The Statamic price hike, and the quiet exit problem

On 1 May 2026, Statamic Pro went from $275 per site to $349, and the annual update fee climbed from $65 to $99. That is a real, and not insignificant, jump. If you run client sites on Statamic, you noticed. If you run a lot of them, you really noticed.

What is more interesting than the hike itself is the conversation around it. Most of what I have read since May has been some flavour of "is it still worth it" or "should I absorb the cost or pass it on". Almost nobody is asking the harder question, which is: if I wanted to leave, how would I actually do it.

There is a reason for that, and it is worth pulling apart.

The maths, plainly

The headline numbers look small until you stack them.

For a freelancer with three Statamic Pro sites, the licence increase alone is $222 the next time you stand up new sites, and an extra $102 a year in update fees on top of what you were already paying. Five sites takes that to $370 upfront and $170 a year. Ten sites is $740 upfront and $340 a year, every year, indefinitely.

None of those numbers are ruinous on their own. But they are not the kind of cost you can hide from a client who is paying you a fixed retainer, and they compound year on year. If your client list is small, or your margins are tight, or you took on a few sites cheap to get a foot in the door, this is the sort of change that quietly eats your day rate.

Craft Pro, for context, is roughly $399 per site with a $99 annual update fee. Before 1 May the gap between Statamic Pro and Craft Pro was about $124 per site. Now it is closer to $50. That gap is no longer a real reason to choose one over the other on price. Whatever you were paying the premium for, you are paying it without much premium any more.

Why everyone is debating staying, not leaving

There is a specific reason the leaver conversation has been so quiet, and it is not because Statamic users are uniquely loyal.

Statamic ships an official tool called Importer, which brings content into Statamic from other platforms. It is genuinely good. There is no equivalent tool that goes the other way. No official Exporter. That is a deliberate product decision, not an oversight, and it is the kind of decision every CMS vendor makes at some point when growth slows. You make it easy to come in, and you let the going out look after itself.

The result is that talking about leaving Statamic feels weirdly underpowered. There is no obvious tutorial. There is no canonical script. There is no Stack Overflow thread three years deep where someone has solved your case. So the conversation defaults to whether the new price is fair, because that is a conversation you can actually have.

It is worth saying clearly: the hike is a business decision, not a betrayal. Statamic is a small team building a real product, and they are entitled to charge what they think it is worth. None of this means you should leave. It just means the question of how you would, if you wanted to, deserves to be on the table. I have written before about how staying on the wrong platform is often riskier than the migration itself, and that argument applies here too.

Where Statamic leavers actually go, and the platform people forget

Look at the search data and the top "Statamic alternative" queries land on Sanity, Storyblok, Webflow, and WordPress. Each of those is a defensible choice for a different reason. Sanity for headless purists. Storyblok for marketing-heavy teams. Webflow for designers who want out of code entirely. WordPress for the obvious reason that it is WordPress.

The platform that almost never appears in those lists is Craft. Which is odd, because for anyone fluent in Laravel (the PHP framework that already underpins Statamic), Craft is the most natural fit on the shortlist.

Two things are worth knowing here. First, Statamic is a Laravel application. It runs on Laravel, you customise it with Laravel, and a lot of what makes you productive in Statamic is really Laravel knowledge dressed up. Second, Craft 6, due in Q4 2026, is also moving to Laravel as its underlying framework. So in a year's time, the two systems you might be choosing between will share the same foundation.

That matters more than it sounds. It means your Laravel skills carry across. It means your Eloquent-style instincts (the way Laravel talks to databases) work in both. It means the deployment story, the testing story, the queue story, are mostly the same story.

There are real differences, of course. Statamic is flat-file by default, which means content lives as YAML and Markdown files in your repository. Craft uses a database. That is a meaningful shift in how you think about content, version control, and backups. It is not necessarily worse, just different, and worth pricing in. For a deeper comparison of the two, I have written a full breakdown of Statamic against Craft.

Craft also gives you something Statamic does not always give you cleanly, which is full ownership of the data in a queryable form. Your content lives in tables you can read, dump, and migrate. That is a property you tend not to value until you need it.

Craft is not the right answer for everyone leaving Statamic. If your team is mostly designers, Webflow makes more sense. If you genuinely need a headless API as the product, Sanity or Storyblok will serve you better. But for the Laravel-fluent freelancer or small agency with a handful of Statamic sites, Craft is the underrated option that almost nobody is recommending out loud.

The real technical hurdle is Bard to Matrix

I should be honest about the friction, because pretending it is easy would be silly.

The hardest part of any Statamic to Craft migration is converting Bard fields into Matrix blocks. Bard is Statamic's rich-text editor: the field type that lets you mix paragraphs, images, headings, and custom embedded blocks inside a single content area. Matrix is Craft's equivalent: a structured field where each block is a different type with its own set of fields.

Conceptually they are similar. Both let an editor compose a page out of repeating, typed blocks. In practice the data shapes do not line up cleanly. Bard stores its content as a tree of nodes that mixes inline text with block-level structures. Matrix stores each block as a separate record with its own fields. To go from one to the other you need to walk the Bard tree, decide what counts as a block, decide how to handle inline images, links, and custom sets, and emit the right Craft model for each. Edge cases multiply quickly: nested blocks, custom Bard sets that have no Matrix equivalent yet, inline assets with metadata, the lot.

This is the bit nobody has solved cleanly, and it is the reason serious migration consulting for Statamic to Craft starts at £3,000 a site and runs to £15,000. That price is not theatre. A consultant doing it properly is hand-mapping fields, writing custom transformers, and testing against your actual content. For a single high-value site that is fine. For three small client sites that are each worth a few hundred pounds a year, the maths breaks.

There is currently no good middle ground. No self-serve migrator. No CLI you can point at a Statamic install and get a Craft project out the other side. The technical reason that gap exists is the Bard to Matrix conversion. The commercial reason is that the people who could build it are too busy doing the £3,000 to £15,000 jobs.

What to do this week

If you are sitting with Statamic sites and feeling the pinch, here is the calm version of the decision.

Stay if your sites are stable, your clients are happy, and the new prices still pencil out. Statamic is a good product and a price increase does not change that. Pass the cost on to clients on renewal where you can. Most clients understand a small increase tied to a vendor change. The ones who do not understand were probably going to be difficult about something else anyway.

Wait if you are Statamic-curious about Craft. Craft 6 in Q4 2026 changes the technical picture. Once both platforms share Laravel as their foundation, the migration story for the Laravel-fluent will be much friendlier than it is today. There is no rush to move now if you can absorb the next twelve months of pricing.

Switch only if you have a clear reason: a single site whose architecture has outgrown flat-file content, a client who wants a database-backed CMS for reporting, or a project where ownership of the data in a queryable form is a hard requirement. Pay for the migration properly if it is one site. Do not try to roll your own Bard to Matrix converter for three small sites unless you genuinely enjoy that kind of work, and have the time to do it right.

The one concrete step worth taking this week, regardless of which path you pick, is an export drill. Pick your most important Statamic site. Get every entry, every asset, and every field value out of it into a format you control: JSON, CSV, Markdown, whatever fits. Not because you are leaving, but because you should know that you can. A platform you cannot leave is a platform you do not really own your content on, and that is true at $275 a site, $349 a site, or any number that comes next.