"WordPress is free" is true in the same way that "the car was a gift" is true when you're paying for fuel, insurance, parking, and a mechanic on retainer. The software costs nothing; running it as a serious business website costs real money every month, spread across enough small invoices that most owners never see the total. Let's add it up honestly — the WordPress maintenance cost, hosting, plugin licenses, and the hidden lines that only show up after a bad week.

Hosting: $240–$2,400 per Year

Cheap shared hosting starts around $5–10/month and is fine right up until it isn't — the first traffic spike or slow-query plugin exposes it. Managed WordPress hosting (Kinsta, WP Engine, and similar), which handles updates, staging, and CDN, runs $30–100+ per month for a single business site. E-commerce and high-traffic sites climb from there. The uncomfortable part: much of what managed WordPress hosting charges for — caching layers, security hardening, update management — is work created by the platform itself.

Premium Plugins: $200–$1,000 per Year

A typical business site's paid stack looks something like: a form builder ($50–200/yr), an SEO plugin's premium tier ($99/yr), a caching/performance plugin ($60–250/yr), a backup service ($50–150/yr), and a page builder or theme license ($50–300/yr). Individually reasonable; together they're a recurring $200–1,000 every year, and each renewal is priced knowing that leaving is painful. If the site was built on Elementor or Divi, that dependency has its own exit costs — we cover those in escaping page builder lock-in.

Maintenance: the Line That Grows

Somebody has to apply updates, test that nothing broke, and fix it when something does. The market rates are well documented: DIY costs your time (typically 2–5 hours a month done properly), while professional WordPress maintenance plans run roughly $100–1,000+ per month depending on site complexity, with e-commerce at the top of the range. This is the largest single line item for most businesses — larger than hosting and plugins combined — and it exists because a WordPress site left alone for six months is a liability, not an asset.

The Hidden Lines

• Incident recovery. A hacked site means emergency developer hours, potential blacklist removal, and lost sales during downtime. With 91% of WordPress vulnerabilities coming from plugins, the risk scales with your plugin count.
• Performance consulting. 'Make the site faster' engagements are a cottage industry precisely because speed isn't the default. Budget $500–2,000 per attempt.
• The redesign tax. Because themes couple content to presentation, redesigns often mean partial rebuilds every 3–4 years rather than restyling.
• Developer friction. Every small change estimated with a WordPress premium — hard to see on any invoice, easy to feel over a year of sprints.

A Realistic Annual Total

For a professionally run small-business site, a typical year looks like:

• Managed hosting: $360–1,200
• Premium plugin renewals: $200–1,000
• Maintenance (service or honest DIY time): $1,200–6,000
• One incident, speed project, or 'small rebuild': $500–2,000 amortized

Total: roughly $2,300–10,000 per year — for the platform alone, before any new feature or content work. Larger sites and stores multiply from there.

The Comparison That Matters

The question isn't whether that number is outrageous — it's what the same money buys elsewhere. Modern static-first platforms remove entire categories from the list: no caching plugin because pages are pre-rendered, no security retainer for the public site because there's no PHP runtime to attack, far fewer plugins because the fundamentals are built in. We've published EmDash's pricing math and a head-to-head EmDash vs WordPress comparison if you want to run the numbers for your own site.

And if the total above made you wince, that's one of the nine signs it's time to leave — the migration itself costs less than most teams assume, especially compared to another year of the status quo.