Prismic price changes – migrate, mitigate, adapt

[kepae]

This month, Prismic announced a number of pricing changes set to come into effect January 8th, 2024. We don't use nearly all of the features on Prismic, but because we do use 3 locales, we would now be bumped into the "medium" tier plan at a whopping new price of $180/mo.

Per Prismic's price increase email:

Reason to upgrade: Exceeded the limit of Locales, in your plan New plan and new price: Medium $180 Per Month Consider upgrading in December to a Medium Yearly plan to get a 15% discount on the annual price (applied on January 8th).

We haven't set any billing for our usage, so we won't be automatically upgraded and charged on the date. However, the account will be frozen/locked until we upgrade:

What happens if I exceed one of the limits and I’m on a free plan?

If you exceed the free plan's limit of 4 million API calls, 2 locales, or 100GB of CDN bandwidth, you will receive an email notification advising you to upgrade your plan. If you do not upgrade within the following month and your usage continues to exceed any of these limits, your repository will be locked. This means the next time you attempt to log in, you will be prompted to upgrade your repository to regain access.

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Options

1. Migrate from Prismic to another headless CMS. We'll begin considering alternatives. Other people are frustrated and doing similarly.
2. Hack around the locales feature by dispatching on the locale in the code and requesting the proper document from Prismic. At first sight, this is unwieldy and still has us relying on Prismic. I wouldn't mind paying for a smaller plan, but I don't feel confident we should lock ourselves in this way.
3. Move back to using primarily MDX. This scales well, is still supported, and is open-source friendly – but gives up the wins we tried to have for editorial users with the headless CMS.

[lmcnulty]

I may be wrong, but as far as I can tell, the main benefit we got from moving to Prismic was the ability to add and edit content pages without making commits to the source repository. That does seem fairly essential to me, but I don't really understand the benefit to storing the content in another cloud platform rather than just another MongoDB collection, with on-site editing in a fancy Markdown editor like the one we use on the submit form.

[clari182]

@lmcnulty that could be an option yes. The use of Prismic was aimed to editors and creators so they wouldn't need us to upload content, and also when the AIID page was offered as a whitelabel, content could be added to Prismic easily. By content I mean, sidebar links, blog posts, landing page content, footer and header links, pages (about us, etc) and so on. Prismic (and other CMS) offer more options when creating content, which is not enough with only a Markdown editor.

To have content editable on our side (like an admin content editor), would require more development from our side than using an external tool. But I'm up for it if it's something that has more benefits than using an external CMS.

[cesarvarela]

My vote goes to something like option 2.

I am taking into account that this feature is rarely used.

[pdcp1]

Taking into consideration the advantages of using a CMS like Prismic for adding/editing content, I prefer to continue using Prismic and explore option 2.

[clari182]

@kepae Option 2 is already implemented actually. The different locale environments inside prismic are just there to make it more clear what document is in what language. But otherwise, each document already has a language field that is the one actually used in the code.

So in order to remove the "locale environments" what we need to do is:

• Move FR and ES documents to the EN environment. This is done by "Copying them into another locale".
• Remove locale environments FR and ES

After that we should be good to go with the free plan

[kepae]

That sounds good to me! Let's use this issue to track the development work.

It might also be good to tackle this first in hopes that it simplifies the migration:

• https://github.com/responsible-ai-collaborative/aiid/issues/2545

What do you think?

In addition – let's move to the smallest paid Prismic plan ("Starter") to get additional users – but not depend on the locales they give us with that. We need the additional users to share account burden and access. I'll discuss this with you on Slack.