As 2024 comes to a close, it's once again time to reflect on the past year. It’s been another packed year, and it’s great to look back at everything we achieved, day by day.
Want to take a walk down memory lane? Here are previous editions: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020.
Alright, let’s dive into the highlights and celebrate how far we’ve come! ✨
Breaking records: €6 million in revenue! 🌟
This year, we hit an incredible milestone: €6 million in revenue! That’s a solid 30% year-over-year growth, a testament to the steady momentum we’ve built over time. Ten years ago, when the first lines of DatoCMS code were written, this achievement would have seemed simply unimaginable.
But beyond the numbers, what fills us with pride is how we've reached this point — maintaining our independence and staying focused on what truly matters for us and our customers, ignoring trends, vanity, and grandiose ambitions. What’s remarkable isn’t just the number — it’s the context. The headless CMS space has matured, moving past the hype into a phase of grounded utility. And yet, here we are, thriving. This proves one thing: we’re not just surviving — we’re here to stay.
This year, with our usual composure and without too much fanfare, DatoCMS powered ~2 billion API calls per month (+60%), managed a total of 7PB of asset traffic (+30%), and delivered 4M hours of video streaming (+181%).
We also managed +2,000 support requests, resolving over 60% of them within 8 hours — and that includes free users.
These figures really are a testament to what’s possible with a small, humble team of laser-focused individuals — dispelling the myth that success demands sprawling teams and endless VC funding.
Achievements and Highlights
ISO 27001 Certification 🔒
In 2024, we earned our ISO 27001 certification, a badge of honor that underscores our commitment to security and reliability. It’s more than just a certificate; it’s a reflection of the rigorous standards we’ve implemented to safeguard customer data. Plus, it makes enterprise contracts a smoother ride for everyone involved.
Expanding resources: Academy, User Guides, Glossary 📚
We have always believed in empowering all our users, not just developers. This year, Ronak introduced a ton of new resources such as the Academy, User Guides, and Glossary — featuring tens of hours of content aimed at making DatoCMS more accessible for content creators and editors.
My favourite content? The lo-fi break videos! 😂 Jokes aside, we really hope these tools can help bridge the gap, ensuring that everyone can fully unlock the platform’s potential.
Project Starters, reimagined 🛠️
Developers weren’t left out either. We reorganized and enhanced our Project Starters, dividing them into:
Starter Kits: Minimal scaffolds for integrating DatoCMS with frameworks like Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, and SvelteKit and kickstart your custom website right away.
Full-Fledged Starters: pre-built Ecommerce and Marketing Website projects to see all of DatoCMS's features in a realistic production-ready setup, with many example content types, and advanced features.
This clear distinction in purpose for different people's needs is already helping a lot, and the ongoing effort of always keeping these repos updated has been dramatically simplified.
A better product discovery experience ✨
This year marked the launch of try.datocms.com — the best way to explore DatoCMS without registration. This interactive experience includes the full product, plus video tutorials, and a live demo website that instantly reacts to content changes. The average boot time is below 10 seconds.
Since its launch 5 months ago, it has already been used more than 3,000 times, and we hope it continues to allow users to quickly grasp the capabilities of our platform, removing barriers and making discovery effortless.
Revamping our website: from Next.js to Astro 🚀
In the last quarter of 2024, we also managed to completely rewrite our website, transitioning from Next.js to Astro. The result? A faster, more streamlined site that better embodies our vision of what a good content-driven website should look like.
Throughout this process, we've discovered a ton valuable insights that we've decided to share on our blog for others to benefit from. The ongoing series starts from this first article!
Focusing on you 🫵
Of course, the highlight that hits closest to our hearts is the incredible work that you all have been doing — our users, customers, and partners.
In the last twelve months, our official Agency Partner Network literally doubled from 82 to 158 — an achievement that reflects the daily support we provide on both sales and technical fronts, always delivered with the human touch we value so much.
Also the number of showcased projects more than doubled, prompting us to launch the Agency Projects Showcase: a dedicated page gathering the stunning projects agencies are creating with DatoCMS. From ecommerce to gaming, fintech to entertainment, luxury, tourism, fashion, sports, and beyond — there’s no industry untouched by their creativity and technical expertise.
This growing momentum also inspired Ronak and Matteo Papadopoulos to set up some casual chats that highlight the work put into these projects beyond just the "generic case study stats". These friendly conversations bring together agencies, customers, or both, to share ideas, challenges, and successes.
It's all about fostering connections, learning, and showcasing what makes the headless stack a new welcome standard. And from dreipol's 3D texture generation to Trip To Japan's personal travel itinerary builder, we continue to be amazed by the creativity in building stunning frontends.
Game-changing features 🌟
This year, we delivered many major features we’ve long envisioned, alongside countless smaller enhancements that elevate every aspect of our platform.
It is also important to emphasize that our user research initiative, led by Matteo Balocco, played a pivotal role in organically identifying user needs and validating potential solutions — a challenging but essential process. Insights from this research have directly influenced several key areas, including discoverability, reuse, and content organization, which were central to our recent development cycles.
Here are some of the standout innovations developed by our (it's funny to think about it) 3½-person dev team:
Schema Interface Makeover: Our content modeling interface got a fresh redesign with new features like drag-and-drop organization, quick search, and emoji icons — making schema management more intuitive than ever.
Expanded Modular Content: We introduced Single Block and Frameless modes, giving new life to modular content. Single Block simplifies content management by allowing specific block limitations, while Frameless mode enables seamless field sharing across models — a game-changer for consistent content structure.
Media Optimization Made Easy: We improved media handling with automatic image optimization and new video components. Images now automatically compress and optimize using our DatoCMS Preset (achieving perfect Lighthouse scores!), while new framework-specific video components make it effortless to integrate Mux-powered streaming.
Improved Video Management: We enhanced our video capabilities with support for 4K streaming (available for Enterprise plans), improved subtitle management including auto-generated captions with editing capabilities, and support for SRT/VTT subtitle uploads and alternate audio track support in various formats.
Data Usage Dashboard: We introduced comprehensive usage monitoring and forecasting tools, allowing users to track bandwidth, API calls, and video streaming across projects. The new dashboard provides detailed analytics, usage predictions, and alerts to help manage resources effectively and prevent overages.
Cache Tags: A groundbreaking feature that enables surgical page regeneration on content changes. This sophisticated caching system automatically manages invalidation, dramatically improves performance, and reduces hosting costs by ensuring only affected pages are regenerated. With zero configuration required, projects of any size can now leverage enterprise-grade caching strategies that previously required complex implementations.
Asset Collections: A major enhancement to media management that introduces folder-like collections and sub-collections in the media area. Assets can be organized through drag-and-drop or bulk actions, making it easier than ever to maintain a structured media library. Collections behave like traditional folders, allowing for nested organization while ensuring each asset belongs to a single collection for clear categorization.
...but that's just the tip of the iceberg. As every year, we have worked on a mountain of small improvements and adjustments, such as better management of webhooks, a new SDK for Astro, new hooks for DatoCMS plugins, an improved Structured Text editor, increased security for the GraphQL API, bulk actions for Modular Content... the list can go on and on. 😅
Team dynamics and growth 🌱
I'm thrilled to announce that Luca Bonfiglio, a long-time friend, has joined our team to oversee financial operations. His expertise is already making a significant impact, enhancing both our processes and long-term strategy.
This year also marks a notable milestone: for the first time in a decade, a few team members have decided to move on to pursue other opportunities — or, in some cases, the decision was mutual. While departures are never easy, they are a natural part of any organization's evolution. I see this as a healthy indicator of growth and change.
After carefully evaluating our options and considering new hires, we’ve decided to maintain our current team size. This decision reflects our belief that we can achieve great things with the talented people already on board. It’s also a reaffirmation of our core philosophy: expanding the team only when absolutely essential.
I’d also like to give special recognition to Marco Mezzavilla, who has been instrumental as an external contractor in developing our marketing website during 2024. His contributions have been very appreciated, and we’re definitely starting to consider him a part of the team!
Looking ahead: Strategic infrastructure evolution 🔧
Our total infrastructure costs for 2024 amount to approximately €850k, allocated between CDNs, server expenses, billing/transaction costs, and other minor suppliers.
The most substantial item is surely related to the various CDNs we use to provide our service (Cloudflare, Fastly, Imgix, Mux). We are actively working to create competition among the (few) available players and find optimizations. According to our estimates, in 2025 we should be able to reduce CDN costs by about €130k, a 30% decrease.
As for the server-related costs, from the very beginning, we strategically chose Heroku to outsource our infrastructure management. This allowed us to focus entirely on our product during the years of most uncertainty. While the decision has been incredibly beneficial, we think it's time to make a change.
Currently, our annual server costs for Heroku amount to about €200k, with an annual increase of at least 8%, thanks to the grotesque contracts Salesforce now requires enterprise clients to sign. With Heroku’s stagnation over the last decade, lack of innovation, poor support despite our enterprise contract, and their lack of transparency during downtimes, we feel they've really pushed their luck.
While switching to alternative PaaS providers would surely offer better pricing, during this year we followed with much interest Basecamp's complete exit from the cloud. The reasons underlying this choice surely resonated a lot with us: a stable SaaS business of our size should own their infrastructure, rather than continue renting it.
Initial estimates suggest that moving to physical servers would reduce our server and database costs to around €50,000 annually — an 80% savings in the short term, that would only grow over time. But the benefits don’t end there. This shift would give us the freedom to tailor our architecture to our specific needs, improving performance and reliability.
Additionally, the significant cost savings would allow us to revisit our pricing model, ultimately offering our customers more flexible and cost-effective options.
We’ve already begun preliminary experiments. We know this is a complex decision, but we also believe this is one of our top priorities for 2025, and we are committed to approaching it with the utmost seriousness and care.
Thank you! 🙏
As we close out 2024, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude to our customers, team members, and community. Your support and collaboration inspire us to keep striving for excellence, year after year. You are the reason we do what we do, and we couldn’t have achieved these milestones without you.
Here’s to a successful 2025 filled with innovation, growth, and continued collaboration.
Happy holidays, and we look forward to seeing you next year! 🎄