WordPress has that one screen. You know the one I'm talking about.

The installed plugins page. It can take so long to scroll you wonder if there's gonna be a commercial break halfway through. One of the rows is sporting a little banner that says your license expires in 9 days and the firewall stops getting fresh malware signatures unless you renew. Ruh roh.

You keep scrolling. Yoast wants another $118. Wordfence wants another $149. The forms plugin's free trial is over and wants $59, though the piece that actually routes a submission to your particular CRM is a separate add-on and you have to contact them for pricing. Somewhere in there is a caching plugin that needed a second subscription for image optimization you figured was already included.

These are good plugins, by the way — built by real people who care, solving real problems. Not knocking them at all. The problem with this situation is broader than any one of them: they don't renew on the same day, they aren't built by the same people, they all handle support completely differently, and the bill lands in a different inbox every month of the year.

This is the part of the "but WordPress is free!" pitch that somehow never makes it onto the scoping sheet. After all, nobody gets fired for choosing WordPress. It's too popular to be a bad choice. Right?

Add it all up

Here's a modest WordPress stack — the responsible one a real business site actually runs:

• SEO — Yoast Premium, $118/year
• Forms — Gravity Forms Basic, $59/year
• Caching — WP Rocket, $59/year
• Security — Wordfence Premium, $149/year
• Backups — UpdraftPlus Premium, $70/year

That comes to $455. Every year. Five plugins, five jobs, five different companies (six when you include Automattic), one website.

And that's the conservative version. Move up to the Gravity Forms tier that takes payments, add the image-optimization subscription WP Rocket leaves out, put a page builder like Elementor Pro on top, and you can clear $700 a year before you've gotten a visitor.

The Vendor Spreadsheet

Each plugin is its own company — its own roadmap, its own support queue, its own release schedule. Plenty have been acquired over the years (Yoast joined Newfold Digital back in 2021), and consolidation tends to nudge prices up over time. Every one of those is a fair business decision. It also leaves you quietly managing a portfolio of relationships you didn't set out to sign up for.

When WordPress ships a major release, five vendors have to be ready on roughly the same day. Most of the time it's fine. Some of the time it isn't, and you lose an afternoon figuring out which update quietly broke the contact form. Or the image slider on the home page. Or the email notifications.

This goes deeper too. A good slice of the WordPress security market exists to watch over the surface that the rest of the plugins create — more code, more moving parts, more places for something to go sideways. It's a reasonable thing to pay for, given how important security, uptime, and reliability are to any business. It's also worth questioning why you're paying for it at all.

What ships in the box

Statamic comes at this from the other side. A good chunk of what you'd reach for a plugin to do is already sitting in core, free, written by the same team who built the CMS.

• Forms are built in — validation, email notifications, hooks for custom business logic, the works. No plugin, no license.
• Caching is built in, and comes in several different flavors based on your needs. Including static site generation.
• Image resizing, cropping, and optimization is built in.
• Passkeys, two-factor, and elevated sessions are built into core too.
• Backups? Your content is flat files in a Git repo. Your backup is git push. Your restore is git revert or git cherry-pick. Out of the box there's no database to dump and store somewhere, because there's no database (but if you need one, we support them, and there are free Laravel packages to automate your backups).

Being straight about our own pricing

Fair is fair, so here's the honest version of what we charge:

• Core — free forever, build whatever you'd like
• Pro — $349 per site, paid once, with an optional $99 a year after that for continued updates and direct support from us
• SEO Pro — $75, paid one time

So there's a renewal in the picture if you want it. And we do recommend it — updates are pretty important for security and reliability. The real difference is the shape of it: one platform, one team, one place to look — rather than a calendar full of separate dates from separate companies.

The first-party stuff

When you want more than core gives you, a lot of the good stuff comes from us.

SEO Pro handles meta tags, Open Graph, structured data, sitemaps, redirects, 404 tracking, and reports that grade every page on your site and tell you what to fix. One addon, built by the team that builds the thing it plugs into. When major updates to Statamic ship, SEO Pro ships right alongside it, because the same team moves both. No waiting on an outside vendor to catch up.

And there's more coming. Forms already live in core, and Forms Pro is on the way for the heavier lifting. But I'll save the details for another day. Soon. 👀

The Laravel ecosystem

If you've spent time in the Laravel ecosystem, you know how good it is. You composer require a package (probably from Spatie), it does its one job, it gets along with the next package, and the whole thing stays calm.

Statamic addons work much the same way. They're Composer packages, and the marketplace is full of them — Cargo for e-commerce, Cookie Byte to manage cookie consent, Bard Mutator to unlock another level of control of your content markup, a handful of SEO addons that happily share the same shelf — and the people building them are part of the same community we are. It feels a lot more like the Laravel world than anything else. Many are free, there's a lot of collaboration, and the code is public on Github.

Five years of receipts

Let's take that same example stack and let it ride for five years. Here's the software side by side — what it runs per year, and where it lands after five:

A couple of honest footnotes: These are entry-level tiers on a single site, and the table ignores the price drift that tends to ride along with renewals. Real WordPress bills usually run higher once you want payments in your forms or a page builder in the mix. The Statamic $99 a year is optional, too — let it lapse and your site keeps running, you only stop getting new updates and support.

Do the math on the boring stuff

Numbers on a page are easy to wave off, so go pull your own. There are plenty of alternatives to the plugins we listed, but the same fragmentation will exist however you slice it up.

Switching a CMS is a real project, and not something to do on a whim. But the next time a renewal notice lands or your plugin page is full of banners shouting at you to upgrade, it's worth asking — is it worth it?

Give Statamic a look. Core's free forever. You can use Pro in development as long as you'd like. We've been building Statamic for 14 years now, and it's still getting better every single day. We ship multiple releases every week, all year round. We're obsessed with user experience. Your experience.

And if you need a Statamic expert to get your project rolling, check out our Partners directory. These folks are awesome.