KEY FINDING. Everything a WordPress site needs that is not the server costs somewhere between $15.46 and $474.08 a year for the same one site at the same traffic. That is a 30.7x spread, and it is not a quality gap. Four of the seven line items have a free tier that is genuinely sufficient at this size, and two of the paid choices most people make by default are the two most expensive lines on the bill. The single largest cost in the cheap column is the domain name. The server has its own arithmetic and is deliberately left out here. This is everything else: domain, TLS, offsite backup, uptime monitoring, transactional email, CDN and object storage. Every figure below is a published list price read on 6 September 2026 from the vendor's own pricing page, before tax. The whole bill, two ways One WordPress site, roughly 50 GB of bandwidth a month, daily backups. Cheapest is the lowest defensible option in each row, not the lowest imaginable. Mid-range is what a careful owner picks without thinking hard about it. Line Cheapest $/yr Mid-range $/yr Domain (.com, renewal) Porkbun 11.08 Namecheap + ICANN fee 18.68 TLS certificate Let’s Encrypt 0.00 Let’s Encrypt 0.00 Offsite backup Cloudways add-on, 5 GB 1.98 Jetpack VaultPress Backup 119.40 Uptime monitoring UptimeRobot Free 0.00 UptimeRobot Solo 144.00 Transactional email Amazon SES pay-as-you-go 2.40 Postmark Basic 180.00 CDN Cloudflare Free 0.00 Bunny.net 12.00 Backup storage Backblaze B2 free 10 GB 0.00 bundled with Jetpack 0.00 Annual total 15.46 474.08 Two lines carry 68% of the mid-range column: managed backup and monitoring. Neither is required at this size, and one of them is beaten by a competitor’s free tier, which I get to below. The domain is the only line you cannot get to zero It is also the line where the advertised price is least likely to be the price you pay. Namecheap’s .com is $6.79 for a new customer with a code and $18.48 on renewal, plus a $0.20 ICANN fee the page states is added on top. That is a 2.7x step up in year two. Porkbun charges $11.08 in year one and $11.08 in year five, and says so on the product page. The gap widens on newer TLDs. Namecheap’s published renewals: .io $75.98, .co $45.48, .app $22.98, .dev $20.98, .org $18.98. If you picked a .io because the first year was $34.98, the renewal is more than double it. Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost with no markup, which its product page, docs, FAQ and learning page all state. What none of them publishes is the actual .com figure. I checked five official URLs. The pricing is only visible inside the dashboard, so I am not printing a number for it. Three lines that are free and should stay free TLS. Let’s Encrypt is free, and wildcards are free too if you can use the DNS-01 challenge. That shrinks the honest case for a paid certificate down to organizational or extended validation, or a host that will not let you do DNS-01. For comparison, a Namecheap Standard DV certificate renews at $6.99 a year and a standard wildcard at $44.39. CDN. Cloudflare’s Free plan includes DNS, CDN, Universal SSL, WAF and unmetered DDoS mitigation. One thing worth being precise about: neither Cloudflare pricing page says “unlimited bandwidth” or “unmetered bandwidth” about the Free plan. Only DDoS mitigation is described as unmetered. The paid step is Pro at $20 a month billed annually, or $240 a year, which for a 50 GB site buys image optimization rather than capacity. Backup storage. Backblaze B2 stores the first 10 GB free permanently, and charges $6.95 per TB per month after that with egress free up to three times what you store. Cloudflare R2 is $0.015 per GB with zero egress at any volume and 10 GB free a month. R2 costs 2.16x more per stored gigabyte; B2’s egress is only free inside the 3x ratio. At 5 GB both are $0. Monitoring: the free tier that beats the paid one UptimeRobot Free gives 50 monitors at a 5-minute check interval, three months of retention and one status page. Its first paid tier, Solo, is $12 a month billed annually, or $144 a year, and buys 60-second checks, SSL and DNS monitoring and twelve months of retention. Better Stack Free gives 10 monitors at a 30-second check interval, one status page, Slack and email alerts and unlimited team members. Its first paid tier is $29 a month billed annually, or $348 a year. Read those two paragraphs against each other. For one site, Better Stack’s free plan checks twice as often as UptimeRobot’s $144-a-year plan. What $144 actually buys is retention, SSL and DNS monitoring, and phone alerting. If you are paying it for the check interval, you are paying for something a competitor gives away. Transactional email: the free tier that quietly disappeared WordPress cannot reliably send its own mail, so password resets, order receipts and form notifications need a relay. The advice everyone repeats is “use Amazon SES, it is basically free.” That is out of date. The current SES pricing page publishes no always-free allowance. What it offers a new account is up to $200 in general AWS Free Tier credits, inside a six-month trial window, to be used within twelve months of account creation. The old 62,000-emails-a-month-from-EC2 allowance is not on the page. SES is still the cheapest way to send at volume: $0.10 per 1,000 emails pay-as-you-go, no plan, no minimum. At 2,000 emails a month that is $2.40 a year. But it is now a metered service from the first message, and it is the option that costs you a morning of DNS and sandbox-exit work. The two relays with real free tiers are SMTP2GO at 1,000 emails a month (capped at 200 a day) and Postmark at 100 a month. For a small site under 1,000 emails a month, SMTP2GO Free takes this line to zero and the whole annual bill down to $13.06. The paid steps are SMTP2GO Starter at $10 a month or $100 a year for 10,000 emails, and Postmark Basic at $15 a month for the same 10,000. Backup: where the mid-range column really goes Jetpack VaultPress Backup is $4.95 a month billed yearly for the first year and renews at $9.95 a month, or $119.40 a year, with 10 GB of backup storage. Jetpack prints both numbers on its own page, which is more than most vendors do. BlogVault Personal is $99 a year, annual billing only, 30-day retention, sites up to 20 GB, but that price sits under a “60% Off” banner and the page publishes no separate list or renewal price, so treat it as a promotion rather than a stable number. If your host already offers offsite backup as a metered add-on, the arithmetic is different by two orders of magnitude. Cloudways charges $0.033 per GB per server per month, billed on incremental change volume and rounded to the nearest $0.50. At 5 GB that is under $2 a year against $119.40. What the $119.40 buys is one-click restore, a managed schedule and someone else’s problem when the restore fails. Whether that is worth $117 a year is a real question, and it is the same question as paying anyone to run infrastructure for you: the price of not doing it yourself. Three things this changes Check the renewal price before the first-year price, on everything. It is the domain’s whole story ($6.79 to $18.48), and it is Jetpack’s too ($4.95 to $9.95 a month). Compare free tiers against each other, not against zero. Better Stack’s free monitoring is more frequent than UptimeRobot’s paid plan. SMTP2GO’s free tier is ten times Postmark’s. The cheap column is not the reckless column. Let’s Encrypt, Cloudflare Free and Backblaze’s free 10 GB are not degraded versions of anything. The two lines where paying actually buys something are backup restore and alerting, and those are the two lines to decide deliberately. Method, assumptions and limits Method. Every figure was read on 6 September 2026 from the vendor’s own pricing page or official documentation, listed under Sources. No promotional pricing is used in the totals except where a vendor publishes only a promoted price, which is stated inline. No product was purchased and nothing was benchmarked. Assumptions, stated because they move the totals. Backup data retained: 5 GB, chosen by me and not published by any vendor. A media-heavy site moves this line first. Transactional email: 2,000 messages a month. CDN traffic served from European and North American edges, which is Bunny’s cheapest region; Asian traffic triples that per-GB rate. All figures are USD and, as far as any page read stated, exclude tax. Limits. The server is deliberately excluded; I price it separately in a calculator I keep for that. Support quality, restore reliability and deliverability are real differences between these products and none of them is measurable from a pricing page. Cloudflare Registrar publishes no per-TLD price, so it is absent from the table rather than estimated. Sources Domains: Porkbun, Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar TLS: Let’s Encrypt FAQ, Namecheap SSL Backup: Jetpack VaultPress Backup, BlogVault, Cloudways offsite backup charges Monitoring: UptimeRobot, Better Stack Email: Amazon SES, Postmark, SMTP2GO CDN and storage: Cloudflare plans, Bunny.net, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2 Every price above was read on 6 September 2026 from the vendor's own pricing page, linked in the Sources section. Nothing was benchmarked and no product was purchased. If a figure is wrong, tell me which row and I will fix it. Disclosure: I write this research with the help of an AI assistant. The prices are mine to verify and I read every pricing page myself; the drafting is collaborative.