Compare InkCMS
An honest matrix comparing InkCMS to WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, Squarespace, and Webflow. We name names and call out where competitors are stronger.
Read more§ Pricing
Priced by pages.
Nothing else.
No per-seat fees. No AI-tokens markup. No tiered features held hostage. Pick a tier by site size, bring your own LLM key, pay only for what you use upstream.
All tiers include every feature. 110% soft buffer before publishes are blocked. Whitelabel agreements available on Medium and above. Web hosting is not included — InkCMS is the CMS license; you run it on your own server or hosting provider.
§ Enterprise · 2,500+ pages Running something bigger? Let's talk custom pricing, annual contracts, and dedicated support.
Contact us →§ Included in every tier
Every feature, every tier.
We don't gate features by tier. You get the entire product on day one. The tier is purely about how many pages your site has — Starter is the same software as XL, just running smaller.
Authoring
CMS Editing Assistant
Admin-side AI panel. Staging-first writes. Pending-action cards. Per-conversation cost telemetry.
Visitor
AI Advisor bar
Sticky search bar across every public page. Voice input. Inline citations. Server-side URL safety.
Providers
Multi-provider runtime
Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT — swap with a dropdown. Bring your own API key.
Content
Staging · publish · revert
Three-folder model. Snapshotted history per publish. Soft-delete and restore from admin UI.
Media
Imageflow + Document text
On-demand image transforms. PDF / DOCX / XLSX / PPTX text extraction. Magic-byte validated uploads.
Auth
Per-user permission scopes
Viewer / Editor / Publisher / Administrator. Per-scope denylists. PBKDF2-SHA256 password hashing.
Audit
Full audit log
Every admin and every AI action, JSONL, one file per day. Per-question token counts and dollar costs.
Editor
WYSIWYG + HTML editor
Froala Editor Pro (license key auto-delivered) plus CodeMirror 5 for hand-authored markup.
§ How pages are counted
What counts as a page.
InkCMS counts a "page" as any production page in the index — anything reachable at a public URL. Specifically:
- Counted: every
index.mdundercontent/production/withstatus: activeorstatus: published. - Not counted: staging pages, history snapshots, knowledge entries (AI-only content), soft-deleted pages, the 404 page itself.
- Counted once: aliases and
oldPageredirects don't multiply the count — one canonical page is one page.
Your current count is visible at /administer/administration/version at any time, and is sent to InkCMS.ai/validation/heartbeat once a day so we can show you a friendly upgrade banner before you hit the cap.
§ The soft buffer
We don't break your site.
Page limits are enforced in the editor, never on the public site. Even if you blow past your tier, every visitor still sees every page. We just nag you to upgrade.
The six states of the license guard
Healthy— under 80% of your tier. No banner.Approaching— 80–99%. Amber banner: "Consider upgrading."AtLimit— at 100%. Orange banner: "You can publish N more on the soft buffer."SoftBuffer— 101–110%. Red banner; publishes still succeed.HardBlock— over 110% (or expired/tampered). Red banner; new-page publishes refused with upgrade prompt. Existing pages still publish freely.Unlimited— localhost / grace mode / unactivated. No enforcement at all.
The public-facing site is never affected by the license state. Even in the hardest block, every existing page keeps serving every visitor. That's a hard product rule: we never punish your audience for our billing.
§ AI costs you pay upstream
We don't mark up your tokens.
InkCMS pricing covers the CMS. AI usage costs are paid directly to Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI under your own API key — we never see those bills, and we don't mark them up.
Rough per-question costs at typical Advisor question sizes (these are the providers' published rates, not InkCMS numbers):
- Google Gemini 2.5 Flash: ~$0.0001 – $0.001 per answer
- Anthropic Claude Haiku: ~$0.001 per answer
- OpenAI GPT-4o-mini: ~$0.0005 per answer
- Anthropic Claude Sonnet (premium drafting): ~$0.01 per authoring turn
A site serving 1,000 visitor questions a day on Gemini Flash costs less than your domain registration. The AI Stats dashboard in your admin shows total spend per day, daily volume, and the recent 100 questions with tokens and 6-decimal costs — so you always know what you're spending before the credit-card statement arrives.
§ FAQ
Common questions.
Is web hosting included?
No. InkCMS pricing is for the CMS license only. You run it on your own server, VPS, or hosting provider of choice — anything that runs .NET 8+. We don't bundle hosting because we don't want to mark it up, and because most teams already have a hosting story they like.
What happens if I exceed my page tier?
You get a 10% soft buffer (e.g. 55 pages on the Small tier). Once you cross 110% of your limit, new-page publishes are refused with an upgrade prompt in the editor. Republishing existing pages always works. The public site is never affected. Localhost installs are always unlimited.
Do I need to provide my own AI API key?
Yes. InkCMS is bring-your-own-key for all three providers. You configure the key in /administer/administration/editing; we never see it. This keeps your costs at-cost and lets you switch providers without changing CMS vendors.
Can I run InkCMS without an AI key at all?
Yes. The CMS works fully without any AI provider configured — you just lose the editing assistant and the visitor advisor. The filesystem-only storage, staging/publish flow, audit log, and all editor features keep working. Add an AI key later if/when you want it.
Is there a free trial?
Localhost is always unlimited and unactivated — you can clone, run, and build entire sites on your laptop without paying anything. Pricing kicks in when you activate against a real production hostname.
What payment methods do you accept?
Credit card via Stripe is the planned default for self-serve sign-up. Annual prepay by invoice/wire transfer is available on Medium and above. Reach out to contact us for procurement-heavy billing setups.
Can I get a custom plan?
Yes — for whitelabel licenses (remove the "Powered by InkCMS" footer), volume discounts (10+ sites under one organization), or for hosted-service resale (running InkCMS as a service to your own clients). Talk to us.
What happens if I cancel?
Your content stays yours — it's all on your filesystem. The license guard transitions to Expired state, which blocks the admin from publishing new pages but never breaks the public site. You can re-activate any time. You never lose your content.
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