WooCommerce cost in 2026: hosting, extensions, payments and three worked budgets

WooCommerce costs nothing to download, and a working store usually costs from about $900 a year in software for a small shop to $8,000 or more for a large one, before payment fees and the people who run it. In practice the biggest line is card processing, about 3% of sales on WooPayments' US list rate, followed by development and upkeep. This guide prices every line from the vendors' own pages, checked on 10 November 2026, and works the totals for three store sizes.

WooCommerce is open-source software released under the GPL-2.0 license (GitHub), and the WordPress.org plugin page lists version 11.2.2 with 7+ million active installations. WooCommerce's own pricing page puts it plainly: the core platform is free, with no monthly subscription and no revenue share. What you pay for is everything around it.

Every WooCommerce cost line

WooCommerce has no plans to choose between. The table below is the full set of lines a store pays for, with the published price where the vendor prints one. All figures are US dollars.

Two of these lines scale with the business: payment fees grow with sales, and hosting grows with traffic. The rest are mostly fixed, which is why WooCommerce looks cheap for a large store on paper and expensive for a small one that pays someone to maintain it.

Hosting: the first bill you will see

WooCommerce runs on your own WordPress site, so you choose the host. WooCommerce's pricing page says most stores spend $25 to $350 a month on hosting. Two WordPress hosts that publish their prices show the spread.

Prices are from WordPress.com pricing and Pressable pricing. WordPress.com takes its own transaction fee on payments through its built-in payment features on lower plans; its page says that fee drops to 0% on Commerce, and Stripe's processing fee is separate. Pressable bills overage at $1.20 per 1,000 visits and $1.00 per GB, so a sale or a viral post can push the bill above the plan price.

Cheap shared hosting exists below these prices. For a store taking orders, the cost of a slow or failed checkout usually outweighs the saving. Look for staging sites, daily backups, and someone who answers at night.

Domain and theme

A domain is a small, yearly line. WordPress.com includes one free for the first year on yearly plans, and monthly plans do not. Cloudflare Registrar says it sells domains at cost with no markup. Other registrars price by extension and often charge more at renewal than in year one, so check the renewal price, not the first-year offer.

Storefront, WooCommerce's own theme, is free. Paid themes on the WooCommerce Marketplace are sold yearly; the two listed next to Storefront today are $59 and $79 a year. A custom theme built for your brand is a development cost, covered below.

Extensions: where the annual bill grows

WooCommerce core is deliberately lean, so most stores add extensions for subscriptions, bookings, shipping rules, product options or marketing automation. WooCommerce's pricing page puts them at $29 to $299 a year each. Here are the prices of common official extensions on the WooCommerce Marketplace today:

The 2-year plans are 20% off. Three terms matter more than the sticker price, all from WooCommerce's subscription documentation:

• One key, one store. A subscription covers one production site plus one staging or development site. A second storefront needs its own.
• Renewals are at today's price. Subscriptions renew at 100% of the current listed price for the term, not the price you first paid.
• Lapsing stops updates, not the extension. An expired extension stays installed and keeps running, but it no longer gets updates or support. On a store, that means missed security and compatibility fixes, so a lapsed extension is a risk, not a saving.

Some official extensions are free. WooCommerce Shipping has no monthly fee; you pay only for the labels you buy. WooCommerce Tax calculates sales tax at checkout for free in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and more countries, but it does not file returns or pay tax authorities, and its own page points stores with complex tax set-ups or automated filing to other tools, which cost extra.

Payments: the largest line for most stores

WooCommerce itself charges no fee on payments, and it adds nothing extra if you use a third-party gateway, which Shopify does. You still pay your payment processor. WooPayments' US fees, checked today:

Two details catch finance teams out. Transaction fees are not returned when you refund a customer. And an extra 1% applies to any order containing a subscription payment if that subscription runs on the Stripe Billing engine.

At around $1 million a year in card sales and up, it is worth getting quotes from other processors. WooCommerce works with many gateways, and switching costs development time rather than a platform penalty.

Security, backups and maintenance

On a hosted platform such as Shopify, the vendor patches the software. On WooCommerce, you do. WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme, each extension and the server all need updates, and they must keep working together. Jetpack's pricing page lists its Pro bundle at $29 a month, or $348 a year billed yearly, and Complete at $49 a month, or $588 a year. Managed hosts often include backups and malware scanning, so check what your plan already covers before you buy both.

The larger cost is time. WooCommerce suggests a monthly update schedule for most stores, with security fixes applied sooner, and every update should be tested on a staging copy first. Our WooCommerce maintenance checklist lists the weekly, monthly and quarterly jobs. Budget a few hours a month for a simple store and a standing engineering commitment for a complex one.

Worked examples for three store sizes

These are our arithmetic on the list prices above, checked on 10 November 2026. Inputs marked example are assumptions; change them to your own numbers. Sales tax, shipping labels and marketing are left out.

Example 1: a small store, $300,000 a year

A specialty retailer with one site, example 3,000 orders a year at $100, all domestic cards on WooPayments, set up in-house on a marketplace theme.

• Hosting: Pressable Signature 1, $250 a year.
• Domain: example $20 a year.
• Theme: a $79 marketplace theme, $79 a year.
• Extensions: Product Add-Ons ($79) and Table Rate Shipping ($119), $198 a year.
• Security: Jetpack Pro billed yearly, $348.
• Payments: 2.9% × $300,000 = $8,700, plus 3,000 × $0.30 = $900, so $9,600 a year.
• Maintenance: example 4 hours a month in-house at $75 an hour, $3,600 a year.

Software comes to $895 a year. The total is about $14,095 a year, or 4.7% of sales, and payments are two-thirds of it. The software is cheap. The hidden cost is whose time goes into updates.

Example 2: a growing store, $2 million a year

A brand selling one-off and subscription orders, example 10,000 orders a year at $200, 20% of card sales from international cards, about 60,000 visits a month.

• Hosting: Pressable Signature 3 (staging and room to grow), $600 a year.
• Domain and theme: $99 a year ($20 example + $79).
• Extensions: Subscriptions $279, Memberships $199, AutomateWoo $159, Table Rate Shipping $119, Product Add-Ons $79, Product Bundles $79, so $914 a year.
• Security: Jetpack Complete billed yearly, $588.
• Payments: domestic 2.9% × $1,600,000 = $46,400; international 4.4% × $400,000 = $17,600; 10,000 × $0.30 = $3,000; so $67,000 a year.
• Build: a Gigabit Store Build, from $9,000 fixed, one time.
• Maintenance: example 10 hours a month at $100 an hour, $12,000 a year.

Software comes to $2,201 a year. Year one is about $90,201; year two, without the build, is about $81,201, or 4.1% of sales. Payment fees are 83% of the recurring cost, so the processor rate matters more here than any software choice.

Example 3: a large store, $10 million a year

A B2B and direct-to-consumer business, example 40,000 orders a year at $250, 10% international cards, an ERP integration and custom pricing rules.

• Hosting: Pressable Premium, from $350 a month, at least $4,200 a year.
• Extensions: example 12 extensions at up to $299 each, at most $3,588 a year.
• Security, domain and theme: Jetpack Complete $588 + $20 example + $79, $687 a year.
• Payments at WooPayments list rates: 2.9% × $9,000,000 = $261,000; 4.4% × $1,000,000 = $44,000; 40,000 × $0.30 = $12,000; so $317,000 a year.
• Engineering: one embedded engineer at $3,000–$7,500 a month, $36,000–$90,000 a year.

Software comes to $8,475 a year, under 0.1% of sales. The recurring total is about $361,475 to $415,475 a year, before the initial build, which at this scope is quoted as a fixed price above the Store Build's $9,000 from-price. A store this size should negotiate processing: every 0.1% off the card rate is worth $10,000 a year at $10 million in sales.

When WooCommerce is worth it, and when it is not

WooCommerce is the cheaper platform when your team, or a partner, already owns WordPress and can keep the store updated. It fits when you need to own the code and the data, choose where it is hosted, sell in many markets without per-market fees, or build product and pricing logic that a hosted platform restricts. Unlimited variants and no extra fee for third-party gateways are real advantages for B2B catalogs and businesses with negotiated processing rates.

It is the more expensive choice when nobody owns updates. Then the cost shows up as outages, a slow checkout or a security incident rather than as a line on an invoice. For comparison, Shopify's US pricing, checked today, is $19, $49 or $299 a month paid yearly for Basic, Grow and Advanced, with Plus from $2,300 a month, and Shopify adds 2%, 1% or 0.6% on orders paid through a third-party provider. Our Shopify pricing guide breaks that down, and Shopify vs WooCommerce compares the two on license, fees, hosting, checkout and upkeep.

A short test: if you would need to hire or contract someone mainly to keep WooCommerce running, price that person in before you compare. If you already have that person, WooCommerce usually wins on cost.

What it costs to build and run with Gigabit

Gigabit builds and maintains WooCommerce stores. Our WooCommerce work is priced as fixed scopes:

• Store Build, from $9,000 fixed, from 6 weeks: a custom theme, catalog set-up for up to 500 products, payments, shipping and tax, up to three integrations and launch support. B2B, headless and multi-storefront builds are quoted above that, as a fixed price before work starts.
• Platform Migration, from $7,000 fixed, from 4 weeks: data migrated and reconciled, every old URL redirected, a rehearsed cutover with a rollback plan and 30 days of monitoring. We move stores onto WooCommerce and off it.
• One integration or workflow, $8,000 fixed over 3 weeks, such as orders into an ERP with stock synced back.
• Custom extensions, performance work and upkeep, through an embedded engineer at $3,000–$7,500 a month, with a two-to-four week trial and no lock-in.

For routine upkeep, Store Care is the monthly maintenance plan for WooCommerce and Shopify stores: monitoring, updates, fixes and a monthly report. You do not need any of this if a free theme, a few extensions and an hour a week of your own time do the job, which is true for many small stores. If you are unsure which applies, the maintenance checklist above is a fair test of how much time the store will take.