Vessa vs Standards
Standards starts at $40 a month for unlimited published guidelines, two seats and custom domains. Its MCP server lets an AI read your published pages, and its API sits on Enterprise. Vessa is €39 once per brand when you publish it, with no subscription. Its MCP connection comes with every brand and works both ways: your AI fills sections, uploads assets and publishes while you review in the editor, then reads the real palette and type back. Every published guideline also serves a brand.json and an llms.txt at its own URL with no key to request. The motion is in there too: real easing curves, duration bands, code your developer can paste.
Standards is free to try, and publishing needs Pro from $40 a month, so a year starts at $480 whether it hosts one client brand or many. On Vessa building is free and a client's brand is €149 + VAT, for businesses. You pay it once and there's nothing to renew.
Updated October 2026. Standards' prices were checked on their site on 26 October 2026, its help center and AI access on 23 October.
| Vessa | Standards | |
|---|---|---|
| Price model | Free to build. Publishing your own brand is €39 once with VAT included, and a client's brand is €149 + VAT, for businesses. No subscription. | Pro from $40 a month, two seats included, $20 a month per extra seat. Unlimited published guidelines. Enterprise is quoted. |
| What you pay to start | Nothing to build. €39 once when you publish, then edit and republish for as long as you want, with nothing to renew. | Free to try, with no card. Publishing needs a paid plan, from $40 a month, and published projects go offline 10 days after the subscription ends. |
| Where the guideline lives | vessa.design/brand/{name}. Same URL shape for every guideline. | live.standards.site/{name} by default, your own domain on Pro. |
| Custom domain | Not offered. Every guideline lives on vessa.design. | Included on Pro, from $40 a month. |
| Platform credit on the live page | On an own-brand page, one “Published with Vessa” link beside the year. A client-brand page carries nothing of ours, only your studio’s credit if you turn it on. | Not documented on the pricing page. Their showcase runs under a “Made with Standards” banner in the news hub, which is marketing rather than a badge on the guideline. |
| Motion system | A built-in section: motion personalities with live scrubbable specimens, real easing and duration values, and copy-as-GSAP or CSS code your developer can paste. | Pages can move: slideshows, marquees and video. No section documents a brand's motion as values or code. |
| Editor | A structured form. You fill typed sections and the template owns every layout and animation decision. No canvas. | A free-layout builder: you place elements on a grid per breakpoint, with design, content and comment modes and real-time collaboration. |
| People editing it | One account per guideline. No team seats. | Two seats on Pro, more at $20 a month each, with designer, content editor and commenter roles. Viewer SSO and viewer logs are Enterprise. |
| Private or password-protected guidelines | Yes, a password per brand. No viewer accounts or SSO. | Yes. Password-restricted pages on Pro. Sign-in with an access list, domain-verified access and viewer SSO on Enterprise. |
| Languages | One language per guideline. | Up to 20 languages with automatic translation, on Enterprise. |
| Comments, search and version history | None of the three. Each edit saves as you go, and there's no history to restore yet. | Comments with mentions and threads in the editor, search across the published site, and backups you can preview and restore. |
| AI: building and reading the guideline | Shipped. An MCP server with OAuth on every account: Claude, Claude Code or Cursor can read a guideline's real palette, type and rules, and write back too, filling sections, uploading assets and publishing while you review in the editor. Plus a versioned brand.json and an llms.txt on every published guideline, no key and no login. Motion is in all of it: easing curves, duration bands, stagger. | Read only. An MCP server on Pro that browses your published pages, and an OAuth API on Enterprise whose every endpoint reads. Nothing writes back. |
| Track record | New. Launched 2026. | Established indie platform. Cash App, MLB, Mailchimp and Headspace are on their examples page, and they run a regular news and interview hub. |
Updated October 2026. Standards' prices were checked on their site on 26 October 2026, its help center and AI access on 23 October.
Where Standards is the better buy
Standards is the best-built product in the indie half of this category, and on several counts it is ahead of Vessa rather than merely different.
Programmatic access for teams. Both products speak MCP. On Enterprise, Standards adds a REST API with role-based access, so a company stack can query the brand and respect who is allowed to see what. Vessa's connection is MCP only and owner only. If the client needs an API their backend calls, or permissions per viewer, Standards is the one that does that today.
Volume, again. Pro is unlimited published guidelines from $40 a month. Vessa is €39 per brand. If you publish more than about a dozen guidelines a year, the subscription is the cheaper line and it isn't close.
Guidelines behind a sign-in. Both products put a password on a page. Standards Enterprise goes further: viewers sign in through Google, Microsoft or SAML, an access list says who gets in, and a log shows who looked. Vessa has a password per brand and nothing past it.
More than one language. Standards Enterprise translates a guideline into up to 20 languages. Vessa is one language per guideline, and for a client operating across markets that is a hard stop rather than an inconvenience.
The different bet each one makes
Standards bets that the guideline is a data source. One document, read by people through the web page and by machines through standards.md, MCP and the API. That's a genuinely good bet, it's ahead of most of this category, and if your client's problem is that nobody's tools know the brand exists, Standards already solves it.
Vessa bets that most guidelines are a handover. You finish the identity, you hand over one link, and the page has to be good enough that people actually open it. So the money is a one-time fee per brand instead of rent, and the craft budget went into the page itself: the moodboard that reflows when you open an image, colors that copy on click, a type specimen set in the client's own faces, and a motion section with real easing curves and code your developer can paste.
The two bets meet where AI comes in, and they split there. Standards lets an AI read the published guideline, through MCP on Pro and the API on Enterprise. Vessa's MCP connection comes with every account and it writes: Claude, Claude Code or Cursor fills sections, uploads assets and publishes while you review in the editor, then reads the real palette and type back. Every published guideline serves a brand.json and an llms.txt with no key to request, and Vessa's carries the motion, easing curves, duration bands and stagger, which no other guideline tool describes in a form a machine can read.
Who should pick which
Pick Standards if you publish guidelines often enough that a flat subscription beats per-brand pricing, if the client's stack needs an authenticated API, if readers have to sign in through SSO, or if the guideline has to exist in more than one language.
Pick Vessa if you're a designer or a small studio handing over identities one at a time, you want the guideline to be the best-looking thing in the project rather than the most administrative, and you'd rather pay once per brand than carry a subscription between clients. And pick it if your identity moves, because no other guideline tool documents motion as values and code.
See one before you decide
VANTA is a full Vessa guideline, live, with the motion section doing what the motion section does. Read it the way a client would. The gallery has more from real brands.
€39 once, per brand. No subscription.