Why the cheapest CMS is rarely the cheapest website

A founder asked me last month why I would ever recommend a CMS with a licence fee when WordPress is free. It is a reasonable question. The answer is that the CMS is the small print on the website bill and the small print is what decides whether the project pays for itself.

I have built websites on most of the major platforms over the years. The pattern I see is consistent enough to write down. The cheapest CMS by sticker price is almost never the cheapest website by the time you have owned it for three years. What follows is why.

Three cost structures, three different traps

CMS platforms tend to cluster into three structural shapes. Each shape has a different way of hiding cost.

The first shape is free-plus-plugins. WordPress is the obvious example. The core is free. The site is built by stacking commercial plugins on top, each with its own licence and renewal. Some plugins do one job well. Many overlap. The total plugin bill on a mature WordPress site is often larger than a Craft licence.

The second shape is licensed-and-bounded. Craft is the obvious example. You pay for the core, you pay for the plugins and the total is visible because everything has a licence and a renewal. Nothing is free, but nothing is hidden either.

The third shape is SaaS-bundled. Squarespace and Webflow sit here. You pay a monthly subscription that covers hosting, the platform, most features and updates in one bill. There is no plugin marketplace in the traditional sense. The trade-off is that you are renting the platform rather than owning the codebase and you cannot leave with the same site you arrived with.

Each shape has a hidden cost. Free-plus-plugins hides the plugin sprawl and the maintenance burden. Licensed-and-bounded hides nothing on the licence side but can hide the developer skill required. SaaS-bundled hides the lock-in cost that only shows up when you outgrow the platform.

WordPress feels free until the bill arrives

A typical WordPress site I have audited has somewhere between fifteen and forty plugins installed. A handful are essential. Most are vestigial, installed for a feature that was needed once and never removed. Each plugin is a potential security vector, a potential conflict with the next plugin update and a potential renewal fee.

The visible cost of a WordPress site is the hosting and a few premium plugin licences. The invisible cost is the time spent keeping the stack stable. Plugin updates that break a theme. Theme updates that break a plugin. A core update that breaks a custom function in the theme. A security incident every two or three years because one of the forty plugins had not been updated.

None of that means WordPress is wrong. I still recommend it for plenty of projects. What it means is that the headline of a free CMS does not survive contact with a real maintenance budget. Plan for the plugin renewals and the developer hours from day one and the maths is honest. Skip them and the site quietly compounds into a problem.

Craft costs the same money but in different boxes

Craft asks you to pay for the licence upfront, then renew annually for updates. The plugin model is the same. Pay once, renew yearly. There is no free shape to start from, which feels expensive, but the total spend over three years is often similar to a comparable WordPress site once you account for the plugins WordPress sites actually buy.

The difference is that the costs sit in visible boxes. You know what the licence cost. You know what the plugins cost. You know what the hosting costs. The maintenance retainer is a line item you negotiate explicitly. Nothing hides, which makes Craft easier to budget for and harder to undercost into a corner.

Where Craft costs more honestly is the build itself. The platform expects bespoke content modelling rather than a theme purchased for forty pounds. The starting line of the front-end build is higher, which raises the initial invoice. I wrote about the full Craft cost model separately if you want the breakdown.

Squarespace and Webflow look cheap until you outgrow them

A Squarespace site is genuinely cheap to start and cheap to maintain for the right kind of business. A brochure site, a small e-commerce store, a portfolio. The subscription covers everything and the platform handles updates, hosting and security. For a single-person business with no developer, this is often the right choice.

The structural cost shows up when the site needs to do something the platform was not designed for. A custom content model. A specific integration with a CRM that has no plugin. A landing page that needs server-side logic. Performance tuning beyond what the platform exposes. The platform pushes back and the cost of pushing back is high because you cannot open the codebase and change it.

The other structural cost is the migration tax. Leaving Squarespace usually means rebuilding the site somewhere else from scratch. The content exports cleanly enough, but the design and the structure do not. Teams that outgrow Squarespace tend to pay twice. Once for the years they stayed too long and once for the rebuild.

The question that actually decides the cheapest website

When I help a team pick a CMS, the question that matters most is not what does the licence cost. It is what does the site need to do over the next three years and who is going to do it.

A brochure site for a one-person business with no developer is cheapest on Squarespace. The platform fits the constraints. The migration tax never lands because the site never outgrows the platform.

A marketing site for a small team with occasional developer help and standard requirements is often cheapest on WordPress. The plugin ecosystem covers most needs and the developer pool is large enough that you are not over a barrel for hires.

A content-heavy site with a real editorial team and complex content modelling is usually cheapest on Craft over three years. The build invoice is higher. The maintenance is lower. The editor friction is lower. The plugin sprawl never happens.

I have written a side by side comparison of Craft and WordPress if you want the longer version. The short version is that the cheapest CMS is the one that fits the work without forcing workarounds.

The hidden costs nobody quotes for

Three costs almost never appear in a CMS quote. They are real, they are large and they decide the answer more often than the visible ones.

Editor friction is the first. A CMS that confuses the content team slows down publishing. Posts that should ship in an afternoon take a week. Banners that need updating get postponed because the editor cannot remember which template to use. The cost is invisible because it does not appear on an invoice, but the team feels it every day.

Security incidents are the second. A site that takes a serious hit costs days of senior developer time, lost trust with customers and a chunk of SEO if the incident is bad enough. Platforms with smaller plugin ecosystems tend to have smaller attack surfaces. WordPress sites with twenty plugins have more attack surface than Craft sites with five.

Developer availability is the third. WordPress has the largest developer pool, which makes hiring easy and cheap. Craft has a smaller pool, which makes the right developer harder to find and more expensive to hire. Squarespace barely has a developer pool at all because the platform does not expose that surface. Each constraint feeds back into the cost.

What to do next

If you are picking a CMS based on the headline cost, write down the full three-year picture before you sign anything. Licence, plugins, hosting, build, maintenance, training, editor time, security budget. Put numbers next to each line, even rough ones. The CMS that wins on the headline often loses on the total and the CMS that loses on the headline often wins on the total.

If you want a second opinion before you commit, see what Craft CMS work or WordPress work looks like as a senior freelance engagement and tell me where you are leaning. The right answer is sometimes neither and I will say so if that is what I see.