The short version: WooCommerce charges $0 in platform fees, and by its own published figures you then pay $25 to $350 a month for hosting and $29 to $299 a year per extension. At the cheapest end that is $300 a year in hosting before you have added a single extension, which already exceeds Big Cartel's $144 and lands near Shopify's $348. Two extensions take you past $500. The software is genuinely free; the store is not. And the largest cost is not on any price list: you are now the person responsible for updates, backups, and security.
Figures came from WooCommerce's own pricing page in July 2026.
The published numbers are WooCommerce's own, which is the fairest place to start.
| WooCommerce | |
|---|---|
| Subscription | $0 platform fee. You pay for hosting, which WooCommerce's own page puts at $25 to $350 a month for most stores |
| Free trial | Not applicable. The plugin is free to install; hosting is what you buy |
| Platform fee | $0. No commission on sales |
| Card processing | Depends on your chosen gateway. WooCommerce does not set a rate |
Extensions are the other line: $29 to $299 a year each, bought à la carte.
Notice what is honest about this. WooCommerce publishes the hosting range rather than pretending hosting is free, and it publishes the extension range rather than hiding it. That is more candour than "free" usually comes with.
Build it up from the published ranges, at the cheap end throughout.
So a genuinely minimal WooCommerce food store is $373 to $515 a year before processing. Add $492 of processing on $12,000 of sales across 480 orders and you are at $865 to $1,007 all-in.
Compare that to platforms that include everything:
The free platform is the most expensive option on that list. Not by an enormous margin, but the direction surprises people, and it is entirely because hosting and extensions are real costs that hosted platforms absorb into their subscription.
Our breakdowns of Shopify vs Big Cartel and Shopify vs Squarespace for food sellers work the hosted side of that comparison through in detail, and both include hosting, security, updates, and support in the number.
This is where the total moves, and where the à la carte model either saves you money or quietly costs you a lot.
The needs that WooCommerce core does not fully cover for a local food business:
Every one of those is a paid extension in the $29 to $299 range, or a free plugin of uncertain quality and lifespan. Three of them at the middle of the range is roughly $400 a year, which doubles your hosting cost.
The honest counterweight is real, though: you can build exactly what you want. Hosted platforms give you their idea of local delivery, and if it does not match how you actually operate, you work around it forever. On WooCommerce you can have a delivery radius that matches your actual radius. For a business with genuinely unusual requirements, that flexibility is worth money.
Our look at WooCommerce alternatives for cottage food covers who ends up leaving and why.
You become the system administrator, and nobody puts an hourly rate on that.
On a hosted platform, someone else handles updates, security patches, uptime, backups, and the database. On self-hosted WooCommerce, that is you or someone you pay. Concretely:
CISA's resources for small and medium businesses covers the baseline expectations for anyone running their own web infrastructure, and it is a useful reality check before choosing self-hosted. Most of it is genuinely achievable; none of it is automatic.
Put a number on it. If keeping the site healthy takes two hours a month, that is 24 hours a year. At $30 an hour of your own time, that is $720, more than the entire hosting bill. Managed WooCommerce hosting at the higher end of the published range exists precisely to buy that back, which is why the range goes to $350 a month.
There are real cases, and they are more specific than "it is free."
That first one is the strongest. A food business with an established WordPress blog ranking for local searches has an asset, and bolting a store onto it is cheaper and safer than migrating away.
That last point deserves weight. Every platform breaks occasionally. The difference is whether breakage is someone else's emergency or yours, and a bakery in the middle of a Friday bake is not well placed to debug a plugin conflict.
The tell is who fixes it when the checkout breaks on a Saturday. WooCommerce puts you in charge of updates, plugins, and hosting conflicts; if that sentence sounds like a second job, it is, and it pays nothing.
Only as a starting point, and this is a useful habit for every vendor comparison you read, including this one.
WooCommerce's own pricing page compares itself against competitors and quotes their prices. Some of those figures are worth checking at the source. Wix's own pricing page, checked directly in July 2026, lists Core at $29 a month on a yearly subscription with no commission on sales, and it does not state any online revenue cap.
That is not an accusation of bad faith. Competitor tables go stale, terms change, and every vendor frames comparisons to its own advantage. It is a reason to do what you would do with any sales material: read the competitor's own page before believing a competitor's summary of it.
Apply the same standard here. Every figure on this page came from the vendor's own pricing page in July 2026, and you should check them yourself before spending money, because pricing pages change and articles do not.
Whether you self-host or not, these stay with you:
On the tax point specifically, extensions exist that calculate rates at checkout and almost none file a return for you. The obligation starts with registration in every state where you have one, and the IRS's recordkeeping guidance covers what you are expected to retain, which matters more on a self-hosted store where nobody else keeps a copy of anything.
If your requirements are ordinary and what you actually want is to stop administering software, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: you cannot customise it. There is no plugin ecosystem, no theme editing, no code access, no blog, and it does not ship nationally. If you need something specific enough that only a plugin can express it, WooCommerce does things it cannot. If your requirements are pickup days, a delivery radius, and not thinking about sales tax, you can run a week of real orders through it and compare against a year of hosting bills.
Step three is where most WooCommerce plans fall apart. "Free plus hosting" becomes "free plus hosting plus four extensions plus a theme plus a developer for a day," and by then a $348-a-year hosted platform looks like a bargain rather than a compromise.
Do the exercise before you start, not after. Writing down six requirements and pricing an extension for each takes half an hour, and it is the difference between choosing WooCommerce deliberately and drifting into it because the word free was on the page.
The cheapest way to sanity-check the result is to run one real week both ways. Putting a week of actual orders through a hosted storefront while you cost out a WooCommerce build gives you a working comparison rather than two spreadsheets, and it surfaces the requirements you forgot to write down.
Worth thinking about in both directions, because self-hosting changes the answer.
Leaving is easier than people fear. Your database is yours, WooCommerce exports products and orders as CSV, and your domain moves with a DNS change. Nobody can lock you out of a site you host.
Staying is where the cost accumulates. Every extension is a dependency with its own update cycle, its own developer, and its own chance of being abandoned. A store running eight extensions after three years has eight things that can stop being maintained, and replacing an abandoned extension usually means rebuilding whatever it did.
That is the honest long-term difference between self-hosted and hosted. A hosted platform's risk is that the company changes terms or shuts down. A self-hosted store's risk is quieter: nothing dramatic happens, the pieces just drift out of maintenance one at a time, and eventually an update breaks something and the plugin that used to fix it has not been touched in two years.
Neither risk is a reason to avoid either model. Both are reasons to keep your product and customer data exported somewhere you control, and to prefer extensions with active development over ones that merely have good reviews.
The plugin is genuinely free with no platform fee or commission. What you pay for is hosting, which WooCommerce's own page puts at $25 to $350 a month, plus extensions at $29 to $299 a year each.
At the cheapest end, roughly $373 to $515 before processing: $300 hosting, $15 domain, and two entry-level extensions. Add processing on $12,000 of sales and you are near $865 to $1,007 all-in.
Usually not for a small store. Shopify Basic at $348 a year includes hosting, security, updates, and support. A minimal WooCommerce store costs more than that once hosting and two extensions are counted.
No. There is no platform fee or commission. Your card rate depends entirely on which payment gateway you connect, and WooCommerce does not set or mark up that rate.
Typically local pickup scheduling, local delivery with a radius, order lead times, quantity caps, and product options. Each is a paid extension in the $29 to $299 range, so three of them roughly doubles your hosting cost.
You do, or someone you pay. WordPress core, WooCommerce, your theme, and every extension need regular updating, and backups need to exist and be tested. Budget roughly two hours a month.
When you already run a WordPress site with traffic worth keeping, when your requirements are genuinely unusual, or when you have reliable technical help. Choosing it because it is free is the one bad reason.
WooCommerce's platform fee really is $0, and by its own published figures the store then costs $25 to $350 a month in hosting and $29 to $299 a year per extension. A minimal food store lands at $373 to $515 a year before processing, which is more than Big Cartel and roughly level with Shopify, both of which include everything.
The cost that decides it is not on the price list. Self-hosting makes you responsible for updates, backups, and security, and two hours a month of that is worth more than the hosting bill at any honest valuation of your time.
So choose WooCommerce for control, for an existing WordPress site, or for requirements nothing else expresses. Those are good reasons. Choosing it because it is free is choosing the most expensive option on the list while believing you picked the cheapest.
