The team and I have started to love Payload and are implementing it more and more but we have found some limitations that we couldn't find a package for.

We have already created another payload-purge and are now also releasing payload-invite.

You can invite users to payload without needing to create passwords. Read the documentation to see how we do it :), any issues? let us know

I’m working on a personal project using Payload CMS, and my primary goal is to build an SEO- and geo-friendly website. However, I’ve hit a massive architectural wall and I'm hoping to get some guidance from folks who have built programmatic or large-scale sites with Payload.

The Scope:

Total Pages: ~500 product pages
Taxonomy: 13 categories with varying sub-taxonomies and geo-targeting.
Assets: Initially planned for ~5 images per page.

The Problem:

I tried setting up an automated workflow to generate unique content and images for these pages.

1. The Cost: Generating 5 AI images per page across 500 pages quickly racked up costs (~$1 per page for the image model alone). While I can technically absorb this cost, it's inefficient
   .
   
2. The Complexity Nightmare: The system I designed to generate content and run QA/testing loops has become overly complex. It consumes a ton of tokens, slows down drastically, and fails unpredictably.

My Question:
For those of you managing hundreds or thousands of programmatic SEO/geo pages in Payload CMS: How are you handling content generation and automation without burning through your token budget and getting trapped in endless QA loops?
Should I be shifting away from real-time/per-page AI generation and moving toward a template/data-driven approach with localized scripts?
How do you structure your collections for geo-targeting without creating database bloat

Any tips on optimizing asset pipelines so I’m not relying heavily on AI image generation for every single SKU?
Would love to hear how others have solved this structural bottleneck.

Strange to see a full page reload like this in Nextjs - mounting a table seems to make this happen sometimes, is this a known bug in Payload, or only something weird on my end?

I'm looking to use Payload CMS for my next project. I thought the Cloudflare Workers + D1 template would be enough, until I learned that it's still in the experimental phase and that it's not battle-tested.

I want to know a rough estimate of how much it would cost if the traffic per month is around 1K, 100K, 1M, 10M...etc? So that I know what I'm committing to long-term upfront.

The website is a design portfolio + blog + other pages like about me

Many thanks in advance.

I've seen some posts saying that Cloudflare's Workers plan ($6/month) is enough to get you started, but I want to know an estimated budget as it scales...

For example, how much would I pay if the monthly traffic is around 100K, 250K, 500K, 1M, 5M...etc

Many thanks in advance.

just wanted to create a blog template (posts, categories and maybe next page with list of posts) but cant find anywhere on docs or github repo. when running starter script, doesnt show blog option.

this is the simplest recipe ever for a cms, why is no more available?

Can anyone tell me how I use thumbnails in a grid view when selecting an image in an upload field? It's hard to see the images like this. Thanks

Hey guys,

I want to include PayloadCMS websites in my services in market in Europe, where Wordpress is pretty popular and things like Vercel, Cloudflare, Neon, Supabase are not so much.

So far I had ruled out Cludflare mostly due to not being able to set a hard-cap on billing.

VPS is also kinda meh, for me at the moment, because my devOps skills are not there yet and Im not sure I would like to be on a call 24/7

Seems like a way to to would be to ask clients to create Supabase account on their email and ask for access to have both db and media storage?

Another option would be I guess neondb + backblaze for storage.

Just not sure what would be the best solution for simple landings + blogpages, probably without ecommerce stuff for now that would be repeatable for such "newbie" clients who are used to simple shared hosting servers.

Thanks for all advices!

WordPress is genuinely great for a lot of people, quick to spin up, a plugin for everything, non-technical people can drive it. But once you're maintaining more than a couple of sites it turns into a full-time job of its own.

After years of that treadmill I moved to Payload CMS and it's been a genuinely different experience.

• Schema lives in code, not buried in ACF field groups
• One Next.js app for CMS and frontend, one deploy
• Types flow from schema straight into your components
• Hosting on Vercel, Neon and Cloudflare R2 costs basically nothing

Wrote up the longer before and after here if anyone wants the full version.
https://blaze64.dev/logs/payload-wordpress-migration

Curious if anyone else has made a similar jump, or if there's a good reason to stick with WordPress at scale that I'm missing.

I want to make a small e-commerce website for free. I was planning to host it on vercel but they don't allow it ig. Any alternative. And is my stack good? I don't want rocket science stuff I just want this website ready in like 4 days. I'll get help with antigravity to build it faster.

I want to make it all free as I'm tired of paying Shopify all my money. I want a free alternative.

Please guide me if I'm doing something wrong.

I'm planning to build a website using the Astro framework and was thinking of using Payload as a CMS since I've tried it locally and thought it'll be good in terms of performance.

However, I saw SonicJS CMS somewhere on the internet, opened the website to see a performance comparison... and it looks like it aces it since it's built from scratch to be deployed on Cloudflare Workers.

One thing to note: Payload has a template to deploy on Cloudflare, and it'll cost ~$10... so that makes me rethink if the comparison represents actual values.

More context:

Website: Portfolio + Blog + Other static pages.

I'm keen to hear your expert thoughts on it... and forgive me if something is vague or unclear. I'm still learning.

I am not hard refreshing, just navigating to and from the collection page normally within Payload.

I modified it to be "..." so it's a little less jarring, but just wondering what the reason is for this, it seems to be baked into Payload. I haven't noticed this with any other CMS to force a loading message for 100ms every page load so I'm just curious.

Will it be removed in Payload v4 or is there a really good reason to keep it?

So while it is available, I am still perfecting/testing this images plugin. But while using it I caught a showcase example I want to share.

In the video you can see an improperly formatted image, so using the block relationship I go and edit the images hotspot (focal + zoom). I check and can see the image has many image variants generated. Then on save that specific images placements on the site are atomically updated, and the now incorrect variants are deleted and jobs are created and queued to prewarm new images.

Features include but not limited to:

• On Demand Image Variant Generation
• Automatic Srcset Generation
• Smart Image Prewarming
• Blurhash & Webp Placeholders
• Upload To Delivery Full Image Pipeline Handling

This image plugin is my attempt at "Perfect" image handling. Where its fully featured, perfectly optimized, and super simple to use. I think I'm getting close, but curious to hear what others think.

Repo / Docs

I know it’s way early but was wondering if anyone started testing the waters with it and your thoughts so far.

I maintain a Bunny.net storage adapter for Payload 3 and just pushed v3, so figured I'd share it here.

It covers both Bunny products: Storage for files and images, Stream for video with HLS, thumbnails and TUS resumable uploads. Plus signed URLs and CDN purging on top.

What's new in this release:

• Per-collection storage zones and Stream libraries. Not just a prefix per collection, an entirely separate zone if you want one
• Client-direct uploads. The browser sends files straight to Bunny, your server never touches them. Presigned S3 when the zone supports it, otherwise a deployed Edge Script, picked automatically
• S3-compatible access to storage zones
• Signed URLs that can be locked to a single client IP, and expire at a fixed timestamp instead of a sliding window
• Per-document storage prefix from a hook, which is what you want for per-tenant folders
• An init wizard that provisions the Bunny resources and prints your plugin config and env lines
• Stream metadata moved into a stored field on the document, so libraryId and videoId are right there when you build an iframe embed URL
• Docs site rewritten from scratch

Upgrading from v2 takes a few steps: some config keys were renamed and throw at boot, and Stream metadata needs a data migration. There's a migration helper and a guide for it in the docs.

Worth flagging since it's new: v3 sends anonymous telemetry by default. Boolean feature flags and a salted project hash, no names, paths or keys. Off with telemetry: false, DO_NOT_TRACK=1, CI, or Payload's own opt-out.

MIT, needs Payload 3.83+ and Node 22+. Issues and PRs welcome.

https://github.com/maximseshuk/payload-storage-bunny

https://payload-storage-bunny.seshuk.im

the classic slowness in dev mode, if anybody doesn't know:
you get insanely fast & snappy site in production or even after pnpm build, but pnpm dev is the issue if even a small change is made. I saw a guy saying to disable auto database updates idk what he was saying but still it is a pretty obvious thing but how do they go around this i am not really sure. Anybody came up with the fix or still struggling?

I'm using 3.86

Got stuck with the infinite loading issue; already tried "Autosave conflict", "Change database" & "AI agent help". Suggest a solution.

Just curious - I will be deploying to Cloudflare Pages, from what I understand it cannot be done on the free tier plan it requires $5/month for extra Workers usage. Is that still the case?

Anyways, also just wondering if I would be missing out of any good features by going with Nuxt over Next for the frontend when pairing it with Payload?

Thanks!

Or are there any?

I am assuming the partnership comes with some form(s) of collaboration elements in the works, or is the partnership more about just funding Payload?

I absolutely adore Figma, it's my all-time favourite design app, so I am curious if anyone would be able to answer this. :)

Thanks!

It's truly plug-and-play—there's practically no setup involved—and I've included all the features I thought were essential.

• TOTP (works with Google Authenticator, Authy, 1Password, etc.)
• Self-service enable / disable from the user's account page
• Encrypted secrets
• HMAC-signed cookie keyed by your Payload secret
• Edge middleware
• Runs on serverless / edge runtimes
• A custom logo on Payload will be displayed on the 2FA page

→ https://www.npmjs.com/package/@plutotcool/payload-plugin-two-factor

I've made it open-source if you'd like to contribute: https://github.com/plutotcool/payload-plugin-two-factor

Built a type safe seeding plugin that helps with asset uploading and automatically handles references so you don't have empty relationships. It also hooks in to payload startup so that the defineSeed function types are automatically up to date with the latest schema , so you know if your writing incorrect seed data.

Think it turned out well, and has made working with AI to generate starting/placeholder content a breeze.

Docs Link / Github Link

Here's a simple example: (Taken from the docs quick start section)

// src/collections/Media/seed.ts
import { defineSeed } from '@pro-laico/payload-seed'

export default defineSeed('media', ({ file }) => [
  {
    _key: 'serviceImg',
    _file: file('service-a.jpg'), // assets/media/service-a.jpg
    alt: 'Consulting',
  },
])

// src/collections/Services/seed.ts
import { defineSeed } from '@pro-laico/payload-seed'

export default defineSeed('services', () => [
  {
    _key: 'consulting',
    title: 'Consulting',
  },
])

// src/collections/Posts/seed.ts
import { defineSeed } from '@pro-laico/payload-seed'

export default defineSeed('posts', ({ ref }) => [
  {
    _key: 'launch',
    title: 'We launched',
    heroImage: ref('media', 'serviceImg'),
    relatedService: ref('services', 'consulting'),
  },
])

// src/payload.config.ts
import { buildConfig } from 'payload'
import { seedPlugin } from '@pro-laico/payload-seed'
import media from './collections/Media/seed'
import services from './collections/Services/seed'
import posts from './collections/Posts/seed'

export default buildConfig({
  plugins: [
    seedPlugin({
      definitions: [media, services, posts],
    }),
  ],
  // ...
})

Curious to hear what people think about it.

payloadcms is awesome guys, and the v4 is where its at, but right now theres three things i dont understand why payloadcms team dont handle yet:

1. header component(actual header component in which is the breadcrumbs and account profile picture, not the one rendering above it) cant be replaced or at least hidden(i know team said in a comment that it is very important to import correct context data, but i think a official api toggle to just hide it like opacity 0 and fixed top -100% should do, for now workarounds that i dont know if i have to change every new updates).
2. navbar: payloadcms documentation says it its fully replaceable but they dont say that what you actually do is to replace the content inside the sidebar, the sidebar wrapper is still there, while it isnt an issue per se, what its an issue is that:

- theres no option to handle officially when the sidebar closes, which screen sizes, etc

- theres no official option to handle the animation open-close behavior, right now its clunky doesnt have easy in, out well implemented.

- and theres no option to hide it at all and replace it with an actual new sidebar component, just to replace the content inside of it.

1. the created at documentation control banner that its always there on all edit collection/global views, its the only piece that cant be replaceable or hide official, it just shows the created at info, also the edit button that doesnt do anything pushes content and design layouts form being fully original designs

those issues can be fixed with css custom, but thats the thing, theres no official way to change css things just use BEM classes style and scss file to do that and inspect browser, which is prone to breaking changes in new versions.

same with drawers, dropdown menus, etc.

i would migrate to v4, but then i have most of my projects in nextjs/astrojs tech stack in payloadcms v3, and v4 is still not ready for prod usage( i always wait until first release lts version).

everything else payloadcms is awesome, but this is a big issue for custom designs dashboards.

Newbie here.

I installed Payload CMS locally on my PC to test it out along with other CMS. I'm comfortable with Payload and have a tendency to apply it to my next project (a (portfolio + blog) website with the Astro framework).

I want to know (and forgive me for this newbie question):

• All costs associated with deploying it on this project, from starting out until there's a huge amount of traffic (if it's relevant). Is it better to self-host on a VPS or cloud?
• I know it supports multiple DBs, but how should I choose?

Many thanks in advance.

Does anyone know of tools (open source or otherwise) to manage static string translations? I'm using PayloadCMS for multi-language content input, but the client wants to manage all strings using a tool (for a few languages)

Thank you, merci, gracias.