The Myth of Free
WordPress is free to download. That fact has powered its adoption to 43% of all websites, according to W3Techs. But 'free to download' and 'free to run' are very different things. We assembled the actual costs that most organizations never calculate in one place.
The Annual Cost Breakdown
Total: $4,200 to $38,000 Per Site Per Year
For an organization running 5 WordPress properties, that's $21,000 to $190,000 annually — on infrastructure maintenance alone, not feature development.
An equivalent portfolio on Astro or Hugo: $300 to $3,000 per year. Static hosting, no plugins to patch, no PHP servers to maintain, no database to optimize. The security audit is simpler because the attack surface is minimal.
The Cost Nobody Calculates: Opportunity Cost
Every hour a developer spends patching WordPress plugins is an hour not spent building features, improving user experience, or developing new products. For a team of 3 developers spending 20% of their time on WordPress maintenance, that's the equivalent of losing one full-time developer entirely.
At an average developer salary of $95,000, that's $95,000 per year in productivity lost to maintenance — on top of the direct costs above.
The Breach Cost
Sucuri reports that WordPress accounts for over 90% of all CMS-based security incidents. The average cost of a web application breach for a small business: $25,000 to $50,000 including incident response, customer notification, and reputation damage. For mid-market: $100,000 to $500,000.
With 18,005 CVEs in the NVD database and 4,200+ new vulnerabilities discovered in 2025 alone, a WordPress breach is not a question of if. It's a question of when.
The Comparison
Why This Data Didn't Exist
WordPress hosting companies don't publish total cost of ownership — they publish hosting prices. Plugin marketplaces don't calculate your annual renewal burden. Security firms don't aggregate the maintenance hours per CVE. Nobody had an incentive to assemble the full picture. Until now.
