Two websites, almost the same name, and one of the most expensive misunderstandings in this industry. I should declare my position immediately: I have only ever run the self-hosted kind. This blog and a second blog are WordPress.org installs on a shared hosting plan I pay for. I have never been a WordPress.com customer, which means half of this post is experience and the other half is a pricing page I read on 20 September 2026 and will tell you the date of every time I quote it.
Same software, two different contracts
WordPress.org is the software. It is free, open source, and it does nothing at all until you put it on a server somebody rents you. You choose the host, you install it, you own the files and the database, and every consequence of that is yours.
WordPress.com is a company’s hosted service built on that software. You buy a plan, they run everything underneath it, and the boundary of what you are allowed to change is set by the tier you bought. The confusion is not that people cannot tell the two apart; it is that both are called WordPress and the dashboards look similar enough that you do not notice which contract you signed until you try to do something the contract does not cover.
Put crudely: one is software you install, the other is a subscription you rent. Neither is the scam that partisans of the other claim.
What the WordPress.com plan grid said on 20 September 2026
I opened the pricing page and wrote down what it showed me. It served euros, because I am in Spain; if you are reading this from the United States or the United Kingdom, your figures will differ and the plan structure may not. The monthly column and the annual column are far apart on every tier, which is worth noticing before you click.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | Storage | What the grid says |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 € | 0 € | 1 GB | Subdomain only; the page states free sites display WordPress.com ads to visitors |
| Personal | 9 € | 4 €/month | 6 GB | Free domain for one year; plugin installation listed |
| Premium | 18 € | 8 €/month | 13 GB | Payment buttons, video hosting |
| Business | 40 € | 25 €/month | 50 GB | Email marketing and advertising credits listed |
| Commerce | 70 € | 45 €/month | 50 GB | WooCommerce integration, 0% transaction fees |
One row on that page contradicts almost every comparison article on the internet, including the version of this post I have just deleted. The received wisdom is that WordPress.com is not “real” WordPress until the Business tier, because plugin and theme uploads are locked below it. The grid I read lists plugin installation from Personal upward. I have not bought a Personal plan to see what that means in practice, what the exceptions are, or whether uploading your own code is the same thing as installing from a directory, so I am not going to tell you it is settled. What I will tell you is that the claim you have read a hundred times is worth checking against the page before you plan a site around it, and that this is exactly the kind of detail platforms move without announcing.
What my side of it costs, on the same day
Self-hosted WordPress has no licence fee, so the bill is hosting plus a domain. Hostinger’s shared hosting page, checked on 20 September 2026, lists Premium at $2.99 a month on a 48-month term, renewing at $10.99, with 20 GB of storage and room for three sites. Unlimited is $3.99 renewing at $16.99, with 50 GB and daily backups.
Two things about that which the headline hides. The first is the term: $2.99 means paying for four years in advance, and the number that actually describes the plan is $10.99. The second is that three sites share one bill, which is where self-hosting gets cheap and a per-site subscription does not. I break the whole spend down, domains and mail included, in what I pay for hosting, domains and email, and the plan-by-plan detail is in the hosts I actually pay for.
Four things that change when you hold the files
The maintenance lands on you, including the parts you did not know existed. This is the honest headline and I have the bruises. On 20 September 2026 I checked my own two WordPress blogs with curl and found that neither returned any page-cache header: every single request was running PHP 8.3 to rebuild a page that had not changed. That had been true since the day the blogs launched. Nobody was going to tell me. On a hosted plan, caching is somebody’s job by contract; on mine it was my job and I had not done it.
The defaults are yours to audit. Same week, same site: the public REST API endpoint at /wp-json/wp/v2/users was handing my actual login name to anyone who asked, and comments were open on every post while the theme rendered no comment form, so the only thing arriving was spam through the back door. Both are ordinary WordPress defaults and both were my problem. The full pass is in hardening WordPress after finding my own site wide open.
Everything is inspectable, which cuts both ways. The same REST API that leaked my username also let me pull all ninety published posts out of this blog as JSON, without logging in, in one command. That is how I audited the site before rewriting it: export the lot, sort by word count, look at the pattern instead of the page. A hosted platform that decides what you may query is a platform that decides what you may learn about your own content.
Leaving is a file transfer rather than a negotiation. WordPress ships an export and an import in both directions, and the files on the server are the site. That is not a small advantage. When I moved this blog from a static export to WordPress, the files were the easy part and the old addresses were the hard one, which I wrote up in moving a site to WordPress without leaving ghosts behind.
Why I will not give you a total-cost verdict
You can find a dozen posts that put “WordPress.com Business: $300 a year” next to “self-hosted: $80 a year” and declare a winner. I am not doing it, for three reasons.
The prices above are in two different currencies, collected from a Spanish connection, on pages that decide what to show based on where you are. Putting a euro subscription next to a dollar hosting plan and subtracting is arithmetic, not analysis.
The two sides are not the same product. One includes updates, backups, security and someone else’s uptime commitment. Mine includes an afternoon discovering my cache did not exist. Whether that afternoon was worth the difference depends entirely on what your afternoon is worth.
And the cheap number on my side depends on a four-year prepayment and on spreading one plan across three sites. For a single site with no term commitment, the gap narrows a long way.
The side of WordPress.com I have never seen
I have never opened a WordPress.com dashboard as a paying customer, so I have no opinion on its editor, its support, its performance or how a migration into or out of it feels in practice. I have not measured its uptime or its response times. I do not know which advertising arrangements each tier permits, and that is one to read in the terms of the specific plan rather than in any comparison post, including this one.
If I buy a plan to find out, this post gets updated with the date, the tier and what it actually did. Until then, what is here is one hosted pricing page with a timestamp and one self-hosted setup I have run for long enough to have found my own mistakes in it.
Who should hold the files
Nobody is going to maintain it. Take the hosted plan. Not because self-hosting is hard, but because an unmaintained WordPress install is a liability with a countdown on it, and the subscription is an insurance premium against a problem you have already told me you will not handle.
The site is the business, and it will grow. Self-hosted, on a plan that carries more than one site. You keep the files, the database and the freedom to move, and you accept a maintenance list you will actually work through. The exact setup behind this blog, cost included, is in how this blog is set up.
You are not sure yet. Buy the domain at an independent registrar first, whichever way you jump. It is the only decision in this comparison that is genuinely hard to undo, and it turns any future change of mind into a DNS edit rather than a rebrand. Everything else here is a migration, and migrations are just work.