Is WooCommerce Free? What the Plugin Costs and What a Real Store Costs

Is WooCommerce free? The plugin is — genuinely, permanently free and open source, with no license fee and no revenue share. Running a store on it is not. Every live WooCommerce store pays for hosting, a domain, payment processing, and usually a few extensions. Budget roughly $500 a year at the bottom and six figures at the top.

What is genuinely free

The free part is real, and it is not a trial that expires. WooCommerce is a GPL plugin in the WordPress.org repository: version 11.1.0 shipped on September 3, 2026, and the listing shows more than seven million active installations (source). You can download it, install it, sell on it, and never send Automattic a dollar. WooCommerce’s own pricing page states the platform has “0% revenue share” and no platform fees (source).

Also free, and worth naming precisely because people budget for them by mistake:

• WordPress itself. The CMS underneath WooCommerce is GPL. There is no seat count and no license renewal.
• A working theme. Storefront and a long list of block themes will run a store at $0. You are paying for design, not for permission.
• TLS certificates. Let’s Encrypt is a nonprofit issuing free certificates to more than 700 million websites, and almost every host now provisions and renews them automatically (source).
• Part of the extension marketplace. WooCommerce’s extension directory carries “hundreds of free and paid extensions” (source). Analytics, several payment gateways, and shipping label printing sit on the free side.
• Your data. Orders, customers, and products live in your own MySQL database. Leaving is a database export, not a negotiation.

That last item never appears on a price sheet and is the reason most stores pick WooCommerce to begin with. What follows is everything the price sheet does cover.

What every live store actually pays for

Below are the September 2026 published numbers, line by line. The ranges are wide on purpose: a store shipping 40 orders a month and a store shipping 40 orders an hour are not buying the same thing.

Two worked examples

Line items are abstract. Totals are not. Both examples use published September 2026 rates and simple arithmetic you can redo with your own numbers.

A first store doing $20,000 a year, about 400 orders at a $50 average order value. Hosting on a shared WooCommerce plan: SiteGround lists $4.99/month promotional and $29.99/month on renewal for GrowBig (source), so call it $60 in year one and $360 after that. Domain $12. Certificate $0. Storefront theme $0. No paid extensions. Card fees at 2.9% + $0.30: $580 plus $120 in fixed fees, or $700. Email on Klaviyo’s free tier at $0. Year one lands near $772; the steady-state year lands near $1,072. Payment processing is already the largest line, and the plugin is still $0.

A working store doing $250,000 a year, about 3,000 orders at $83. Managed hosting at $50/month is $600 (Kinsta lists a single-site 40GB plan at $50/month for 65,000 visits — source). Domain $12. Astra Pro renewal $149. Three extensions — Product Add-Ons, Table Rate Shipping, AutomateWoo — $357. WP Rocket $60. Card fees: $7,250 plus $900 in fixed fees, plus roughly ten disputes at $15, or $8,300. Klaviyo at 25,000 profiles, around $400/month, is $4,800. Sixty hours of developer time at $100 is $6,000. Total: about $20,300 a year. The free platform is still free. Card fees and people account for roughly 70% of the bill.

The costs people miss

• Renewal pricing. Budget hosting advertises the first year. SiteGround’s WooCommerce plans list $2.99–$7.99/month promotional against $17.99–$44.99/month on renewal (source). Year two is a different budget from year one.
• The fixed fee, not just the percentage. At a $25 average order value, the $0.30 per transaction is another 1.2% on top of 2.9%. Low-AOV stores pay an effective rate closer to 4.1%.
• Cross-border stacking. An international card on Stripe or WooPayments adds 1.5%, and currency conversion adds 1% on top of that (source). A store with 40% overseas customers is not paying 2.9%.
• Disputes. Stripe charges $15 when a dispute arrives, and $15 again if you respond manually — refunded if you win, not if you lose (source). WooPayments lists the same $15 dispute fee.
• Extension renewals. WooCommerce marketplace licenses are annual and per site. Stop paying and you keep the code but lose updates and support, which on a payment or shipping extension is a security decision, not a budget one.
• Profile-based email billing. Klaviyo moved to active-profile billing in February 2025, so contacts you never email still appear on the invoice (source). List hygiene is now a line item.
• Subscription surcharges. WooPayments adds 1% to the entire order when subscription payments run through Stripe Billing (source).
• Your own hours. Testing checkout after every update, tracing a plugin conflict, rebuilding a shipping rule. It is unbilled, but it is not free.

Where Urumi fits in this math

For most of the stores reading this, it does not — and saying otherwise would be dishonest. Urumi is the platform layer for WooCommerce stores doing roughly $1M–$50M GMV, where an hour of broken checkout costs more than a year of hosting. It is custom-priced and it is never the cheap option. Below that revenue line, a $25/month plan and a careful update routine is the right answer.

Above it, the arithmetic inverts: the license is $0 and the revenue leak is the expensive part. That is what Urumi is built to find and fix — slow pages, checkout bugs, launch-day crashes — with over $60M in GMV running on the platform today. If your store is in that range, the managed WooCommerce platform page explains what is included; if it is not, come back when it is.

Frequently asked questions

Is WooCommerce really free?

Yes. The WooCommerce plugin is GPL-licensed and free to download from WordPress.org, with no license fee, no seat count, and no revenue share on your sales. What costs money is everything a store needs around it: hosting, a domain, payment processing, and any paid extensions or themes you choose.

Does WooCommerce take a percentage of my sales?

No. WooCommerce’s pricing page states 0% revenue share and no platform fees. Your payment processor takes a percentage — 2.9% + $0.30 per US card transaction on Stripe or WooPayments, 3.49% + $0.49 on PayPal Checkout — but that money goes to the processor, not to WooCommerce.

Can I run WooCommerce without paying for hosting?

Not for a real store. WooCommerce is self-hosted software, so it needs a server running PHP and MySQL. WooCommerce’s own pricing page puts hosting at $25–$350/month for most stores; free or near-free plans exist but will not hold up under checkout traffic.

How much does it cost to start a WooCommerce store?

A minimal store can launch for under $100: a domain at $10–$20, a shared WooCommerce hosting plan at $3–$8/month promotional, a free certificate, and a free theme. After that, payment processing at roughly 3% is the first real cost, and it scales with your revenue rather than with the software.

If you are sizing infrastructure rather than software, read what managed WooCommerce hosting must include and how many PHP workers WooCommerce needs — those two decisions move your hosting bill far more than the plugin ever will.

Last reviewed September 2026. Competitor details come from their public pages on the dates linked; check them before you buy.