Changes to Craft CMS and Craft Commerce Editions, Licensing and Pricing

With Craft CMS 5 now well in beta, and expected to launch around the end of March, there have been some announcements on changes to some of the Craft CMS editions and licensing, including a price increase on new licences.

Dropping Commerce Lite

Craft Commerce 5 Beta is right around the corner, which delivers on two of the most-requested Commerce features ever: multi-store (multi-currency) and multi-warehouse inventory management. In addition, there'll also be improved GraphQL support, statistical insights, and reporting planned for future 5.x releases.

With these advances to Commerce Pro, the Craft team have decided to retire the Commerce Lite edition. Originally designed for typically smaller and simpler storefronts, the number of Commerce Lite instances has declined, with the Shopify plugin likely to be a more effective solution.

The good news? Commerce Pro from version 4.5 has been released as a single-edition plugin and all previous Lite licenses have been upgraded automatically. However, this will mean they will be subject to the higher priced Commerce Pro edition license fees going forwards.

Stronger license enforcement

Craft 4.8 introduces stronger Craft and plugin license enforcement, with a new full-page control panel takeover screen that will show up when licensing issues are detected on production installs.

Previously a red warning bar across the top of the control panel that had the potential to be ignored, this splash page will force corrective action on plugins that have been installed in a Craft version without the correct renewals in place.

To avoid being a complete nuisance however in case you're waiting for purchase orders or approvals, the screen will only appear once per day, and each day will require a longer waiting period before access to the control panel is restored.

The Craft team are keen to point out however that this is only a control panel-only change. Craft will never do anything to affect the front-end of your site over licensing issues.

Pricing increases

Finally, it's been announced that Craft CMS and Craft Commerce license and renewal prices will increase on 26 March 2024.

New Craft CMS licenses will cost $399, and renewals will cost $99. That's an increase of $100 on the initial license and a $40 increase on the renewal.

The exciting new features in Craft Commerce mean the Commerce Pro licenses will cost $1,199 from $999, and renewals will increase by $100 to $299.