The $635 a year nobody budgets for.
A typical WordPress plugin stack renews at about $635 a year, before hosting or anyone's time. Here's the itemized list, at renewal prices.
When an owner tells me what their website costs, they quote the hosting bill. Maybe the care plan. Almost nobody counts the plugins, because the plugins don't arrive as one bill. They arrive as eight small renewals on eight different dates, on the card that happens to be on file.
Here's a typical paid stack for a small-business WordPress site, priced at renewal, not at the first-year discount.
| Plugin | What it does | Renewal |
|---|---|---|
| Elementor Pro (Essential)Page builder | Page builder | $60.00 |
| Astra Pro add-onTheme features | Theme features | $69.00 |
| WP Rocket (Single)Caching, speed | Caching, speed | $59.95 |
| Gravity Forms (Basic)Contact forms | Contact forms | $59.00 |
| ACF PRO (Personal)Custom fields | Custom fields | $49.00 |
| Wordfence PremiumSecurity firewall | Security firewall | $149.00 |
| Yoast SEO PremiumSEO | SEO | $118.80 |
| UpdraftPlus (Personal)Backups | Backups | $70.00 |
| A year | $634.75 | |
Source: Vendor pricing pages, renewal list prices, read October 2026.
Your stack may be different. The shape usually isn't: a builder, a form plugin, a speed plugin, a security plugin, an SEO plugin, a backup plugin. Each one solves a real problem. Each one bills separately.
The first-year trick
Several of these vendors advertise 50% off the first year and say in the fine print that renewals are at full price. WPForms, MonsterInsights and Astra all work this way. So the quote you got when the site was built understated year two by somewhere around $150 to $250. Nobody lied. The number just moved.
Add a couple more common plugins, analytics at its $199 renewal and an image optimizer, and the stack gets to about $1,350 a year.
Three years of it
- plugin renewals over three years, the $635 stack
- $1,904
- Statamic Pro over three years: $349 once, then $99 a year
- $547
Over three years, the $635 stack is about $1,904 in plugin renewals alone. Add managed WordPress hosting and it's somewhere between $2,900 and $4,050, before anyone's time.
For comparison, the platform under a Ludic site is a Statamic Pro license at $349 once, plus $99 a year for updates after the first year: $547 over three years. Ludic includes it in the conversion price and in Keep.
The part that isn't on any invoice
The renewals aren't the expensive part. The time is.
Eight plugins means eight update schedules, from eight vendors who don't coordinate. In 2025 the WordPress ecosystem logged 11,334 new vulnerabilities, 91% of them in plugins, and 46% had no patch available when they were disclosed. That's the structural reason WordPress care plans exist, at $89 to $350 a month. You're not paying someone to make your site better. You're paying someone to keep eight things from breaking each other.
That's fine if someone does it well and you're happy with the price. Plenty of owners are. But it's worth knowing you're paying it.
How to find your own number
Ten minutes, no tools:
- Log in to WordPress and open Plugins. Write down every plugin with "Pro," "Premium" or a license field.
- Search your email for each plugin's name plus "renewal" or "receipt."
- Add them up. Then add hosting, and your care plan if you have one.
If the total surprises you, you're in good company. If it doesn't, you're better organized than most of us.
What Ludic does about it
Ludic moves sites off WordPress onto Statamic, page for page, for $6,000, or $500 a month for a year. Forms, redirects and SEO fields are built into the kit, so there's no WordPress-style plugin stack to renew. After year one, Keep is $120 a month and covers hosting, updates and backups.
Or keep your stack, and now you know what it costs.