So Outside Technology Security CMS
AnQiCMS
Online Demonstration

The program itself is free, but the plugins are charged by seat. How do you calculate this cost when selecting?

📅 2026-11-01 👁️ 0

Open-source content management systems are free themselves, but plugins are charged per seat. How should this account be calculated when selecting? First, let's define the word 'free' clearly: it refers to the software authorization, and the hosting resources, key plugin seat licenses, and maintenance hours are not exempt. A selection guide for headless systems, such as the description of Strapi, is very typical: the core is free, but necessary plugins are charged for seat licenses, and deployment can be self-hosted or use the official cloud. When comparing, the four segments of cost should be priced separately, and then the total account should be calculated based on the number of team members and the number of sites.

Which part does 'free' refer to?

The open-source attribute of a content management system only indicates that the source code is available and no authorization fee is required for the program itself. This point is often listed separately in public comparisons: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Strapi, Payload, and Directus are classified as open source, while Contentful, Hygraph, Storyblok, DatoCMS, Squarespace, and Wix are classified as proprietary. When both are open-source solutions, self-hosting still requires the cost of hosting to be borne by oneself.In other words, classification solves the issue of 'can you get the source code, can you deploy it yourself', but does not solve 'how much will it take to run in total'.

At which stage will seat-based charging be blocked?

The seat fee usually goes with two things: the number of editors and the number of channels to be connected. The more people on the team, the easier it is to hit, because writing, auditing, operation, and outsourcing often occupy one seat each; some plugins are counted by sites, and when the number of sites increases in group building, the cost rises linearly. The actions to be taken at the selection stage are very specific: first, list the necessary plugin list, and confirm item by item whether the billing standard is monthly or annual, per person or per site, and which fields and processes will fail after removing the seats.

The two-way allocation of resources and working hours.

Hosting this section of the difference comes from runtime. Based on the GoLang and Iris, GORM technology stack system, memory usage can be reduced by about 80% compared to PHP class content systems, and more sites can be placed on the same server, and the host grade will naturally decline. This part of the working hours is more likely to be ignored: upgrades, backups, recovery exercises, and template changes all require personnel. Self-hosting should leave these two items, using Docker images or Baota panel and other deployment methods can standardize repeated actions and reduce the rework caused by errors.

A comparison table broken down by headcount and site number

Cost items Open source self-hosting Exclusively hosted
Software license Free, source code is available for self-extraction Priced by subscription
Hosting resources Priced by host slot, multi-site can be amortized Generally, each site is billed separately
Plugins and extensions Core is free, necessary plugins may be charged by seat Most features are in the subscription tier
Operations labor Upgrade, backup, and restore yourself The platform takes on part of it
Multi-site management One back-end manages multiple sites, resources are shared Commonly, the number of sites is叠加

Common questions

Can the seat fee be purchased only during peak season?It depends on the license terms, most seats charged annually have limitations on discounts, and negotiation space is concentrated on the initial number of seats.

Will the content model be locked in the plugin?Need to be confirmed separately. When using custom fields to carry structured data, the field definition and data ownership must be able to be exported, otherwise replacing the plugin is equivalent to doing it all over again.

If there are many sites, should multi-site be used?There is obvious profit when websites need to share column structures, terminology, and backup strategies; it is better to deploy separately when each station operates independently.

How can a small team save the most?Calculate the total account for three years with the same口径: the host grade is determined according to the memory and concurrent requirements, the seats are determined according to the actual number of editors, the working hours are estimated according to the fixed maintenance hours per month, and then see which part can be undertaken by the platform.

Related articles

The screening conditions generate a large number of similar pages, whether to block crawling first or block indexing first.

The screening page should first determine whether the waste is the crawling quota or the inclusion quota: the address combination is still being repeatedly requested, which belongs to the crawling side issue, and can be收敛 using robots rules; the page has been crawled and entered into the inclusion before talking about indexing, the handling of whether to index should be canceled indexing or merge the standard address into the main page, blocking crawling itself will not cancel the existing inclusion.

2026-11-01

How to control the crawling depth of list pages when pagination and infinite scrolling coexist

The depth of crawling on the list page is determined by the internal link structure: Infinite scrolling must retain direct access to pagination addresses, each page returns complete HTML and real links, and page turn marks are no longer considered as inclusion signals. The control means three things - fixed pagination parameters, hanging the entry text into a crawlable link, and supplementing the deep content with site maps and anchor text, rather than expanding the page numbers infinitely.

2026-11-01

Only two of the top ten sources cited by the three AI engines overlap, do we need to prepare the content separately according to the engine?

There are only two sources of median overlap among the top ten references of three engines, which means that the domains selected by each search pool are different, and it is not the same problem that has been split into three sets of requirements. Copying pages by engine will make the internal signals thin, and it is more cost-effective to write the same content into paragraphs that can be independently cited, accompanied by verifiable data and a clear site structure, and then monitor the citation results on a periodic basis.

2026-11-01

The form plugin is being used in the wild to plant backdoors, and it is still necessary to check which places after the upgrade.

Installing the patch is just the first step to stop the bleeding. After the form plugin is exploited in the wild to implant a backdoor, it is necessary to check if there are any additional hidden entries in the administrator account, whether there are any forged files in the plugin directory, whether scripts have been written into the template and text, and then fill in the robot verification for the form and message entry, and check if the backup is available.

2026-11-01

The average click-through rate of questions with AI overview has dropped by about 20%, what other indicators can be attributed to

The average click-through rate dropped by about 20%, coming from the mean comparison of ten thousand-level keyword samples, which is the relative difference between the baseline with overview and without overview, and cannot be taken as the decline of a single site directly. Single-site attribution is more suitable for viewing the traffic of brand words and non-informational intent, the conversion process after entering the site, and the structural changes after retaining the control period, with the click-through rate itself only being one of the signals.

2026-11-01

Does a small site need to worry about crawling budget, what two numbers do the backend look at first?

The crawl budget usually only becomes a bottleneck on large websites or websites with high frequency updates, small stations should first clearly see the total number of daily crawl requests and the average response time in the search console, then deal with these three types of waste: broken links, redirect chains, and bulky site maps, and the real problem of most small stations is not the quota, but the inclusion and content.

2026-11-01

After the redesign changed the domain name, do we need to keep the redirection of the old address active?

The redirect after changing the domain name is not an obligation forever, but addresses that have received external backlinks or have stable traffic should be retained for a long time, usually at least one year before evaluation; after removing, the old address will directly return an error page, and the backlinks and weight will be cut off accordingly. The cleaning sequence is to do address mapping first, then cut the traffic, and finally batch replace the internal links within the site to avoid diluting the signal of multi-level redirect chains.

2026-11-01

Where is the difference in construction costs between static pages and dynamic sites, and who has higher post-maintenance costs?

The price range of static sites during the construction period is lower, while dynamic sites are expensive in terms of backend, database, and security patches; during the operation period, the situation is reversed, where the content update of static sites depends on technical intervention, and dynamic sites require continuous upgrades and backup work. Sites with frequent updates are more suitable for content systems with backend and scheduled publishing, separating the update actions from the development time.

2026-11-01