All human faces are unique, but there’s an instantly recognizable expression that comes over them when costs suddenly go up.
Eyes widen. Mouths open. Some people even go a little pale.
You don’t have to be a mind reader to see the wheels turning as they think back to their original purchase decision and try to figure out how they arrived at the number that’s now in front of them.
This is bad regardless of what you’re spending on, but it’s particularly alarming when you’re talking about the skyrocketing cost for a CMS that manages 10 to 20 websites.
A CMS is a necessary investment for any large enterprise, but the return on investment (ROI) should outdistance the ongoing financial outlay by an order of magnitude.
That doesn’t happen when, six months or less after signing a contract, you’re hit with API and bandwidth overages, additional security modules, and professional service fees you thought were included in the standard support tier.
There’s usually no going back at this point. Your CMS bill becomes a necessary evil because you have a large, distributed digital presence that relies on it.
There’s also no hiding the news. If you’re the one who made the original business case for choosing the CMS and presented licensing costs to a buying committee, your professional reputation is now on the line.
Here’s what to think about before you reach this point, and what to do if it’s already happened.
The five costs that don’t appear in the proposal
With some CMSes, licensing or subscription fees may represent less than a quarter of the total cost of ownership (TCO). Maintenance, additional infrastructure and spending on personnel such as developers can all escalate TCO far beyond the initial estimate when a contract was signed. One research firm found choosing the wrong CMS can cost more than $2 million in replatforming.
Some of the most common pitfalls include:
Integrations
Some CMSes were not designed to deliver everything a large enterprise wants out of the box. Some will require brands to connect a separate analytics platform or a commerce tool. Personalization applications, digital asset management (DAM) solutions, and other tools can easily make your CMS bill bigger. It means your team not only has to integrate them with the platform but also take the time to build and test.
Headcount
While AI is taking on many tasks, you still need knowledgeable people to implement and continue to maintain a CMS over time. Those involved could include solution architects, QA staff, third-party agencies and consultants, as well as internal developers.
Full-time salaries and retainers can vary widely, but assuming you need to be competitive with the rest of the market, your CMS suddenly looks much more expensive to run. Employee turnover can exacerbate these costs because people often walk away with invaluable knowledge that requires retraining.
Additional modules
You may have a solid baseline of your core CMS requirements when you initially select a platform, but business needs evolve. As you publish more content and begin drawing higher traffic, premium support becomes necessary to support debugging, deep troubleshooting, resolving plugin conflicts, and performance optimizations.
Then you realize you need to add advanced workflow and governance modules to assign permissions based on roles, create content variations to drive personalization, and support localization and translation. This could lead to API overages that weren’t accounted for in your subscription plan.
Tech debt
You’re never starting a CMS deployment with a blank slate. Migrations can expose integration issues, data cleanup problems, and security vulnerabilities that all need to be addressed. There might be some workarounds, but they tend to be short-term fixes compared with a more thorough retrofit.
Tech debt can also take the form of too many tools in the stack that need paring down. All of this can create expensive delays in moving CMS projects forward and increase the pressure on overworked employees.
Version upgrades
A CMS should be continuously improving with new features and capabilities, but not all providers make it easy to upgrade to the latest version. You may have to adjust content models, perform extensive regression testing, double-check the integration work already done (or even redo it), and retrain staff. None of this is free in terms of labor.
Why having 20+ sites changes the math
Large enterprises rarely support a single website. They are running global, multi-brand programs, which means their CMS usage will likely scale significantly once a platform is initially deployed.
During the contract negotiation phase, it’s common to see infrastructure and hosting costs labeled as “included” in a cloud offer, but team and support costs can balloon as your company grows.
The variables not only include the number of sites and locales you’ll be supporting. You also need to consider the range of dev, stage, and production environments a multisite network entails. Scope out your likely needs around traffic/CDN, search and indexing, and what kind of customization your infrastructure may require.
You might go through a demo that looks at how a CMS works across one hypothetical site, but your contract should reflect your organization’s current reality and long-term business plan.
CMS questions to ask before signing (or renewing)
You can never be too thorough in your due diligence, whether it’s the moment you initially form a relationship with a CMS vendor or when the time comes to determine whether you want that relationship to continue. The questions below are by no means exhaustive, but could serve as a starting point for your discussions, both internally and with prospective providers.
For the team:
- What’s a reasonable estimate for the number of sites, brands, languages, and regions we’ll need to support over the next five years?
- What are our typical localization requirements based on previous growth, and could that become more complex as we continue to expand?
- How much of our tech stack may be reaching obsolescence and will be retired within one to two years?
- What’s the scope of access required across the business today outside of the marketing/content team, and how is that likely to evolve?
- What are our current priorities/needs around personalization and the use of additional channels, and to what extent is that changing based on our strategic planning?
- How many internal FTEs will we need to administer a CMS platform, and how does scaling our network of sites affect that?
- What’s our degree of internal expertise and knowledge to maintain, customize, and further develop our sites, and to what extent should we be planning on consultants and agency partners?
- What additional regulatory compliance requirements do we foresee that may affect how we operate our sites and retain data?
For the CMS vendor
- How do factors such as number of sites, traffic, number of users, storage requirements, content volume, API calls, and locales affect the total pricing?
- What additional modules or add-ons do similar organizations usually require following the first year of deployment?
- To what extent are workflows, integrations, content types, and templates included as part of your integration services, and how is this priced out?
- Do we need to upgrade our plan for any overages? Which are charged automatically?
- What’s the typical price increase you have charged similar clients at contract renewal over the past two years?
- What are the typical costs your clients encounter when they move into a new environment or region? What about when a new regulatory compliance requirement arises?
- How much customization does your platform typically require as business needs change, and what is the best way to calculate the cost of any additional services we might need?
- How do support response times vary by subscription plan or tier?
- How much time and labor should we estimate to support major platform releases or upgrades?
- What fees are associated with contract termination, including any data export fees?
Beyond getting answers to any or all of the above, try to create a five-year model of your projected usage growth and how it might escalate your subscription or plan costs. This model should be reviewed and updated six months prior to contract renewal so you can be prepared for discussions with your partner and, more importantly, any internal stakeholders who need to provide buy-in.
The art of future-proofing at a reasonable price point
There’s a big difference between a static cost problem and a compounding cost problem. Your overall expense may be higher than expected because the urgency to have a CMS in place outweighed the need to plan for how that investment might change over the years.
If that’s the case, there is still time to right-set or optimize your cost structure while continuing to deliver the content experience your customers need and expect. The effort to make expense management a core discipline is worth every penny.
