WordPress is free, and the most expensive way to run a business website

WordPress is free. It is also the most expensive way to run a business website.

The same site, three platforms, three years

14 pages, a 60-post blog, 25,000 monthly visits, no store, built in-house at 70 dollars an hour. 3-year total cost of ownership:

• Framer: 4,958 dollars.
• Webflow: 7,016 dollars.
• WordPress: 12,612 dollars.

Where the money actually goes

WordPress comes out at about 2.5x Framer. The subscription is 0 dollars. But plugin licenses and the time for updates, security, backups and the occasional broken plugin add up to 7,200 dollars over three years, with another 1,800 for the managed hosting the other two bundle in for free. That maintenance line alone is larger than the entire Framer total.

The monthly fee everyone argues about is the smallest number on the page. Build hours and maintenance are where the real cost hides.

The lever that moves all three totals: your hourly rate

Every figure here except the subscription is priced against one number you choose: your hourly rate. The calculator defaults to 70 dollars an hour and bills both the one-time build and the ongoing maintenance at it. So the WordPress premium is not really a software cost, it is a labour cost, and it moves with that rate.

The model puts monthly maintenance at about 2.5 hours for WordPress against 1 hour for Webflow and 0.5 for Framer, all charged at your rate. Raise the rate and the gap widens, because WordPress carries the most billable hours. Lower it and the gap narrows. Value your own time at close to nothing and the three columns collapse toward subscription, hosting and plugin licenses, where WordPress no longer looks anywhere near 2.5x more expensive. The 2.5x headline is a claim about the price of hours, not about license fees.

• In-house build at your own rate is the default here. Your hours are a real cost even when no invoice is issued, which is why the maintenance line dominates the WordPress total.
• Agency or freelancer build is the other setting. The calculator has an in-house or agency toggle that applies a disclosed 1.3x to the build hours for project management and margin. It lifts the one-time build line on all three platforms, and it lifts it most on WordPress, because WordPress has the largest build to begin with.

So before you trust any single total, set the rate to what your time is actually worth and pick in-house or agency to match how the site will really get built. Most of the gap between the platforms is the price of hours, so the rate you put on an hour decides most of the answer.

The cost the 3-year total leaves out: getting back out

The model prices what it costs to run each platform, not what it costs to leave one. That gap runs the opposite way from the headline, and it is the thing WordPress buys with its higher running cost.

• Framer: no official way to export a working site or self-host it. The published site runs on Framer infrastructure, and the third-party exporters that exist produce only a static snapshot, so CMS-driven pages stop updating once you leave.
• Webflow: you can export HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but the export drops the CMS, forms, ecommerce and member areas. Collection lists render empty and forms stop submitting, so a content-driven Webflow site comes out as a static brochure, not the working site.
• WordPress: open source, and you hold the database and the files, so moving to another host is a migration rather than a rebuild. That portability is part of what the higher running cost pays for.

If there is a real chance you outgrow a hosted builder, or you want to own the stack outright, factor a possible rebuild into the Framer or Webflow column. On a brochure or marketing site you never plan to move, that exit cost stays hypothetical and the lower three-year total stands.

The other line the total leaves out: growth pushes you up the plan ladder

The three-year totals price the plan each site needs today. Both hosted builders meter usage, though, so the plan you start on is not always the plan you keep. Framer and Webflow each cap bandwidth and CMS items per tier, and a marketing site that takes off, or a blog that keeps publishing, can cross a ceiling and get pushed onto the next tier up. That is the same cheap-plan-is-a-trap dynamic that shows up in subscription tools: the sticker is for the tier you fit now, not the one your usage grows into.

• Framer prices by tier on its own pricing page: the Basic plan at 10 dollars a month includes 50 GB of bandwidth, and the Pro plan at 30 dollars includes 100 GB of bandwidth and 2,500 CMS items, with more bandwidth, CMS items and pages available only as paid add-ons or on Enterprise. The 25,000 visits and 60 posts modelled here sit well inside those limits, but a step change in traffic, or a library of a few thousand CMS items, would not.
• Webflow works the same way: its site plans each carry a monthly bandwidth allowance and a CMS item cap, and a content-heavy site with a large library or heavy traffic is moved onto a higher plan to stay within them. The CMS item count, not just the visitor number, is part of what moves you up.
• WordPress does not meter this way. Its cost is the maintenance and hosting line, not a usage ceiling, so growth shows up as a bigger host bill you choose, rather than a plan jump the platform forces.

For the brochure-plus-blog in this model, neither builder ceiling bites, so the totals stand. The caveat is for the site that grows into a busy content hub: check your projected monthly traffic and CMS item count against the plan’s included limits before you assume the three-year figure holds, because on a metered plan the bill steps with usage, not with the calendar.