Going to share some numbers because I think people deserve to see them plainly.

I added up what a typical WordPress setup actually costs per site per year. Managed hosting, a premium theme, an SEO plugin, a security plugin, a backup plugin, and a caching plugin. Conservative estimates.

The total lands between £500 and £900. Per site. Every year.

Contentful, the headless CMS platform you'll find recommended as the "modern" alternative, starts at $300 a month. $3,600 a year. That's for content management only. You still have to build and host the actual website on top of it separately, using a JavaScript framework.

CARL is a one-time payment. Unlimited sites. Unlimited domains. Client work included. Every update I ship is included automatically because I run my own sites on CARL, and I'm not going to let it go stale.

I'm not sharing this to pitch anyone. I genuinely found the comparison surprising when I laid it out, and I built the thing.

Has anyone here actually priced out their full WordPress stack recently? Curious what the real number looks like for people.