EmDash vs Sanity
Sanity charges $15 per seat per month on Growth and meters documents, API requests, assets and bandwidth on top of that. EmDash stores content in the same Portable Text format, on your own server, for a flat $7/mo.
EmDash vs Sanity: The Verdict
Sanity has the better free tier and, for a solo project, the better price: 20 seats, 10,000 documents and a hosted global CDN for $0, which a $7/mo pod cannot beat. Say that plainly. The comparison changes the moment you become a team or cross a quota. Growth is $15 per seat per month, and above it sit documents at $299 for 50k, extra API requests at $1 per 25k, bandwidth at $0.30 per GB, and a second dataset at $999 a month. EmDash is flat: $7/mo on InstaPods, unlimited editors, and nothing counting your documents or your traffic. The two share a real technical asset, which is Portable Text - the same structured content format on both sides, so this is a swap rather than a rewrite. What you give up is significant and worth naming: Sanity Studio is a mature, genuinely excellent editor with real-time collaborative editing and a plugin ecosystem, and EmDash is a beta preview shipping roughly weekly.
Last updated: 2026-09-01Quick Comparison
| Feature | Sanity | EmDash |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per seat, plus usage meters | Per pod. Flat |
| Free tier | Yes: 20 seats, 10k documents, 2 public datasets | No free tier. $7/mo from day one |
| Paid tier | Growth, $15 per seat / month, up to 50 seats | $7/mo flat, unlimited editors |
| Cost of a 4-person team | $60/mo, or $720/yr, before any overage | $84/yr |
| Documents | 10k on Free, 25k on Growth, then $299 for 50k in total | Unmetered. Whatever fits in 25 GB of SQLite |
| API requests | 250k/mo, then $1 per 25k. CDN requests 1M/mo, then $1 per 250k | Unmetered |
| Bandwidth and assets | 100 GB each, then $0.30/GB bandwidth and $0.50/GB assets | Unlimited bandwidth, 25 GB of disk |
| A second dataset | $999 per extra dataset per month on Growth | Run a second pod for another $7/mo |
| Dedicated support | $799/mo add-on on Growth | Community for the software, InstaPods for the hosting |
| Content format | Portable Text | Portable Text. The same format |
| Schema definition | Code, versioned in your repo | Visual schema builder in the admin UI, backed by real SQL tables |
| Editor | Sanity Studio: real-time multiplayer, mature plugin ecosystem | Built-in admin panel. Younger, no ecosystem of that size |
| Draft history | 3 days on Free, 90 days on Growth, 365 on Enterprise | Content versioning in your own database, plus daily pod backups |
| Where content lives | Sanity Content Lake | SQLite on a pod you own |
| Front end | Headless. Bring your own framework | Ships an Astro site, plus a REST API if you want it headless |
| Maturity | Production-proven, SOC 2, hosted CDN | Beta preview, releasing roughly weekly |
| License | Managed platform (Studio itself is open source) | MIT, about 12,000 GitHub stars |
Where Sanity Gets Expensive
Trade-offs to weigh before committing.
The Seat Meter Starts at Two People
Growth is $15 per seat per month. Four editors is $720 a year, ten is $1,800, and the product does not change as you add people. EmDash charges for a server, so the fifth editor costs nothing.
Four Separate Usage Meters
Documents, API requests, CDN requests, assets and bandwidth are each counted, each capped, and each billed past the cap: $1 per 25k API requests, $1 per 250k CDN requests, $0.50 per GB of assets, $0.30 per GB of bandwidth. Growth includes the same 100 GB of bandwidth as Free.
A Second Dataset Costs $999 a Month
Both Free and Growth include 2 datasets. Extra ones are a $999 per dataset per month add-on. If you wanted a separate space for a second site or a staging environment, that one line is more than a hundred times a $7 pod.
Documents Are Capped Before They Are Priced
Growth includes 25,000 documents. Going past that is not per-document: it is a $299 a month add-on that lifts you to 50,000 in total. A large content archive hits a step, not a slope.
Why Self-Host with EmDash?
What you get when you pick this stack.
The Same Content Format, No Meters
EmDash stores rich text as Portable Text, exactly like Sanity. You keep the structured-content model you came for and drop the counters: no document cap, no request cap, no bandwidth bill.
Unlimited Editors on One Pod
There is no seat concept to buy. A ten-person team pays the same $7/mo as one person, because the price is attached to the server rather than to headcount.
Schemas From the Admin UI
Sanity schemas live in code and ship with a deploy. EmDash defines content types in the database through a visual schema builder, and each collection becomes a real SQL table developers can generate TypeScript types from.
Content in a File You Own
Everything sits in an embedded SQLite database on your pod, inside your daily backups and reachable over SSH. No Content Lake, no export request, no retention tier deciding how much history you keep.
Real Cost Comparison
A four-person content team running one site with a growing archive, past the free tier.
- Sanity Growth: $15 per seat/mo x 4 seats = $60/mo
- Past 25,000 documents: +$299/mo for the 50k allowance
- A separate dataset for staging: +$999/mo
- Bandwidth past 100 GB/mo: $0.30 per additional GB
- InstaPods Build plan: $7/mo
- EmDash: free (open source, MIT)
- Unlimited editors, documents, requests and bandwidth
- A staging pod, if you want one: another $7/mo
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Sanity cost in 2026?
Sanity publishes three plans. Free is $0 forever with up to 20 user seats, 2 roles, 2 public datasets, 10,000 documents, 1M CDN requests and 250k API requests a month, and 100 GB each of assets and bandwidth. Growth is $15 per seat per month for up to 50 seats, 5 roles, 25,000 documents and private datasets, with pay-as-you-go overages: $1 per 250k CDN requests, $1 per 25k API requests, $0.50 per GB of assets and $0.30 per GB of bandwidth. Add-ons on Growth are $299/mo for a 50k document allowance, $999/mo per extra dataset and $799/mo for dedicated support. Enterprise is quote-only. Verified on sanity.io/pricing on 2026-09-01.
Is Sanity ever cheaper than self-hosting EmDash?
Yes, and it is worth being straight about it. A solo developer or a small team inside the free tier pays Sanity nothing and gets a hosted global CDN with it, where EmDash costs $7 a month on a pod you also have to keep an eye on. Sanity Free is the better deal until you cross a quota or add paying seats. The flip happens around two or three editors, or the first time a document, dataset or bandwidth cap turns into an add-on.
Do EmDash and Sanity use the same content format?
Both store rich text as Portable Text, the open structured JSON format Sanity created. That is unusually convenient for a migration: your blocks, marks and custom types map across rather than needing to be re-authored, and any rendering code you wrote against Portable Text keeps working. The schema definitions do not carry over, because Sanity schemas live in code and EmDash defines content types in the database.
What do I give up by leaving Sanity?
Three real things. Sanity Studio is a mature editor with real-time multiplayer editing, comments, tasks and a large plugin ecosystem, and EmDash is a much younger admin panel. The Content Lake is a hosted, globally distributed API with an SLA behind it, and a single pod is not. And Sanity is production-proven with SOC 2 compliance, where EmDash describes itself as a beta preview shipping roughly weekly. What you get back is a flat bill, unlimited editors and your content in a file you own.
What does EmDash cost to host?
$7/mo on the InstaPods Build plan: 2 vCPUs, 2 GB RAM, 25 GB of storage, HTTPS, a custom domain, unlimited bandwidth, SSH and daily backups. Build is the floor rather than an upsell, because updating EmDash rebuilds the Astro site in place and that build runs out of memory on a 512MB pod. New accounts get a $10 credit when they add a card.
Can I run a staging environment?
Run a second pod. That is another $7 a month, so a production plus staging pair is $14/mo or $168 a year. On Sanity the equivalent is a second dataset, which is a $999 per dataset per month add-on on Growth, or you share the two datasets your plan already includes.
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