# Is Sanity free?

Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki · facts verified 25 October 2026 · canonical: https://deploi.ca/sanity/faq/is-sanity-free

## Short answer

Sanity is free to start: its Free plan costs $0 with no end date and includes 20 user seats, 10,000 documents and 2 public datasets ([Sanity pricing](https://www.sanity.io/pricing), October 2026). Private datasets and Editor roles start on Growth at $15 per seat a month. A Free project that hits a quota is blocked, not billed ([Sanity Docs](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/plans-and-payments), October 2026).

- **Free plan price:** $0, with no end date. Includes 20 user seats, 10,000 documents, 2 public datasets, and the Administrator and Viewer roles ([Sanity, Plans that scale with you](https://www.sanity.io/pricing); [Sanity Docs, Technical limits](https://www.sanity.io/docs/content-lake/technical-limits))
- **First paid feature teams need:** Private datasets and Editor roles, on Growth. Growth costs $15 per seat a month, billed monthly; Viewers are free on every plan ([Sanity, Plans that scale with you](https://www.sanity.io/pricing); [Sanity Docs, Roles](https://www.sanity.io/docs/user-guides/roles))
- **At a quota on Free:** Blocked with HTTP 402, not billed. Requests fail until 00:00 UTC on the 1st or an upgrade; Sanity Studio keeps working ([Sanity Docs, Plans and payments](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/plans-and-payments))
- **Open source:** Sanity Studio is MIT-licensed. The editor is open source; Content Lake, the hosted database behind it, is the service the plans meter ([Sanity, LICENSE (sanity-io/sanity on GitHub)](https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/blob/main/LICENSE); [Sanity, Plans that scale with you](https://www.sanity.io/pricing))

## Deploi's call

Sanity's Free plan is generous for building and testing, and the wrong place to launch a business site. Prototype on Free, then move to Growth before launch, because the hard quota block and the Administrator-only role model are risks a business shouldn't carry to save $15 a seat.

**YES: Free is enough while**

- One person, or a few trusted Administrators, edit the content.
- Everything in the dataset is meant to be public once published.
- The site can survive being blocked until the 1st if its request or bandwidth quota runs out.
- You're prototyping, learning Sanity, or running a personal or hobby site.

**NO: Plan for Growth when**

- Several editors need roles narrower than Administrator, because Free has only the Administrator and Viewer roles as of October 2026.
- Content has to stay private, or editors need Scheduled drafts, Comments or Tasks.
- A production site has to keep serving content past its monthly quota.

## What does Sanity's Free plan include in October 2026?

Sanity's Free plan includes 20 user seats, 10,000 documents, 2 public datasets and monthly quotas of 1 million API CDN (content delivery network) requests, 250,000 API (application programming interface) requests and 100 GB of bandwidth, for $0 ([Sanity pricing](https://www.sanity.io/pricing), October 2026). Every plan also gets Sanity Studio with free hosting, Visual Editing, the Presentation tool, real-time collaboration and GROQ (Graph-Relational Object Queries). Viewers don't use a seat on any plan.

The surprise is traffic: Growth includes the same requests, bandwidth and asset storage as Free, so it doesn't give you more traffic; it lets you pay to go past the quota.

**Free and Growth include the same traffic; Growth adds seats, private data and overage**

| Item | Free plan | Growth plan |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Price | $0 | $15 per seat a month, billed monthly |
| User seats | 20 | Up to 50 |
| Documents | 10,000 | 25,000, no overage |
| Datasets | 2, public only | 2, private or public |
| API CDN requests a month | 1 million | 1 million, then overage |
| API requests a month | 250,000 | 250,000, then overage |
| Bandwidth and asset storage | 100 GB each | 100 GB each, then overage |
| Usage past a quota | Blocked | Billed as overage, except documents |

Sources: [Sanity, Plans that scale with you](https://www.sanity.io/pricing); [Sanity Docs, Technical limits](https://www.sanity.io/docs/content-lake/technical-limits). As of 24 October 2026.

## What does the Free plan leave out?

The Free plan leaves out the controls a team uses to keep content private and editors in their lane. Sanity's pricing marks these as Growth or Enterprise only ([Sanity pricing](https://www.sanity.io/pricing), October 2026):

- Private datasets: Free datasets are public only.
- Roles beyond Administrator and Viewer: no Editor, Developer or Contributor.
- Comments, Tasks, Scheduled drafts and AI Assist.
- More than 3 days of draft change history, and the activity feed.
- Paying for overage instead of being blocked.

In our judgment, the role gap bites first. Sanity's Administrator role has read and write access to all datasets and full access to all project settings, and Viewer is read-only ([Sanity Docs, Roles](https://www.sanity.io/docs/user-guides/roles), October 2026). So on Free, everyone who edits content can also change the project's settings. Growth adds narrower roles and permissions: Editor, Developer and Contributor, and a Contributor writes drafts but can't publish.

A public dataset means anyone with the project ID can query its published documents without a token. Unauthenticated requests can't read drafts, and files in a dataset are public on the asset CDN (content delivery network) on every plan ([Keeping your data safe](https://www.sanity.io/docs/content-lake/keeping-your-data-safe), October 2026), so going private on Growth hides documents from unauthenticated queries, while any image or file stays fetchable by anyone who has its URL.

## What happens when a Free project hits its limits?

A Free project that reaches a quota is blocked, not billed, because Free allows no overage ([Sanity plans and payments](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/plans-and-payments), October 2026). Each quota fails differently:

- **Documents.** You can't create new documents, including new drafts, until you delete some or upgrade.
- **Assets.** You can't upload images or files; existing assets keep serving.
- **API, API CDN and bandwidth.** Every further request to the API (application programming interface) and its CDN (content delivery network) fails with HTTP 402 and the error `plan_limit_reached`, so your site stops loading Sanity content. Sanity Studio keeps working.

Sanity emails administrators at 80% and 100% of an API, API CDN or bandwidth quota. Those request quotas reset at 00:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) on the first day of the month ([Sanity plans and payments](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/plans-and-payments), October 2026).

The 1 million API CDN requests a month work out to about 33,000 a day over a 30-day month (Deploi arithmetic from the figures above). A traffic spike or a crawler late in the month can spend that and take a Free site's content offline until the 1st.

> **Free has no grace period**
>
> Upgrading to Growth turns on overage and unblocks requests immediately. Doing nothing leaves the site without content until 00:00 UTC on the 1st ([Sanity plans and payments](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/plans-and-payments), October 2026).

## When do teams outgrow Sanity's Free plan?

Teams outgrow Sanity's Free plan when the site becomes a business asset, not when they run out of documents. Five signals, in the order we'd check them:

1. More than one person edits, and not all of them should hold full Administrator rights.
1. Content must stay private after it's published, such as members-only or client-restricted material.
1. Editors need to schedule a publish, leave comments or assign tasks.
1. The site can't go dark mid-month, so you need overage billing instead of a hard block.
1. More than 20 people need seats.

In our judgment, 10,000 documents covers most marketing sites, so documents are rarely the trigger. A content hub is the exception: drafts count as documents, so a team writing in bulk reaches the cap sooner than the published count suggests ([Sanity plans and payments](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/plans-and-payments), October 2026). Growth raises the quota to 25,000 ([Sanity pricing](https://www.sanity.io/pricing), October 2026), and the Growth plan allows no document overage past that.

> **When not to stay on Free**
>
> - A production site with paying customers, because a quota block takes its content offline.
> - A team of editors, because every editor on Free is an Administrator.
> - Content that shouldn't be readable by anyone who finds the project ID.

## Is Sanity open source?

Sanity Studio is open source under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) License; the Content Lake that stores and serves your content runs only as Sanity's hosted service ([Sanity pricing](https://www.sanity.io/pricing) lists "Fully hosted infrastructure" on every plan, October 2026). Sanity's main repository on GitHub carries an MIT License, copyright 2016 to 2026 ([Sanity's LICENSE file](https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/blob/main/LICENSE), October 2026), and the pricing page lists an "Open Source editor built with React.js" on every plan ([Sanity pricing](https://www.sanity.io/pricing), October 2026).

That split decides what "free" means. You can change, fork and host Sanity Studio wherever you like, and Sanity hosts it at no charge on every plan with `sanity deploy`. Your content, though, lives in Content Lake, which Sanity runs as a hosted, real-time content database on every plan; the pricing page offers no self-hosted version. Free is a quota on that hosted service, and Growth and Enterprise sell more of it.

So "Sanity is open source" is true of the editor and misleading about the platform. A team that wants to own its database end to end should compare a self-hosted content management system (CMS). Whether Sanity counts as open source goes deeper on licenses and lock-in.

## What does Sanity cost after the Free plan?

Sanity costs $15 per seat a month on Growth, billed monthly by card with no minimum term, and Enterprise is custom pricing ([Sanity pricing](https://www.sanity.io/pricing), October 2026). Viewers are free, so you pay only for the people who edit.

Three routes cost less than list price:

- **Growth trial.** Every new project gets Growth features free for a limited period, with Free's usage limits. It falls back to Free when the trial ends, and Sanity charges nothing unless you upgrade ([Growth plan trial docs](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/growth-plan-trial), October 2026).
- **Startup Program.** One year of Growth free for startups with up to 20 employees and $5M in total funding, through Sanity's listed investor and incubator partners ([Sanity for Startups](https://www.sanity.io/startups), October 2026).
- **Non-profit plan.** Mirrors Growth for free within its quotas for eligible non-profits, with 25 users and 3 datasets ([Sanity's non-profit plan](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/non-profit-plan), October 2026).

> **How long is the trial?**
>
> Sanity's trial docs say only "a limited period of time" ([Growth plan trial docs](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/growth-plan-trial)). Sanity's startup page calls it "a 30 day free trial of the Growth plan" ([Sanity for Startups](https://www.sanity.io/startups), October 2026). Neither page settles it, so treat the length as unconfirmed until you see the end date on your own project.

## Deploi's point of view

**Where we disagree.** Most answers to 'is Sanity free' stop at the quotas and call Free generous. The quotas are rarely what ends Free: roles and public datasets are. The second mistake is calling Sanity open source without qualification. The Studio is MIT-licensed, but the Content Lake that holds your content is a hosted service metered by plan, and Growth includes no more traffic than Free; it only lets you pay to exceed it.

**What we'd tell you to do first.** Before launch, check three numbers in Manage: monthly API CDN requests against 1 million, API requests against 250,000, and how many people edit. If projected traffic passes 80% of either quota, or more than one person edits, start on Growth.

**What we refuse to promise.** Sanity doesn't publish how long the Growth trial lasts in its trial docs, and it changes plans from time to time. We won't promise a trial length or that today's Free quotas will hold; we check the pricing page on the day we scope a project.

## When this answer changes

- Sanity changes the Free plan's seats, documents or request quotas
- Sanity allows private datasets or Editor roles on Free
- Growth's included traffic quotas rise above Free's
- Sanity changes the Growth seat price
- Sanity Studio's MIT License changes

## Ready to work out what Sanity would cost you?

Contact us today to size the plan, seats and datasets your content model needs before you commit. [Contact us](https://deploi.ca/contact)

## Sources

1. [Sanity, Plans that scale with you](https://www.sanity.io/pricing), checked 24 October 2026
2. [Sanity Docs, Plans and payments](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/plans-and-payments), checked 24 October 2026
3. [Sanity Docs, Technical limits](https://www.sanity.io/docs/content-lake/technical-limits), checked 24 October 2026
4. [Sanity Docs, Keeping your data safe](https://www.sanity.io/docs/content-lake/keeping-your-data-safe), checked 24 October 2026
5. [Sanity, LICENSE (sanity-io/sanity on GitHub)](https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/blob/main/LICENSE), checked 24 October 2026
6. [Sanity Docs, Understanding the Growth plan trial](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/growth-plan-trial), checked 24 October 2026
7. [Sanity, Sanity for Startups](https://www.sanity.io/startups), checked 24 October 2026
8. [Sanity Docs, Sanity's non-profit plan](https://www.sanity.io/docs/platform-management/non-profit-plan), checked 24 October 2026
9. [Sanity Docs, Roles](https://www.sanity.io/docs/user-guides/roles), checked 24 October 2026