The swap, row by row
| What you use now | Private alternative | What it costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spam filtering | Comment and form spam | Akismet Pro | $9.95 Pro — per month, billed yearly |
| Backups & security | Nothing, until something breaks | Jetpack Security | $19.95 Security — standing rate, billed yearly |
| Courses | A hosted platform you do not own | Sensei Pro | $179 Sensei Pro — per year |
| Job board | A page of links you edit by hand | Job Manager Pro Bundle | $159 Personal licence — per year |
| Shop | WooCommerce core, free | WooCommerce extensions | pricing varies |
| Monthly total, priced rows only | $338 | ||
The total adds the two rows that publish a yearly figure and nothing else. Akismet and Jetpack print a per-month rate and no annual total anywhere on their pages, so multiplying by twelve would put our arithmetic in a column of vendors' prices — see our method. The shop row carries no figure at all, and deliberately: WooCommerce core is free and its extensions are priced one at a time with no single ladder to read.
Every guide to running WordPress compares hosting. That is the easy number, and it is the smaller half of the bill for most sites that do anything. The plugins are the other half, and they are harder to compare because each one is priced in its own shape — per site, per year, per thousand spam checks, per licence activation.
The pattern that emerged when we read all five of these pages on the same afternoon was not about the money. It was that not one of them will sell you a month. Akismet, Jetpack, Sensei and WP Job Manager are all annual licences. Four of the five print a per-month figure anyway, because a small number reads better than a large one, and on none of them can you actually pay it. Sensei's pricing page is the clearest case: the word 'monthly' does not appear on it once, and it still quotes $15 a month.
So the first practical thing to know about the plugin bill is that it lands in one piece. A site that needs spam filtering, backups and a shop is not adding a few pounds a month to a hosting invoice — it is signing up for several annual renewals that will all come round again on their own dates.
Akismet is the one to read most carefully, because its Pro tier is a slider rather than a price. $9.95 a month buys 500 spam checks a month across one site. The rungs above it are exactly linear — double the checks, double the price, at every step we read — so there is no volume discount to find, and the number to budget on is your actual comment and form volume rather than the headline. Business, at $49.95 a month, is where unlimited sites and 5,000 checks start.
Jetpack's is the one to read most sceptically, and for a better reason than usual: it advertises 50% off the first year in large type, against a struck-through standing rate. Both figures are on the page and both are in our record — $9.95 a month for the first year and $19.95 after it. That is an honest promotion, printed honestly, which is rarer than it should be. What Jetpack does not print anywhere is an annual total, so we do not carry one.
Then there is what the site is for. A course platform as a plugin is Sensei Pro at $179 a year, and the interesting comparison there is not against other plugins but against the hosted platforms — we have that one written up against Thinkific and Teachable. A job board is the Job Manager Pro Bundle at $159 a year for a personal licence, or $329 for unlimited activations.
A shop is the row we cannot price, and it is worth saying why rather than leaving a blank. WooCommerce core is free. What costs money is the extensions — payment gateways, shipping, subscriptions, bookings — and they are sold individually on the WooCommerce Marketplace with no bundle and no ladder. There is no single figure to read, so this guide does not invent one. The same is true one level down at WP Job Manager, whose fifty-odd add-ons are each priced on their own page; the bundle above them is the only figure with a ladder behind it, which is why the bundle is what we recorded.
None of this makes plugins expensive. It makes them lumpy, annual, and easy to underestimate when you are comparing hosting quotes to the penny.