Yes, WordPress itself is free - but a site built on WordPress is not free and never was. WordPress is open source software (a CMS, a content management system) you download from wordpress.org with no licence fee, forever, commercial use included. What you do pay for is everything you have to add to turn that free application into a working company website: a domain, hosting, a theme, some plugins, updates and somebody’s time. In practice the real budget for a small company site starts at a few hundred zloty a year and grows with what it has to do.
Below I break that bill apart so you know where the money actually goes and which lines can safely be cut.
What exactly is free
The engine is free: the WordPress files, the code, version updates, all the documentation and the official repository with thousands of plugins and themes. The GPL licence means you can use it on any number of sites, modify it and use it commercially, with no fees and without asking anyone.
Usually free too: a basic SSL certificate from your host (the differences against a paid one I covered in the piece on free versus paid SSL certificates), the default themes, most plugins in their basic version, and the block editor and user accounts.
What is not free: an address on the internet, space on a server, somebody to put it all together, and somebody to watch it afterwards.
WordPress.org versus WordPress.com - half the confusion starts here
These are two different things with almost identical names. WordPress.org is the free software you install on your own hosting, with full control. WordPress.com is one company’s commercial hosting service, built on the same engine, sold on a subscription.
| Feature | WordPress.org (own hosting) | WordPress.com (subscription) |
|---|---|---|
| Fee for the system | none | in the subscription |
| Installing plugins | unrestricted | only on higher plans |
| Custom code, integrations | full freedom | limited |
| Stores, B2B systems | yes | depends on plan |
| Moving elsewhere | simple | depends on plan |
If somebody tells you “WordPress costs X per month”, they mean wordpress.com or a website builder. The version most company sites run on is wordpress.org, and for the system itself you pay nothing.
The real budget lines
These are the costs that appear with any site on its own hosting. Treat the brackets as indicative - Polish provider price lists change every year, and first-year promotions can badly distort the picture.
| Item | When you pay | Order of magnitude |
|---|---|---|
| .pl domain | annually | tens of zloty, usually more at renewal than in year one |
| Shared hosting | annually | from around a hundred to a few hundred zloty |
| Higher-performance hosting (VPS, store hosting) | monthly | tens to hundreds of zloty a month |
| Premium theme | one-off or annual | a few hundred zloty, depending on the licence model |
| Paid plugins | usually annually | from tens to a few hundred zloty each |
| Off-server backups | annually | tens to hundreds of zloty |
| Building the site | one-off | with me, fixed-bid projects usually 5,000-10,000 PLN net |
| Ongoing technical support | monthly | with me, Basic from 1,000 / Pro from 2,000 / Premium from 3,500 PLN net |
The first six are tool costs - you pay them even if you do everything yourself. The last two are human work, and there the choice is real: do it yourself, hire once, or hire on an ongoing basis. I go into this in more depth in the piece on what a website costs.
Where the money leaks most: renewable licences
The biggest surprise is not in the purchase price but in the renewal model. Many plugins and themes are sold as a “one-year licence” - after a year the site still works, but you stop getting updates and support. And a plugin without updates is either a security hole or a conflict after a PHP version bump.
A typical company site has a dozen-odd plugins, 2-5 of them paid. A store usually has more, because payments, shipping, invoicing and stock integrations are separate products - I added up the real bills for a store in the piece on the cost of WooCommerce plugins. On top of that come page-building tools: how the most popular one is billed I show in the piece on Elementor Pro pricing.
A practical rule: before you buy a plugin, check three things - whether the licence is perpetual or annual, how many sites it covers, and exactly what stops working when it lapses.
Free hosting and free themes - when the saving backfires
Free versions make sense as a start and as a test, and stop making sense the moment the site starts earning. Three situations where the saving comes back with interest:
- Free or very cheap hosting - typically shared with hundreds of sites, slow databases, query limits and no sensible backups. What such offers really mean and where their limits sit, I described in the piece on cheap and free WordPress hosting
- An abandoned theme from the free directory - the author stops developing it, and after the next big WordPress release the site breaks. How to choose so this does not happen, I gathered in the piece on choosing a WordPress theme
- A plugin from an unofficial source - paid add-ons “for free” from torrents or dubious archives are the most common route malicious code takes onto a site
Separately: no off-server backup is not a saving, it is a deferred invoice.
What that adds up to per year - three realistic scenarios
The figures below are tool costs over a year, without human work. They depend on the provider and how much the site has to do.
| Type of site | What it consists of | Order of magnitude per year |
|---|---|---|
| Company one-pager | domain, shared hosting, free theme, free plugins | a few hundred zloty |
| Company site with a blog and forms | domain, better hosting, premium theme, 2-4 paid plugins, backup | from around a thousand zloty upwards |
| WooCommerce store | higher-performance hosting, theme, payments, shipping, invoicing, integrations, backup | usually a few thousand zloty |
On top of that comes maintenance in the sense of work: updates, monitoring, fixes. Who should do it and for how much, I break down in the piece on website maintenance cost.
The cost that never shows on an invoice: your time
The most expensive line in a WordPress site’s budget usually has no invoice. It is the hours a business owner spends clicking in the dashboard instead of selling, and the days the site is down because an update went wrong on a Friday evening.
Count it honestly: what your hour is worth, how many hours a month the site eats, and what one day of downtime in peak season would cost. If the total comes out above the cost of a support plan, you have your answer. What such a service covers, I listed in the piece on what WordPress maintenance includes.
How to plan the budget in five steps
- List the features the site genuinely has to have in year one - not the ones that would be nice in three years
- Check which of them need paid plugins and what licence model those use (annual or perpetual)
- Match hosting to traffic and site type - a store and a brochure site have completely different requirements; the piece on choosing WordPress hosting helps here
- Add up the fixed annual costs and leave a margin for renewals, which after year one are usually higher
- Decide on the working model: do it yourself, hire once, or hire on an ongoing basis - you will find the comparison in the piece on building it yourself in a website builder or hiring a developer
The worst outcome is a site built on the assumption that “WordPress is free anyway”, which after a year gets a run of renewal invoices plus a separate invoice for repairing neglected updates.
If you want this bill worked out for you
I start with a free diagnosis: I look at your site or at what you plan to build, and say plainly what running that solution really costs and which items can be cut without risk. For bigger work - a new company website or tidying up an existing one - you get a written quote before the start, with the scope spelled out. If what you want is peace rather than a project, the starting point is ongoing technical support.
Frequently asked questions
Is WordPress paid software? The system itself is not - you download it from wordpress.org for free and use it commercially with no licence fees. What costs money is everything around it: domain, hosting, some themes and plugins, and the work of whoever builds and maintains it. The subscription version at wordpress.com is a separate service, and there a fee for the system itself does exist.
Can I build a WordPress site completely for free? You can build it out of free components, but you cannot publish it under your own address for free - a domain and hosting always cost. Free subdomains and free hosting exist, but for a business they mean no control over the address, weak performance and usually no backups.
What does running a WordPress site cost per year? Tools alone for a simple company site are usually a few hundred zloty a year, for a richer site with paid plugins on the order of a thousand zloty and up, and for a store usually a few thousand. On top of that comes the work: updates and monitoring, which you either do yourself or buy on a plan - with me support is Basic from 1,000, Pro from 2,000 or Premium from 3,500 PLN net per month, depending on scope.
What is WordPress and why does everybody use it? WordPress is a free content management system - software that lets you run a site without writing code: adding pages, posts, images and products from a dashboard. Its popularity comes from the open licence, the enormous plugin ecosystem, and the fact that practically any developer can take a WordPress site over - you are not tied to one company.
Need something like this on your side? I design and build websites for B2B companies - from scratch or as a rebuild of what already stands. Send me the scope and a quote with a date comes back.