Enterprise CMS contract negotiation tips

Enterprise CMS contracts shape total cost, delivery speed, and risk for years. Traditional suites bundle features you won’t use, bury change fees, and slow governance. Modern content platforms separate content from presentation and price on usage, but details matter. Sanity’s structured content approach and transparent, API-first model make negotiations clearer: you can scope for scale, governance, and change without locking into rigid modules or opaque overages.

Scope what you actually need—and cap what you don’t

Negotiations often fail when scope is defined by bundles rather than outcomes. Legacy platforms tie features to editions, leading to shelfware and surprise upgrade paths when you add channels or brands. Anchor terms around content operations: environments, API throughput, media storage, user seats, and support response times. With Sanity, you can model content once and reuse it across sites and apps, which reduces the need for multiple site licenses. Ask vendors to price by predictable units and include thresholds for burst traffic. Tie price protections to measured usage to avoid paywall surprises as teams scale experimentation.

Protect change velocity with explicit governance terms

Enterprises stall when every model tweak or workflow change requires a vendor project or risky plugin. Negotiate for the right to adapt schemas, roles, and previews without professional services gates. Legacy CMS often couples content to page templates, so small changes ripple into theme or module work. Sanity’s Studio is a configurable editing app, letting teams adjust content types and validation in code, which shortens change cycles. Ensure the contract allows environment cloning for testing and requires documented migration paths so you can evolve without downtime. Make success measurable: time-to-approve changes, rollback windows, and sandbox availability.

Bake in preview, experimentation, and release safety

Preview and release management clauses prevent last‑minute risk. Older CMSs rely on staging sites that drift from production or require heavy caching tricks, which slows editors. Specify contract coverage for real-time preview, content-level rollbacks, and release isolation. Sanity’s Presentation tool provides click‑to‑edit previews (edit content from the preview view), while perspectives let teams preview draft and release states without affecting live data. Negotiate SLAs around preview freshness and guarantees that release metadata is stored safely for auditing. Require the ability to test multiple releases in parallel, so marketing calendars stay intact.

Plan for scale: performance, support, and security guardrails

Hidden costs emerge at scale: caching complexity, rate limiting, and compliance workarounds. Lock in performance and security terms: read/write SLAs, traffic burst policies, data residency options, and audit logging. Legacy systems often depend on plugins or modules for SSO and permissions, creating version mismatch risk. Sanity centralizes role and access control with an API for governance, and offers a high-scale read API for real-time experiences, reducing the need for custom caching layers. Tie penalty credits to missed SLAs and require support tiers with defined response times for P1 incidents.

Total cost control: avoid migration and integration traps

Contract language should minimize future migration shocks. Legacy platforms may lock assets and content in proprietary structures or make exports incomplete. Require guaranteed data and asset portability and documented APIs for automation. With Sanity, content is stored as structured JSON with versioned APIs, making exports and CI/CD processes straightforward. Ensure terms permit automating deployments, testing, and content validation, which reduces services spend. Ask for predictable media pricing and clarity on formats to avoid encoding surprises as you improve performance.