Decoupled Drupal TCO Calculator
See what you'd save moving from monolith Drupal hosting to decoupled Drupal + Vercel or Netlify. Real 2026 prices, no marketing math.
Monolith Drupal
Headless Drupal + Vercel
Three structural reasons decoupled costs less.
Smaller backend
Traditional Drupal renders every page on every request — that needs CPU. A decoupled Drupal backend just serves cached JSON. The same workload runs on a tier 2-4 sizes smaller.
Cheap frontend hosting
Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages have generous free and low-cost tiers. A static or ISR frontend serving 100k page views a month often runs on $0. The same traffic hits Drupal's API a fraction as often thanks to caching.
Larger talent pool
There are roughly 60× more React developers than Drupal developers worldwide. That means faster hiring, shorter ramp times, and less retention risk. Not cheaper per dev — easier to replace when they leave.
The global developer pool is lopsided.
Assumptions, transparently.
These are 2026 list prices from the major managed-Drupal providers (Pantheon, Acquia, Platform.sh), averaged and rounded. Self-hosted setups on DigitalOcean, Hetzner, or AWS can come in lower but require DevOps work we haven't priced in.
Traditional Drupal tiers assume a standard monolith setup where Drupal renders HTML for every request. Cache layers (Varnish, Redis) are included but the app still needs enough CPU to serve the tail.
Decoupled Drupal backend tiers assume the same content volume but an API-only workload. Because the frontend caches aggressively (ISR, static, CDN), the Drupal backend only sees a fraction of the visitor traffic. A "Medium" traditional site often fits on a "Small" decoupled backend.
Frontend hosting uses realistic Vercel Pro pricing for the mid and large tiers. Small sites often fit in the free tier. Enterprise tiers include Vercel Enterprise or Netlify Enterprise with custom SLAs.
What's NOT in these numbers:
- One-time migration engineering cost (varies from $30k for a small site to $500k+ for enterprise — see our migration playbook).
- Ongoing engineering and maintenance labor (typically similar between the two approaches, though decoupled projects tend to distribute labor across a larger, more replaceable React team).
- Managed service fees from your existing provider (some Drupal hosts charge more for dedicated support contracts).
- Third-party integrations that don't change between architectures (analytics, CRM, search, etc.).
Bottom line: the hosting savings are real but they're rarely the biggest factor in a decoupling decision. The real wins are developer velocity, frontend performance, and the ability to iterate on the frontend without touching the CMS. The hosting savings just make the business case easier to approve.
Want an audit of your real costs?
Tell us about your current Drupal hosting setup and we'll give you a concrete decoupled-vs-traditional comparison — with real numbers, not tier averages.
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