WordPress is two products with one name. WordPress.org is free software you install on hosting you pick, and there you own everything — the code, the database, the right to move it all tomorrow. WordPress.com is a hosting company selling plans from $48 the first year. Most comparisons blur the two. This one does not, because the honest answer is different for each.
We build custom sites, so read this knowing what we sell. The usual line in these comparisons — “on a platform you don't own your site” — is one we are not going to make here, because on self-hosted WordPress it is false. You own it. Every figure below was read at source on 11 August 2026, and where our own case is weak, the page says so.
Two things called WordPress
| WordPress.org | WordPress.com | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | the software | a company hosting that software |
| Price of the software | $0, GPLv2 or later | included in the plan |
| Where it runs | any host you choose | their servers only |
| Who owns the files | you | you own the content; the plan runs the site |
| Yearly bill | hosting + theme + plugins | the plan, then the renewal |
Checked on wordpress.org/about/license and wordpress.com/pricing, 11 August 2026. The licence page states: “The license under which the WordPress software is released is the GPLv2 (or later) from the Free Software Foundation.” The plugin directory advertises “over 69,000 free plugins”, and the current release is 7.0.3.
What WordPress.com charges, and what it renews at
This is the number most write-ups get wrong, because they quote the price on the card and stop. The card carries three figures: the monthly rate, the discounted first year, and the renewal.
| Plan | Month to month | First year | Renews at | Year two vs year one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal | $9/mo | $48 | $96 | +100% |
| Premium | $18/mo | $96 | $168 | +75% |
| Business | $40/mo | $300 | $420 | +40% |
| Commerce | $70/mo | $540 | $744 | +38% |
Read off wordpress.com/pricing on 11 August 2026, in the Pay yearly mode, in USD. Under each plan the page prints “Auto-renews at $N per month. Billed every 12 months.” The same figures come back from the pricing API the page itself calls: annual plans list a first-year price of $48, $96, $300 and $540 against a standard price of $96, $168, $420 and $744. The billing selector also offers Pay monthly, Pay every 2 years “up to 63% off” and Pay every 3 years “up to 69% off”.
So the advertised saving is real and so is the step after it. Business is $300 to start and $420 every year afterwards — $120 more, arriving quietly on a card twelve months later. Over a decade the difference between budgeting at the intro price and paying the real one is $1,080.
What a self-hosted site costs to run
On WordPress.org the software is free and everything around it is not. A working business site normally needs managed hosting, a theme that does more than the default, a forms plugin and, for anyone taking appointments, a booking plugin. Priced at source the same day:
| Line | What we priced | First year | Every year after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managed hosting | WP Engine or Kinsta, entry plan | $350 | $350 |
| Premium theme | Kadence Essentials | $99 | $99 |
| Forms | Gravity Forms Basic | $44 | $59 |
| Booking | Amelia Starter | $49 | $49 |
| Total | $542 | $557 |
All four read at source on 11 August 2026. WP Engine's entry plan shows “$30 USD /mo” with “Pay $350 today”, one site, 25,000 visits a month and 10 GB storage; Kinsta's single-site plan shows the same $30 and “Pay $0 today, $350 after the first month”. Kadence Essentials is $99 a year for theme and blocks. Gravity Forms Basic shows “$44 /first year” and “$59 /per year” during a summer sale that the page says ends 24 August. Amelia's booking plugin starts at $49. Two caveats worth stating: this is one plausible stack, not the only one, and WPML — the usual answer for a second language — quoted us €39, €99 and €199, so that vendor prices by region and you should check it from where you are.
Ten years, three ways
Same model as the rest of this series, and all of it on the page: the hosted plan pays its first year then its renewal, the self-hosted stack pays its yearly bill, and a build is paid once. A domain sits on every line at $8 a year — free for the first year on a paid WordPress.com plan. Our hosting is $0, on Cloudflare's free tier, where this site and our clients' sites run.
The arithmetic, so it can be checked. Self-hosted: ($2,900 + $557 − $542) ÷ $557 ≈ 5.2 years, so the lines meet in year 6. WordPress.com Business: ($2,900 + $420 − $300) ÷ $420 ≈ 7.2 years, so year 8. Before those points the subscription is plainly cheaper, and for a three-year horizon it is not close: $1,156 on Business against $2,924 for a build.
Note which line is highest. The self-hosted stack — the free-software option — is the most expensive of the three over ten years, because hosting and licences renew every year while the software stays free. “Free” describes the licence, not the invoice.
Who assembles it, and who keeps it running
This is the real difference, and it is not about ownership. A WordPress site is an assembly: core, a theme, and a set of plugins from different vendors, each on its own release schedule. Someone has to choose them, fit them together, and then keep them updated for as long as the site is online. On a hosted plan that job is smaller and someone else does part of it. On self-hosted it is yours, or your developer's, or an agency's.
Managed hosting sells exactly that job back to you, and its feature lists say so plainly: WP Engine lists “Managed WP, PHP & MySQL updates” and “Real-time WordPress threat defense” in the $350-a-year tier, and prices automated plugin updates as an extra at $3 a month on top. That last line is worth pausing on — updating the plugins you already pay for is a paid add-on.
What happens when the updates stop
Nothing, for a while. That is the difficulty: an unmaintained WordPress site keeps working and looking fine long after it stopped being current, so the deferral has no immediate cost. The community's own statistics show the accumulation.
None of that is an argument against WordPress. It is an argument that the assembly needs an owner. If that is not going to be you, price it: either a managed host and a maintenance retainer, or a build where upkeep is a monthly care plan from $95/month you can stop whenever you like.
Speed: what the field data actually says
Carefully, because this is where comparisons overreach. WordPress does not make a site slow — it ships no theme you must use and no plugin you must install, and a fast WordPress site is entirely possible. What the field data measures is the sites people actually built.
Read it as what it is: 48.8% of WordPress origins pass on mobile, against 80.1% of Wix ones — on a sample more than fourteen times larger, which is its own kind of evidence about how varied WordPress sites are. A stack assembled from a theme and several plugins lands on the wrong side of that line more often than anyone intends, because every part brings its own CSS and JavaScript and nobody owns the total. If that has already happened to your site, it is fixable without a rebuild — that is what a Core Web Vitals rescue is for. Our own numbers are measured, not estimated, and they are published per project in the case studies.
Where WordPress is the better call
Plainly, with no hedge: for a large share of businesses, self-hosted WordPress is the right answer, and the reasons are structural rather than sentimental.
- The software is free and open source, GPLv2 or later. No vendor can raise its price, change its terms or discontinue it — the worst any supplier can do is lose your business.
- You are not dependent on one studio, including this one. Any WordPress developer, anywhere, can pick the project up next week. That is a real risk removed, and a custom codebase does not remove it as cleanly.
- The ecosystem answers almost anything off the shelf: over 69,000 free plugins in the official directory alone, plus a commercial market on top of it.
- Portability is genuine. Files and database move to another host on any afternoon, with no export limits and no permission required — better than any hosted platform in this series.
- If your team already runs WordPress and knows it, the marginal cost of the next site is hosting and a few licences.
When those are the deciding factors, a custom build is the wrong purchase and we would say so on a call. The comparison is not WordPress against us; it is one set of trade-offs against another.
Where a build earns its place instead
Three things we can point at, each with a price, a project or a contract behind it rather than an adjective.
- Features without a monthly licence. The studio runs its own booking product, GoBookingSuite, so a booking flow is written into the site rather than rented as a plugin — the $49-a-year line in the table above disappears, and so does its update schedule. It is running behind the studio's own work.
- Things the plugin market does not have. A product configurator and a bilingual back office both shipped on the GebaShop store. When the feature list is that specific, assembling it from plugins is the harder route, not the easier one — that is what a build to a written spec is.
- A contract term, not a promise. Code and design files transfer to you on final payment. That puts a build level with self-hosted WordPress on ownership, which is exactly where the comparison should sit.
Priced the same way as everything else here: $2,900 for a business site built once, $1,900 for one landing page on its own, upkeep optional. If you are weighing this against the hosted platforms, Wix vs a custom website and Webflow vs a custom website run the same arithmetic, and one-time pricing puts the two models side by side. Not sure which side you are on? Send the 5-minute brief — if the answer is “stay on WordPress”, we will say so.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
They share a name and almost nothing else. WordPress.org is the software: free, GPLv2 or later, downloaded and installed on hosting you choose, with over 69,000 free plugins in its directory. WordPress.com is a hosting company that runs that software for you and sells plans — Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce. On .org you own the files and the database outright. On .com you are a subscriber, the same as on any hosted platform. Almost every comparison of “WordPress vs” something else is really about one of the two, and it usually does not say which.
How much does WordPress.com cost per year?
Billed yearly and checked on 11 August 2026: Personal $48 the first year then $96, Premium $96 then $168, Business $300 then $420, Commerce $540 then $744. The renewal figure is printed under each plan as “Auto-renews at $N per month. Billed every 12 months.” Paying month to month costs more, and the page also offers two- and three-year terms at deeper discounts.
Is self-hosted WordPress actually free?
The software is, and that matters — nobody can price you out of it or switch it off. Running a business site on it is not. Priced at source on 11 August 2026: managed hosting from $350 a year at the entry tier of two well-known providers, a premium theme at $99 a year, a forms plugin at $44 the first year and $59 after, a booking plugin from $49. That is $542 in year one and $557 a year after it, before anyone touches the site.
Do you own your website on WordPress?
On WordPress.org, completely — the code is open source, the database is yours, and you can move both to any host with no permission needed. That is more portable than any hosted platform in this series, including ours in one respect: the software itself is not tied to a single supplier. On WordPress.com you own your content and can export it, but the plan is what keeps the site online. If ownership is the deciding factor, self-hosted WordPress answers it well.
When does a one-time build cost less than WordPress?
Against a self-hosted stack at $557 a year, a build from $2,900 pulls level in year 6. Against WordPress.com Business at $420 a year after the intro period, year 8. Before those years the subscription is cheaper and there is no argument to make. After them the gap widens every year, and nothing about the site has to change for it to happen.