Finding the best free headless CMS for a Next.js project in 2026 is harder than it looks. Every vendor buries the real limits — API call caps, seat restrictions, bandwidth ceilings — in a pricing footnote. This post cuts through that: five CMS options, free tier only, honest about what breaks first.
What free actually means across these five CMS options
Before the comparison: there are two categories of "free" here. Managed SaaS free tiers (Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok) give you a hosted service with hard caps. Self-hosted open source (Payload, Strapi) are free in licence cost but you pay for the server, Postgres, backups, and your own time. Neither is bad — they suit different project shapes.
Sanity free tier (2026)
Sanity's free plan is called the Free plan. As of mid-2026 the headline numbers are: 3 users, 2 datasets, 500k API requests/month, 5 GB asset storage, 1 GB bandwidth/month, and 10k non-CDN API requests included in that 500k cap.
