Somebody told you WordPress was free, and technically they were right. The software costs nothing. You can download it this afternoon. What nobody mentions is that a WordPress site is less like buying a tool and more like adopting an animal. The purchase price is the smallest number you will ever pay for it.
I'm Joe, based in Minnetonka, and I end up looking at a lot of small business WordPress sites. Usually the owner calls me because something broke, or because the site feels slow, or because they finally opened the credit card statement and started asking what all these small charges are. The answer is almost always the same. It's the plugins.
Where the money actually goes
Here's a normal setup for a small service business. Nothing fancy. A contact form, a booking calendar, an SEO plugin, a security plugin, backups, a caching plugin so the thing loads before your customer gives up, a page builder because you wanted to edit your own text, and a premium theme.
That is eight pieces of software, and the free version of each one does about seventy percent of what you need. The last thirty percent is behind a yearly license. Last I checked, a decent forms plugin runs somewhere around $60 to $250 a year depending on whether you want it to actually do anything. Security and backup plugins land in the same neighborhood. Booking plugins too. The page builder wants its own renewal. So does the theme.
Add managed hosting on top, which for a business site that you'd rather not have go down is realistically $25 to $50 a month, and you are somewhere between $900 and $2,000 a year before anyone has touched the site.
None of those charges is big enough to argue with on its own. That's the trick. Each renewal email says $79 and you click through it, and the total never sits in front of you in one place.
The part that costs more than money
The licenses are the visible half. The other half is that eight plugins from eight different companies are all updating on their own schedule, all touching the same site, and none of them were built to work with the other seven.
So one Tuesday your forms stop sending. Or the site goes white after an update. Or your booking calendar starts double-booking Saturdays and you don't find out until two customers show up at once. Nothing you did caused it. A plugin author shipped an update, it disagreed with another plugin, and your site is the place where that argument happens.
Now you need somebody. If you have a person, that's a call and a bill. If you don't, that's your Saturday. I've watched owners spend more on emergency fixes in a year than the entire site cost to build, and the fixes don't make the site better. They just put it back where it was.
There's also the version of this that costs you quietly. You skip updates because the last one broke something, and eight months later you're running old plugin code with a known security hole in it. Most small business sites that get hacked aren't targeted. They just had a stale plugin and a bot found it.
Why it ended up this way
I want to be fair to WordPress here. It won for good reasons. Fifteen years ago, if a small business wanted a site it could edit itself, WordPress plus plugins was the only realistic path. The plugin market existed because building custom was expensive, so people assembled sites out of parts instead. That was the right call at the time.
The problem is that the model assumes somebody is maintaining the assembly. In an agency or a company with an IT person, somebody is. In a five-person business where the owner is also doing the estimates and the invoicing, nobody is. The site slowly drifts until it breaks, and the plugin tax keeps billing the whole time.
What changed
Custom used to mean expensive. A developer hand-building a small business site was a five-figure project, which is exactly why the plugin approach made sense.
That math moved. AI has cut the build time on a straightforward small business site down dramatically, and the cost came with it. I've written before about how AI changed what a website rebuild costs, and the short version is that a site built directly, without a stack of third-party parts holding it together, is now in reach for businesses that could never have considered it before.
What you get out of that is not just a lower yearly number. It's that the forms are part of the site instead of a rented add-on. The booking is part of the site. There is no page builder license, no security plugin, no theme renewal, because there's no assembly to hold together. And because you own the code, you can add things later without checking whether a plugin exists for it, which is the same argument I make about what owning your website actually means.
How to figure out your own number
Do this before you decide anything. Open your email and search for "renewal" and "your subscription." Write down every plugin, theme, and hosting charge with its yearly cost. Then add a rough number for what you paid someone to fix things in the last twelve months, or an honest estimate of the hours you spent doing it yourself.
That total is your real site cost. Multiply it by five, because your site is going to be around at least that long. The same exercise applies to hosted platforms, and I ran the numbers on that in what a Squarespace site really costs over five years.
If the five-year number is smaller than what a rebuild would run, stay where you are. Plenty of sites are fine. But if it's larger, and it often is once the fix-it hours go in, then you're paying a subscription every year to maintain something you'll never own, and there's a version of this where you pay once instead.
If you want to talk through what this would look like for your business, the audit is free and takes 30 minutes. Get in touch