we could read, so check them on servd.host before comparing.