WooCommerce pricing: what it really costs

The bill above already covers hosting, the one cost WooCommerce itself doesn’t erase to $0. Card processing and paid extensions are left out on purpose: every ecommerce platform pays some card rate, and a store only pays for the extensions it actually installs, not a fixed set. Everything below explains what moves those extra numbers, and where this free plugin’s real cost is actually hiding.

Which kind of business is WooCommerce actually built for?

WooCommerce’s core plugin costs $0, with no plan tiers and 0% taken from any sale. That deal favors two kinds of buyers most: a direct-to-consumer brand selling its own product online, and an agency that builds and maintains WordPress sites for clients anyway and can fold store upkeep into work it already bills for. Both get unlimited products, orders and product variants on that $0 core, when we checked on 26 September 2026.

Everyone else pays for that price tag in a different currency: time. An owner who wants hosting, security patches and plugin updates handled by one vendor on one bill is choosing the wrong tool. A store with nobody willing to keep WordPress, the plugin and every installed extension updated — in-house or through an agency — is better off starting somewhere that handles it for them. There’s no trial: the plugin is already free, and paid extensions carry a 30-day money-back guarantee instead. Free-core support runs through WordPress.org’s community forums, not a Woo help desk; a real support ticket queue comes bundled only with paid extension subscriptions.

What decides how much hosting adds to the bill?

WooCommerce has no hosting plans of its own, so this is the number that actually varies. Woo’s own pricing page puts it at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, and Pressable, a host on Woo’s recommended list, prices its cheapest tier at exactly $25 a month for one WordPress install — the tier behind the solo bill above. Add staff, sales and traffic, and the tier climbs with it: the small-team bill above sits on a $45 tier, and the growing-team bill on a $155 tier. Outgrow a tier mid-month and Pressable bills the overage directly, at $1.20 for every 1,000 visits past the plan’s allowance.

Woo’s own hosting guide points newer, lower-revenue stores a different way: WordPress.com’s Commerce plan, at $70 a month billed monthly or $45 for the first year on yearly billing, which bundles in several extensions a Pressable-hosted store would otherwise buy separately. What it costs after that first year isn’t clear: WordPress.com showed two different renewal prices on the same day, so budget for an increase without a firm figure to plan around.

Which paid extensions will you actually end up buying?

Most stores need one or two of these, not all of them. WooCommerce Subscriptions, for recurring products and memberships, costs $279 a year per site; Bookings, for appointments and rentals, costs $249. Smaller ones such as Product Add-Ons, Product Bundles or Gift Cards run $79 a year each, and AutomateWoo, for marketing automation, costs $159. Woo also sells a ten-extension bundle, the Essentials collection, for $753 a year; buying its eight paid extensions on their own instead totals $873 a year, so the bundle saves $120 — but only for a store that wants all eight. A store that just wants Subscriptions is better off buying that one alone.

Every extension subscription, bundled or not, covers one live site plus one staging copy; a second production site needs its own subscription. Subscriptions and Bookings both also offer a 2-year term at a listed 20% saving over two separate 1-year terms. Either way, every extension renews at whatever the list price is when the renewal actually happens, not the price you first paid or any promotional rate that got you in the door — a 2-year term just delays that reset by a year.

What does WooPayments charge beyond the base rate?

WooCommerce’s own platform fee is 0%, full stop, no matter which gateway processes a sale. WooPayments, Woo’s own gateway, isn’t free: the base US rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per card transaction, and several situations add more on top. A card issued outside the US (Puerto Rico counts as outside, too) adds 1.5%; a payment in a currency that doesn’t match any of your payout bank accounts adds another 1%. A disputed charge costs a flat $15, refunded automatically if you challenge it and win. Buy-now-pay-later options cost more again: 6% plus 30 cents per payment for Affirm or Afterpay, 5.99% plus 30 cents for Klarna. Selling in person costs 2.7% plus 10 cents a swipe, with the same international and currency add-ons, plus $5 a month for every card reader with three or more transaction attempts that month; Tap to Pay on a phone skips that fee entirely. Optional instant payouts cost 1.5% of whatever gets paid out early.

There’s one contradiction worth flagging: WooCommerce’s pricing page states there are no subscription processing fees when you use the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, but WooPayments’ own fee schedule adds 1% to any order billing a subscription payment through its Stripe Billing engine, on the first charge and every renewal after it. We couldn’t resolve which claim wins in practice, so budget for the 1% until Woo’s support confirms otherwise for your store. WooPayments also advertises 10% off processing fees for a merchant’s first three months, with no published list of who actually qualifies.

Is paying by the year worth it?

Sometimes, and the two costs pull in opposite directions. Pressable bills yearly hosting at ten times the monthly rate, which it markets as two months free, so paying yearly for hosting is a straightforward saving. WordPress.com’s Commerce plan works the same way for its first year only, dropping from $70 to $45 a month, though what happens at renewal isn’t a number Woo or WordPress.com make easy to find.

Extensions cut the other way: the multi-year saving is real, but it only delays the renewal-price reset. A store confident it’s keeping an extension for years gets a genuine saving from committing early; one still deciding whether it needs the extension shouldn’t lock in two years to save on something it might drop within six months.

When does a hosted platform make more sense?

For a straightforward retail store, Shopify is the direct alternative, and the bills above tell an incomplete story on their own: $45 a month for WooCommerce’s small-team scenario looks far cheaper than $105 for Shopify’s equivalent plan. What that gap doesn’t show is who’s keeping WordPress core, the WooCommerce plugin and every installed extension patched, backed up and compatible with each other — work Shopify’s higher price folds in for you, and WooCommerce leaves entirely on your plate. A business with that person already on staff or on retainer gets a genuinely lower bill from WooCommerce. One without anybody assigned to that job is paying Shopify’s price a different way: as risk, not as a monthly charge, if it picks WooCommerce instead.

The full breakdown of where each platform pulls ahead as a store grows, and what it costs to switch between them later, is at Shopify vs WooCommerce.