Webflow to Astro: Why Designers Are Making the Switch in 2026

On May 13, 2026, Webflow announced a pricing update that merged its two most popular site plans, raised prices across the board, and quietly cut the bandwidth that former Business-plan sites had been getting. For a single site the new numbers are survivable. For freelancers and agencies paying per site, they compound - and the community reaction was immediate, with the busiest thread on the Webflow subreddit asking a simple question: what is everyone switching to?

This post is for the designers and site owners asking that question. We will look at exactly what changed, why the answer for content and marketing sites is increasingly Astro, what you give up when you leave a visual-first platform, and how to make the move without losing your design or your rankings.

What actually changed in May 2026

The facts, without the spin:

Change	Before	After
CMS plan	$23/mo	Merged into Premium at $25/mo (yearly) or $39/mo (monthly)
Business plan	$39/mo, 100GB bandwidth	Merged into Premium, 50GB bandwidth included
Basic plan	$14/mo	$15/mo yearly, $25/mo monthly
CMS limits	Per-plan, with paid add-ons	20,000 items and 40 collections on Premium
Team plan	-	New, at $2,500/mo

New purchases got the new pricing on day one. Most existing sites moved to it at their first renewal on or after June 29, 2026, with Freelancer and Agency Workspace sites following on November 16, 2026.

Some of this is genuinely simpler - the CMS item add-ons are gone because Premium’s limits are higher. But if you were on the CMS plan billed monthly, your effective price jumped meaningfully. If you were on Business, your included bandwidth was halved, and the first bandwidth add-on runs another $20 per month. And if you manage five or ten client sites, every one of those deltas multiplies.

The real problem is not one price hike

Here is the uncomfortable math of any hosted site builder: you never stop paying, and you do not own the result.

A Premium site at $25 per month is $300 a year, $900 over three years - for one site. An agency with eight client sites on that plan is carrying $2,400 a year in platform fees before hosting a single byte of anything unusual. And the price is not under your control. It was $23, now it is $25; the platform decides, and your options are to absorb it, pass it to clients, or leave.

Leaving is the hard part, by design. Your site lives inside the platform. The code export is a static snapshot - no CMS, no forms, markup you would not want to maintain - so in practice the switching cost stays high enough that most people just keep paying. That is the business model, and it is a perfectly legal one. It is also exactly what a growing number of designers decided in 2026 they were done funding.

Why Astro is where site owners land

Astro is an open-source framework that compiles your site to static HTML with little or no JavaScript by default. For the kind of sites most people build in Webflow - marketing sites, portfolios, agency sites, blogs, landing pages - it flips every term of the deal:

You own the code. An Astro site is a folder of files in your own Git repository. No plan changes can reach it. If a host raises prices, you deploy the same folder somewhere else in an afternoon.

Hosting is free or nearly free. Static output runs comfortably on the free tiers of Cloudflare Pages, Netlify and Vercel. The $300-per-year-per-site line item simply disappears. Our Cloudflare deployment guide walks through the setup in a few minutes.

Performance is the default, not a tier. There is no bandwidth meter and no speed upsell. Astro ships finished HTML, which is why static Astro sites routinely sit near the top of Core Web Vitals - and why Astro is genuinely good for SEO.

The CMS is yours too. Blog posts and case studies live as Markdown in content collections - plain files you can edit anywhere, version in Git, and take with you forever. No item limits, no collection caps.

No renewal anxiety. A one-time theme purchase plus free hosting means the recurring cost of running the site rounds to zero. Compare that with any per-month platform over a three-year horizon and the gap is not subtle.

What you give up - and what closes the gap

Honesty matters here: Webflow’s visual designer is excellent, and Astro does not ship one. If your daily workflow is visually designing novel layouts from a blank canvas, that is a real loss. Three things close most of the gap for everyone else:

1. Start from a finished theme, not a blank page. The blank-canvas problem disappears if the design is already done. A production-ready Astro theme gives you the layouts, sections, responsive behavior and dark mode - you change content and colors instead of drawing boxes.
2. Visual editing exists for Astro. The AeroLaunch builder lets you open a theme, click text and images to edit them in place, reorder sections, and export a real Astro project you own. For the “client needs to tweak the headline” workflow, this is the piece people assume they will miss. Our guide to no-code Astro builders covers the wider landscape.
3. A CMS when you need one. For clients who want a dashboard, a free Git-based CMS bolts onto content collections and gives editors a form-style interface, while the site itself stays static and yours.

How to move a site from Webflow to Astro

The migration is less dramatic than it sounds. The playbook mirrors the one we use for WordPress migrations:

1. Inventory the site. List every page, every CMS collection, every form, and every URL. The URL list becomes your redirect map.
2. Keep the design reference. Your live Webflow site and its code export are the spec. You are not asking “what should this look like” - it already looks right.
3. Rebuild on a theme or components. Pick an Astro theme close to your structure and restyle it, or rebuild your sections as Astro components if the design is custom. This is the bulk of the work.
4. Move the content. CMS collections become content collections: each blog post or case study becomes a Markdown file with frontmatter. This is mechanical and scriptable via Webflow’s CSV export or API.
5. Rewire the dynamic bits. Forms move to a form service (most Astro themes ship with provider-switched forms), search to a static search library, and anything else to a focused tool.
6. Preserve SEO. Keep slugs where you can, add 301 redirects where you cannot, carry over titles and meta descriptions, then resubmit your sitemap in Search Console.
7. Deploy free. Push to Git, connect Cloudflare Pages, point your domain, and cancel the plan at renewal - not before you have verified the new site.

What about Framer, or WordPress?

Both come up in every “leaving Webflow” thread, so briefly:

Framer is the most common landing spot for designers - and it is the same deal with a different logo. A monthly fee per site, your site living inside a platform, and pricing you do not control. If the May announcement bothered you on principle, Framer resets the clock rather than solving the problem.

WordPress does give you ownership, and we have compared it head-to-head with Astro. The short version: you take on PHP hosting, a database, plugin updates and a real security surface to get it. For a content site that was living happily in Webflow, that is more machinery than the job needs.

Astro is the option that keeps the ownership and skips the machinery.

The bottom line

Webflow is still a superb design tool, and if the visual designer is your craft, the new pricing may simply be the cost of your workflow. But if what you actually need is a fast, professional site - or ten of them, for clients - the May 2026 update is a good moment to notice that the rent went up on something you could own.

The fastest exit ramp: pick a theme that fits, move your content, deploy it free, and keep the difference every month after that. If you would rather edit visually than touch code, the builder has you covered.