Pantheon Pricing and Pantheon Hosting Plans With Real Monthly Bills for Drupal Agencies

Pantheon is the managed WebOps platform many Drupal and WordPress agencies grew up on: git based Dev, Test and Live environments, a global CDN and someone else patching the stack. It is also priced per site, which is where agency budgets start to hurt. Review sites still quote plan names and prices from before the 2024 site plan change, so the numbers below are taken from pantheon.io/plans/pricing in October 2026, in US dollars.

How much does Pantheon cost?

Pantheon costs $55 a month per site on the Basic plan, or $500 a year, and Performance plans cost $200, $350, $700 and $1,150 a month per site. Elite plans are quoted by sales. On top of site plans, the Gold workspace with Multidev and 24/7 support costs $500 a month. Every site needs its own plan to go live on a custom domain, so an agency bill is the site plan price multiplied by the number of client sites, plus the workspace.

Paying yearly saves about 24% on Basic and about 20% on Performance plans, and Pantheon gives annual plans 40% more traffic for the same tier. The same prices apply to WordPress, Drupal and Next.js site plans.

What each Pantheon plan includes

The plan price is mostly a price for PHP capacity and traffic headroom. Pantheon's own comparison table lists these limits per site:

Two rows matter for Drupal. Basic has no object cache and no Solr, so a Drupal site that uses Redis for its cache bins or Search API Solr starts at Performance Small, $200 a month, even with very little traffic. And four PHP workers is the real ceiling for logged in traffic: editors, members and Drupal Commerce carts bypass the edge cache, so a busy back office hits that limit long before the visit count does. All plans share 99.9% SLO uptime, automated backups (seven kept, one or six months retention), HTTPS and the global CDN; Elite adds a 99.95% SLA, a replica database and site monitoring.

Is Pantheon free?

Pantheon is free to try, not free to run in production. The free Silver workspace includes sandbox sites with Dev, Test and Live environments, git and the Terminus CLI, but Pantheon's FAQ says a paid site plan is required to take a site live on a custom domain. For a real client site the minimum is Basic at $55 a month, or $500 a year.

Pantheon traffic overages and how visits are counted

Pantheon counts a visit as a unique combination of IP address and user agent within 24 hours that receives a 200 level (and some 300 level) response, and it counts pages served as requests generated by WordPress or Drupal. Its published overage rate is $40 for each 10,000 unique visits above the plan, or part of 10,000. A Basic site that gets 45,000 visits in a month on a monthly plan is 20,000 over, which is $80 when overages are billed.

Two softeners apply. Pantheon's docs say the automated overage program has been paused since August 2024 while the company reviews it, and annual Performance and Elite plans get one month of overages waived each year (four for qualifying nonprofits). Bots count as visits if they get a 200 response, so a site under a scraper wave can look busier than its analytics show. Budget as if the $40 rate can come back.

Pantheon pricing for agencies

An agency pays per client site plus, usually, the Gold workspace, because Multidev branches, automated updates with visual regression testing and 24/7 support live there rather than in site plans. Preferred pricing exists, but Pantheon's FAQ states it is only available to premier partners, so a small agency should price the list rates.

The worked bills below compare that with running the same sites on servers you own. Server prices are DigitalOcean Basic Droplets ($12 for 2 GB, $48 for 8 GB, $96 for 16 GB). Panel prices are Laravel Forge ($12 Hobby, $19 Growth with unlimited servers) and DeployManage Growth ($129, 10 servers, 50 sites per server, 10 team members, zero downtime releases).

Read it honestly. For one site Pantheon Basic beats DeployManage by a wide margin, and Forge is the cheapest way onto your own server in every row. The busy site row adds Envoyer to Forge because Forge's native zero downtime deploys work on one server per site, and that site runs behind two app servers. DeployManage earns its price at agency scale: one plan that provisions the servers, runs atomic releases across several of them, and gives ten people their own logins with an audit log. The Drupal side of that setup, with drush deploy and shared files, is on our Drupal deployment page.

What the server columns leave out is labor. Pantheon patches the platform, scales containers and answers chat. On your own servers someone on your team reads alerts and plans PHP upgrades. For an agency that already runs Laravel or Symfony apps on its own servers, that cost exists anyway, which is why the move pays off fastest for mixed shops.

Is Pantheon worth it?

Pantheon is worth it for a single important site, or a small portfolio, when nobody on the team wants to own servers and Multidev workflows save real review time. It gets expensive in three situations: a long tail of small client sites that each need a $55 plan, a Drupal site that needs Redis or Solr and is pushed to $200 for features rather than traffic, and logged in heavy sites that need PHP workers more than visits. In those cases a few servers you control are usually cheaper by a factor of two to five, even after the panel fee.

If you are comparing other container platforms for PHP, the same per project and per user maths shows up in Upsun pricing, and the WordPress side of an agency portfolio is covered on our WordPress VPS control panel page.

How to move Drupal sites off Pantheon

A Pantheon Drupal site is already a composer project in git, so the move is mostly data. Pull the latest database and files with Terminus (terminus backup:create, then terminus backup:get with --element=db and --element=files), import the database on the new server, unpack the files into the shared files folder, and replace Pantheon's settings include with your own settings.local.php. Redis and Solr move to a server you run, and the edge cache moves to Cloudflare or your CDN of choice.

Do it per site, lowest traffic first, with DNS TTLs lowered a day ahead. Most agencies move a small marketing site in an afternoon. If your team has no capacity for twenty migrations on top of client work, an outside development team can take the batch as a fixed project while you keep shipping. Once a site is moved, set up the deploy script once on the Drupal deployment flow and every later release is a git push.