WordPress usually costs less to build. But it costs more to run over three years. That extra cost comes from hosting, plugin renewals, and maintenance. Astro paired with a headless CMS typically has the lowest three-year cost. It ships static files with little to patch. Next.js with Sanity sits between the two. It costs more upfront but stays cheap to run.

Key takeaways

  • WordPress builds are often price-competitive with Astro upfront. But recurring hosting, plugin, and maintenance costs usually make it the priciest option over three years.
  • Astro paired with a headless CMS such as Sanity or Storyblok ships static pages that need almost no server maintenance. This keeps running costs low.
  • Next.js with Sanity costs more to build than the other two. But it keeps ongoing costs down through incremental static regeneration and usage-based hosting.
  • Vercel and similar platforms bill on usage. So an unoptimized Next.js site that renders every request live can generate an unexpectedly high bill during a traffic spike.
  • The right stack depends more on how often content changes and who edits it than on raw build price.

Updated 15 August 2026: sources added, experience claims checked against our project record, summary added.

WordPress vs Astro, Next.js & Sanity: A Practical Cost Comparison

How We Grouped the Cost Comparison

Comparing WordPress, Astro, and Next.js on sticker price alone misses the point. The costs that decide whether a client stays happy in year three show up over time. They include hosting, CMS or plugin subscriptions, maintenance retainers, and the occasional emergency fix. This guide breaks each stack into five categories: initial build, monthly hosting, CMS or plugin subscriptions, developer maintenance, and emergency fixes. Then it projects those costs three years out. Upfront cost is the least interesting part of the comparison.

We have shipped builds at both ends of this spectrum. Our SleepDr migration moved a sleep medicine practice from WordPress to Next.js 15 with Payload CMS and Supabase. Lighthouse performance rose from 35 to 94, and the build stayed HIPAA-safe throughout. Our bdManagedIT migration moved a Central-Georgia MSP from WordPress to Astro, Sanity, and Netlify. It landed 95+ PageSpeed scores on zero-JS static pages. Those two projects sit near opposite ends of the ranges below.

The Headline Numbers

The table below is a hypothetical illustration. It shows how the numbers tend to shake out for a mid-sized business site, based on typical agency pricing patterns rather than a single invoice.

Stack Initial build Monthly running 3-year TCO
WordPress $4,000 - $18,000 $80 - $450 $14,000 - $48,000
Astro (+ headless CMS) $5,000 - $14,000 $0 - $90 $6,000 - $17,000
Next.js + Sanity $7,000 - $22,000 $20 - $300 $9,000 - $38,000

A few things stand out. WordPress is not reliably the cheapest stack to build anymore. A custom WordPress theme with the plugins a business actually needs often lands in the same range as an Astro build. Over three years, Astro tends to win on cost. Static output costs very little to run.

Cheapest is not the same as best, so keep reading.

WordPress: Where the Money Actually Goes

WordPress still powers a large share of the web (w3techs.com tracks the current figure), and it is far from dead. But its cost profile has shifted. Clients are often surprised by the breakdown.

The build itself is rarely the expensive part. What adds up is the recurring cost:

  • Managed hosting. Real managed WordPress hosting is not free, and pricing scales with traffic and site count. Cheap shared hosting exists, but it is often slow, and slow pages cost conversions.
  • Premium plugins. A typical business site needs SEO, forms, caching, and backup plugins. Several of these require paid licenses that renew every year, indefinitely.
  • Maintenance. Plugin updates break things. PHP version bumps break things. Someone has to test and patch. That is real, recurring developer time.
  • Emergency fixes. Plugins are consistently the largest source of WordPress vulnerabilities, according to trackers such as WPScan and Patchstack. An unpatched or abandoned plugin can turn into an unplanned cleanup bill.

Say a regional business site costs $6,500 to build, then runs $210 a month for hosting, plugins, and a maintenance retainer. Over three years that is roughly $14,000, before counting any incident response after a compromised plugin.

The attack surface is the quiet cost. A WordPress site has a database, a PHP runtime, a login endpoint, and a stack of third-party plugins. Any of them can ship a vulnerability. That is not FUD. It is simply more moving parts to defend.

WordPress vs Astro, Next.js & Sanity: A Practical Cost Comparison - architecture

Astro: Cheap to Run, Needs a Dev

Astro has the opposite personality. The build takes real developer skill, but once it ships, the ongoing bill barely moves. Astro compiles to static HTML with minimal JavaScript, so hosting can serve plain files from a CDN. There is no database, no server runtime to exploit, and nothing to patch at 2am.

Many Astro sites run entirely within a free hosting tier. Netlify and Cloudflare Pages both handle a large amount of traffic at no cost. Sites that outgrow the free tier usually do so because they added a headless CMS plan or heavier image processing, not because static hosting itself got expensive.

Performance backs this up. In our own bdManagedIT migration, moving from WordPress to Astro, Sanity, and Netlify lifted PageSpeed scores to 95+ on zero-JS static pages. Unoptimized WordPress sites, weighed down by render-blocking scripts and unoptimized images, often score far lower on the same Lighthouse audits.

Say a marketing site is built on Astro with a lightweight Sanity content layer. It costs $8,200 to build, runs on Cloudflare Pages for $0 a month, and only adds a small retainer when the client wants new landing pages. A three-year total under $11,000 is realistic in that scenario. Most of that spend is optional feature work rather than keeping-the-lights-on maintenance.

The catch, and it is a real one, is that Astro needs a developer to change content unless you wire up a proper CMS. That is exactly why the stronger builds pair it with a headless CMS, covered next.

// Astro pulls content at build time, so the shipped site is static
// This runs during 'astro build', not on every request
const posts = await fetch('https://your-cms.api/posts').then(r => r.json());
---
{posts.map(post => <article><h2>{post.title}</h2></article>)}

Next.js + Sanity: The Middle Path

Next.js with Sanity is a common choice for teams that need both performance and self-service editing. It combines React's flexibility, incremental static regeneration so content updates without a full rebuild, and Sanity's editing experience. Our Next.js development and headless CMS work is mostly this combination.

The cost sits between the other two. Builds run higher because there is more engineering involved. A proper Next.js and Sanity site is a real application, not a themed template. Running costs stay low compared with WordPress:

  • Hosting. Vercel has a free tier that covers many small business sites, and paid tiers scale with usage. Cloudflare or a self-hosted VPS can push the cost lower still.
  • Sanity. The free tier is generous, and most business sites never need to leave it.
  • Maintenance. No plugin roulette and no security patching on a PHP stack. Dependency updates still happen, but they are a quiet quarterly task rather than an emergency line item.

Our Florida Massage Elite build shows how fast a Next.js project can move once the architecture is settled. It shipped a full Next.js 15, Supabase, and Stripe verified-therapist directory in five weeks, complete with Stripe Identity verification and subscription billing. Cost still scales with feature complexity like that. That is why identity verification and payments push a build toward the higher end of the range.

Say a media company publishes daily and moves from WordPress to Next.js with ISR serving cached static pages. On WordPress, surviving traffic spikes needed hosting costing several hundred dollars a month. The hosting bill often drops to a small fraction of that even as traffic grows. That happens because the site serves cached pages instead of hitting a database on every request.

Watch the Vercel bill, though. That is the next section.

The Vercel Bill Nobody Warns You About

Usage-based hosting can spiral quickly if a Next.js site server-renders every request instead of relying on static generation or incremental static regeneration, especially during a traffic spike. Stories describing surprising five-figure bills circulate periodically. The pattern is consistent: uncached server rendering, a spike in traffic, and per-image optimization charges stacking on top of each other.

Vercel's pricing is usage-based on serverless function invocations, bandwidth, and image optimization. Build a Next.js site that renders every request live instead of using static generation or ISR, add a traffic spike, and the bill can climb fast. Image optimization is a common trap, since Vercel charges per source image transformed, and a poorly configured gallery can quietly add up.

The fix is architectural, not accidental. Use static generation and ISR aggressively. Cache what you can. Consider offloading image optimization to Cloudflare Images or a dedicated service. Or, and this is a good part of why Astro suits content sites well, ship static files that cost close to nothing to serve.

This is the single biggest reason to avoid reaching for Next.js by default. It is a powerful tool that punishes lazy configuration.

Three-Year Total Cost of Ownership

Here is the three-year projection using the midpoint of each range from the table above. This is arguably the only comparison that matters. Year one flatters WordPress, but years two and three tend to punish it.

Year WordPress Astro Next.js + Sanity
Year 1 (build + running) $9,000 $8,500 $12,000
Year 2 $3,200 $600 $1,800
Year 3 $3,200 $600 $1,800
3-year total $15,400 $9,700 $15,600

Astro comes out ahead on total cost of ownership. WordPress and Next.js with Sanity land close over three years, but they get there differently. WordPress starts low and bleeds recurring costs. Next.js starts high and then goes quiet. Using the ranges above, WordPress's higher end can exceed $45,000 once emergency fixes and premium hosting stack up. Astro's upper bound, by contrast, rarely climbs past $17,000 for a comparable site.

Content Editing: The Deciding Factor

All of this cost analysis matters less if the client cannot run their own site. So this is the question worth asking first, before budget, before anything else: can the client update content themselves, and how often?

Here is a simple way to think about it:

Editing need Best fit Why
Rarely changes, dev-managed Astro (file-based) Cheapest to run, no CMS overhead
Occasional edits, non-technical team Astro + Sanity/Storyblok Static speed with a friendly editor
Daily publishing, editorial team Next.js + Sanity ISR plus real editorial workflows
Client wants a full plugin marketplace WordPress Ecosystem depth, familiar admin

The old assumption, that if a client needs to edit content it has to be WordPress, is not true anymore. Sanity, Storyblok, and similar tools give non-technical editors a form-based interface many teams find easier than the WordPress admin, without the plugin sprawl. Marketing teams often pick up Sanity's editor within a single onboarding session, since it mirrors familiar form-based interfaces.

Where WordPress still genuinely wins is the plugin marketplace. If a client needs a plugin that only exists on WordPress, such as a niche membership or booking tool, rebuilding it on a headless stack gets expensive fast. Sometimes the pragmatic call is WordPress, and that is fine to say out loud.

How We Choose a Stack

The decision usually comes down to four questions:

  1. How often does content actually change? Rarely, lean Astro. Daily, lean Next.js with Sanity.
  2. What is the total budget, build and ongoing? A tight ongoing budget favors Astro, since running costs sit near zero.
  3. Does page speed affect revenue? For e-commerce, lead generation, or anything conversion-sensitive, avoid stock WordPress.
  4. Does the client need a specific plugin ecosystem? If the answer is yes and it only exists on WordPress, build on WordPress.

That is the whole framework. Everything else, like GitHub stars or which framework is trendy this quarter, is noise.

If you want a firm number for your specific project instead of a range, that is what we do. Our pricing page has starting points, or you can get in touch and describe what you are building. We will recommend whichever of these three fits, even when the honest answer is WordPress.

FAQ

Is WordPress cheaper than Astro or Next.js?

Only sometimes, and usually just upfront. WordPress build costs often overlap with Astro's, but recurring plugin renewals, managed hosting, and maintenance typically push WordPress's three-year total higher. Astro paired with a headless CMS tends to have the lowest total cost of ownership, since static pages need almost no ongoing server work.

Why is Astro so much cheaper to run?

Astro compiles a site into static HTML files with minimal JavaScript, so hosting can serve them from a CDN for close to nothing. Many Astro sites run entirely on Netlify's or Cloudflare Pages' free tiers. There is no database or server runtime to patch, so ongoing costs shrink to little beyond domain renewal and occasional CMS fees.

When does WordPress still make sense?

WordPress still makes sense when a client needs a specific plugin that only exists in its ecosystem. It also makes sense when a client wants the familiar WordPress admin and its large marketplace of add-ons. Rebuilding a niche membership or booking system on a headless stack can cost more than accepting WordPress's higher running costs. That makes it a genuine tradeoff rather than an outdated choice.

How can a Next.js site end up with a huge Vercel bill?

Server-rendering every request instead of using static generation or incremental static regeneration pushes usage-based hosting costs up quickly. Add a traffic spike and uncontrolled image optimization, and bills can climb far higher than expected. Vercel bills on function invocations, bandwidth, and image transforms, so an unoptimized architecture pays for work that caching would have avoided. It is an architecture problem, not a platform problem.

Can non-technical clients edit an Astro or Next.js site?

Yes, when the frontend is paired with a headless CMS such as Sanity or Storyblok. Those tools give editors a form-based interface many teams find easier than the WordPress admin. Without a CMS, an Astro site relies on file-based content that needs a developer to change, which suits sites that rarely update and stay cheap to run.

What is the best stack for a daily-publishing content team?

Next.js paired with Sanity generally suits daily-publishing teams best, since Sanity supports real editorial workflows and Next.js's incremental static regeneration updates individual pages without rebuilding the whole site. This combination lets editors work independently while keeping performance close to a fully static site.

Do these cost comparisons apply to e-commerce?

Partly. E-commerce adds payment integration, inventory management, and cart complexity that increase build costs across WordPress with WooCommerce, Astro, and Next.js alike. The general pattern of headless stacks costing less to run over time still tends to hold. A serious store needs its own estimate, though, since transaction volume and catalog size change the maths substantially.

How much does migrating from WordPress to Astro or Next.js cost?

Migrations usually cost noticeably less than a full rebuild, since the content and design already exist and just need a new home. Most of the work involves porting content, preserving URLs with redirects, and protecting search rankings, which keeps the price well below a from-scratch build. Our SleepDr migration moved a WordPress site to Next.js and Payload, lifting Lighthouse performance from 35 to 94. Our bdManagedIT migration moved an MSP to Astro and Sanity, reaching 95+ PageSpeed scores.