Which headless CMS features do developers want for free?
Tags: jamstack, headlesscms, free, project
Published: 2020-08-12 08:48:49

You get excited about a product only to find out you need to fill in your credit card details in order to sign up. Or you can use it for free with one exception—the feature that got you excited in the first place. Conditions, rules, exceptions... enough. What if developers actually designed a free headless CMS plan for themselves?

The story I want to tell you today starts with a group of [Kentico](https://kentico.com/) MVPs. They are web technology professionals who care about the community around Kentico products, contribute to open source, write tutorials, and so on. One of the MVP benefits is that they get a full-featured plan of [headless CMS Kentico Kontent](https://bit.ly/2BTOljf) for personal use, you know, to try out new features and help others use them.

About three months ago, a little disaster happened. Two of the MVPs were using their personal email accounts that werenʼt linked to their company accounts in our CRM. The Kontentʼs cleaning and maintenance script failed to find out their MVP status and eligibility for the highest tier, so their projects were flagged and disabled.

It took us a few hours to localize and solve the problem, that is, to reactivate their projects, but it sparked a discussion about the pricing tiers. The old free plan was too restrictive, and we wanted to provide the cool features to all developers, not just the MVPs.

## From developers for developers
To me, every developer is a visionary. Even if you need to implement a simple calculator, you need to design the processes, methods, how the parts of your application communicate, and so on. That requires creative thinking and a high level of imagination.

If you doubt that, take any developer out for a beer and ask him or her about their latest project ideas. I guarantee they will talk enthusiastically about at least two or three.

![Image of two people and label saying that passion led us to this place](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ya47ak40qp67svhgafwg.jpg)

Here I am speaking for the whole DevRel team at Kentico Kontent. We are developers too. With every new project, we are looking for ways to store content. And even though thereʼs always the possibility weʼll invent a new Facebook, most of the time itʼs just hobby sites with a $0 budget. Like a lifestyle blog for your wife or a website for a local football club. They donʼt necessarily earn any money, but we learn a lot in the process of creating them. We innovate.

## Everything you need for a small project, free

So we put our heads together and decided to create a brand new *[Developer plan](https://kontent.ai/pricing#developer-plan)* the other way around. Not by specifying which features will be disabled, but by figuring out what developers need to get projects up and running as quickly as possible.

We came up with the following points:

* Signing up without providing any credit card details (ever)
* Being able to quickly set up the project
* Storing content and being able to manipulate it without restrictions
* Splitting the content into at least two groups: local and production
* Giving a friend/family member/dog/cat access to collaborate on content 
* Fetching and manipulating content via API
* Being able to have content in multiple languages

I hope we didnʼt leave out any important aspect of your projects. We converted those mentioned above into the new plan that is already active and available.

So what are the features you get for free?

* Cloud-hosted management UI—no need to install anything
* Data delivered via a fast global CDN
* Content storage including custom elements for customized experience entering data and collaboration features up to 500 items
* Delivery and Management API including open-source SDKs
* 2 users
* 2 environments
* 2 project languages

Just [sign up](https://bit.ly/2BTOljf) for the Kentico Kontent trial and switch your plan to Developer. No need to add any credit card info or talk to anyone. Get back to your project as soon as you can, and have fun.

Once your project is live, [give us a Tweet](https://twitter.com/KenticoKontent), weʼd love to take a look :-).