The WooCommerce plugin is free, but a store that actually sells is not - and it is worth knowing exactly what you pay for. WooCommerce is a free store engine bolted onto WordPress: cart, products, orders, taxes, basic shipping. You only start paying for what you add around it, meaning hosting, a theme, plugins for payments and couriers, invoicing, integrations and maintenance. In practice the real yearly bill for a small store starts at roughly a few hundred PLN (Polish market rates), and for a heavily integrated store it reaches several thousand a year.
Below I break that bill into parts and give you ways to trim it without breaking the store. Treat any figure outside my own price list as indicative, because plugin vendors change prices every year and bill in dollars or euros.
What in WooCommerce is genuinely free
What you get for free is a complete, selling engine. WordPress and WooCommerce are open source software, so there is no licence fee and no revenue share going to the authors. The free version gives you a product catalogue, variants, a cart, orders, coupons, VAT rates, basic shipping zones, bank transfer and cash on delivery, plus transactional emails.
Free does not mean “ready to trade”, though. Three things are missing that a Polish store cannot sensibly run without: fast online payment (BLIK, the Polish instant-payment standard, plus cards), courier integrations, and invoicing. Those are usually a new store’s first expenses. More on the engine licence itself in the piece on whether WordPress is free.
What the real bill is made of
Costs split into three types: one-off (the build), yearly (licences, domain, certificate) and monthly (hosting, maintenance, payment fees). Here are the typical line items over a year.
| Item | When you pay | Indicative range (per year) |
|---|---|---|
| Store-grade hosting | monthly or yearly | 300-1,500 PLN, higher with heavy traffic |
| Domain | yearly | 50-150 PLN |
| SSL certificate | yearly | 0 PLN (Let’s Encrypt) or 200-500 PLN for a paid one |
| Premium theme | one-off or yearly | 200-500 PLN |
| Page builder (e.g. Elementor Pro) | yearly | 250-600 PLN for a single site |
| Payment gateway | fee per transaction | usually around 1-2% of turnover plus a flat fee |
| Courier / shipping label plugin | yearly | 300-800 PLN |
| Invoicing and accounting integration | yearly | 200-900 PLN |
| Extra plugins (SEO, backups, filters) | yearly | 0-1,500 PLN depending on appetite |
| Technical care | monthly | with me: Basic from 1,000 PLN, Pro from 2,000 PLN, Premium from 3,500 PLN net per month |
The ranges are wide because the difference comes from how many features the store genuinely uses. A store with fifty products and one courier is a different bill from a store with a thousand SKUs and a live data exchange with a warehouse.
Plugins not worth saving money on
There are four areas where the free version costs more than the paid one - you just pay in a different currency: time and lost orders.
- Payments. A customer who does not see BLIK, or who lands on a payment page that looks like it came from another era, does not finish the purchase. What matters is not the price of the plugin but the transaction fee and how the payment looks inside the cart. I put the comparison together in the piece on WooCommerce payment gateways.
- Backups. An automatic backup kept off the store’s own server costs a few hundred PLN a year and is the cheapest insurance policy you can buy. A copy sitting on the same server as the store disappears along with it in a serious failure.
- Invoicing and accounting. Since April 2026, KSeF - Poland’s mandatory e-invoicing system - applies to everyone, so your invoice flow has to connect to your accounting. Issuing them by hand works up to a dozen or so orders a month. How to set that up is written out in the piece on integrating WooCommerce with an ERP and KSeF.
- Protection and updates. A store means customer data and money. Cutting corners here ends with a repair bill higher than a year of licences.
Elementor Pro and page builder licences
Elementor Pro is the paid version of the page builder, sold as a yearly subscription counted per number of sites. The range starts around 250-350 PLN a year for a single site and grows with bundles, but the pricing has changed several times already, so check the current figure before you buy.
A builder makes sense when you want to edit page layouts yourself without calling your developer. It does not make sense when the store runs on a theme with ready-made templates and nobody touches a single section all year: you are then paying a subscription for a tool you never open, and adding weight to the store on top, because builders generate a lot of extra code. Details in the piece on what Elementor Pro costs.
How yearly licences work and what happens when they expire
A paid plugin licence is usually a yearly subscription for updates and support, not for the plugin working at all. Once it expires the plugin generally keeps running, but it stops getting fixes, and after some major WordPress update it either stops getting along with the rest or turns into a security hole. So when I review costs I build a simple table: plugin, expiry date, what happens if I do not renew it. There are three outcomes: renew, remove, or replace with a few lines of code in the child theme.
Three cost scenarios
Here are three typical setups. The figures cover maintenance and licences over a year, excluding the cost of building the store and excluding payment fees.
| Scenario | What it includes | Yearly tooling cost |
|---|---|---|
| Small store | shared hosting, free SSL, off-the-shelf theme, payments, one courier | around 800-2,000 PLN |
| Typical retail store | stronger hosting, premium theme, payments, couriers with labels, invoicing, backups, SEO plugins | around 2,000-4,500 PLN |
| Store with integrations | high-performance hosting, the full plugin set plus integration with a warehouse, suppliers or an ERP, B2B panel | from 4,000 PLN up |
Building the store is a separate line item: my projects are quoted up front and usually land in the range of 5,000-10,000 PLN net, with the quote given in writing before we start. The breakdown of that figure by stage is in the piece on what a WooCommerce online store costs.
Where people overpay most often
The same four items keep coming back in my reviews.
- Plugins bought “just in case”. A bundle of add-ons picked up at launch, of which two get used. The rest have been auto-renewing for three years.
- Duplicated features. The theme has its own filters and a paid filter plugin sits right next to it. Or two SEO plugins at once, which can actively do harm.
- Hosting that does not match the traffic. Too expensive for a small store, too weak for a big one. The second mistake is paid for in abandoned carts, and what to look at is written out in the piece on hosting for a WooCommerce store.
- A subscription for a one-off thing. A custom field in the cart or a simple shipping condition is a dozen lines of code in the child theme, not an annual licence.
How to cut the bill without breaking the store
The order matters, because ripping plugins out blind ends with a broken cart.
- Make an inventory. A list of plugins plus columns: what it does, who uses it, what it costs per year, when it expires.
- Mark the critical ones. Payments, shipping, invoicing, backups. We do not touch those - at most we switch providers.
- Flag duplicates and dead weight. Anything nobody can point to on the live store goes on the list to be switched off.
- Test on a copy, not on the live store. After switching things off, walk the full path: product, cart, payment, email, invoice.
- Disable one at a time, with a backup first. One change at a time, so you know what broke orders if something goes wrong.
- Replace the small stuff with code. Several tiny plugins can often be replaced by one file in the child theme, which costs nothing and renews nothing.
A review like that usually produces a smaller bill and a faster store at the same time, because every plugin removed means fewer database queries on every customer visit. I covered the comparison with the subscription model in the piece on a SaaS store versus your own.
Where I start when someone asks about costs
I start with a free diagnosis: I look at the plugin list, the hosting, the speed and the places where the store loses orders, then I say straight out what to switch off today, what to swap and what to leave alone. It commits you to nothing.
If a bigger job comes out of it, you get a quote in writing before we start, with scope and a deadline, rather than a bill after the fact. When the repeatable part is updates, backups and keeping an eye on the store, ongoing technical care works out more sensibly than calling someone in only when something breaks. If the store is still being built, we discuss the scope under ecommerce store development.
FAQ
How much does WooCommerce cost per month? The plugin itself, nothing. Monthly you pay for hosting and optionally maintenance; plugin licences are billed yearly. The smallest sensible store is a few dozen PLN a month for hosting plus the yearly licences, while a store with a full set of integrations is several times more.
Can I run a WooCommerce store completely for free? Technically yes, aside from hosting and the domain. In practice that means no fast payments, writing shipping labels by hand and typing invoices manually. At a handful of orders a month that works; at a few dozen it eats more time than the plugins would cost.
Are paid plugins better than free ones? Not always, but more often they come with support and regular updates, which for a store weighs more than the feature list alone. Free ones do well on simple jobs, and where money and customer data are involved I prefer solutions with a clear owner and a track record of fixes.
Can I swap a plugin for a cheaper one without losing data? Usually yes, but it depends where the plugin keeps its data. Orders and products live in the WooCommerce database and stay put, whereas settings and custom fields added by a specific plugin can vanish along with it. That is why a swap like this is done on a test copy, with a backup first.
Running a store where something does not work the way it should? I build and rebuild WooCommerce stores - from a single fix to reworking the whole sales flow. Tell me what you are dealing with and I will send back a scope and a price.