Every month a Bergen County owner asks the same question: WordPress, Webflow, or Shopify — which is cheaper long-term? The marketing pages make all three sound nearly free. The reality, once you run a 5-year TCO against a real business, is a gap of $18,000 to $42,000. Which wins depends entirely on your business type. Here are the honest numbers.
WordPress: low monthly, high one-time, real maintenance
A professionally built WordPress site for a B2B service business runs $4,500 to $12,000 up front. Hosting is $25-$80 per month on a managed host like Cloudways or Kinsta. Plugin licenses for Elementor Pro, a forms plugin, a backup plugin, and a security plugin land at roughly $500-$700 per year. Maintenance — actual maintenance, not “I’ll get to it” — runs $100-$300 per month if outsourced. Over five years a properly run B2B WordPress site lands at $19,000-$32,000 all in.
The thing nobody tells you: ignoring maintenance is what blows the budget. The $5K build with $0 maintenance becomes a $15K rebuild in year three when a plugin update breaks checkout and the backup turns out broken for eight months. WordPress is the cheapest platform if maintained. The most expensive if not.
Webflow: middle build, higher monthly, near-zero maintenance
Webflow’s pitch is a real one — it shifts cost from maintenance to platform fees. A custom Webflow build for a B2B service site runs $6,000-$15,000. Hosting starts at $14/month for a basic CMS site and climbs to $39/month for the Business tier most service businesses need. Maintenance is genuinely minimal — no plugins to update, no security patches, no PHP version drift. Five-year all-in lands at $20,000-$28,000.
The catch is structural. Webflow’s CMS caps at 10,000 items, no native multi-language, no real ecommerce above a couple hundred SKUs. Brochure + blog + contact form, Webflow is excellent. Member portals, course delivery, complex ecommerce — you hit the wall and pay to migrate.
Shopify: low build, high monthly, high transaction fees
Shopify hides cost in transaction volume. A Shopify theme build is $3,500-$10,000. The Basic plan is $39/month, Shopify is $105/month, Advanced is $399/month — and most growing brands move to the Shopify tier within 18 months. App subscriptions for reviews, email, upsells, inventory, and shipping rules add up fast — $150-$400 per month is typical. Then there are transaction fees on top of payment processing if you use anything other than Shopify Payments.
For a brand doing $200K-$1M in revenue, Shopify lands at $28,000-$45,000 over five years. Worth every penny if you are selling physical product. A complete waste of money if you have ten orders a month — at that volume, WooCommerce on WordPress is roughly half the cost.
Which one wins, by business type
The honest answer is that the platform follows the business, not the other way around:
- B2B service business (accountant, MSP, law firm, agency): WordPress wins if maintained, Webflow wins if the team has zero appetite for maintenance. Total 5-year delta is usually $3,000-$6,000.
- Content-heavy blog or media site: WordPress wins by a wide margin. Webflow’s CMS limits and Shopify’s blog UX are both painful at scale.
- Ecommerce, $200K+ revenue: Shopify wins. Inventory, shipping, taxes, payment ops are solved problems. Do not fight it.
- Ecommerce, under $50K revenue: WooCommerce on WordPress wins. Shopify’s monthly cost is a tax on volume you do not have yet.
- Membership, courses, complex bespoke: WordPress, every time. The plugin ecosystem is unmatched.
The decision is rarely about price
On 5-year numbers, the three platforms land within $10K of each other for most use cases. The real decision is operational. Who maintains it? What does the business look like in year three? How comfortable is the team with marketing-tech ops versus paying more monthly to never think about it? Pick the platform whose ongoing cost matches your operating reality, not the cheapest sticker price.
How AJD handles this
Before we quote any build, we run a 5-year TCO worksheet against the actual business — projected revenue, team’s tech comfort, content volume, ecommerce volume, integration needs. Half the time the answer is the platform the client expected; half the time we save them $8K-$15K by steering them off the wrong one. Whether you work with us or not, do the math on your own situation before you commit. The platform that looks cheapest in month one is rarely the one that wins in year five.
Not sure which platform fits your next 5 years? Send us your business model and current site. We will run the TCO and tell you the honest answer in writing — even if the answer is “stay where you are.” Book Free Discovery Call →
