Is WooCommerce Free? What It Costs to Run a Store in 2026

Yes, WooCommerce itself is free. The plugin costs nothing to download from WordPress.org, takes no cut of your sales and sets no limit on products or orders. It is open-source software with 7+ million active installs on WordPress.org (3 November 2026). What costs money is everything around it:

The free plugin is a complete store, not a trial. Out of the box it handles:

• Products: simple, variable (sizes and colors), grouped, external, downloadable and virtual.
• Cart, checkout, customer accounts and order emails.
• Coupons, tax rates and shipping zones.
• Orders, refunds and stock levels in wp-admin.
• Reports under WooCommerce > Analytics, and a REST API for other tools.
• Product import and export as CSV: see how to export WooCommerce products.

The payment plugins are free too: WooPayments, Stripe and PayPal Payments cost nothing to install. You pay their processing fee when a customer pays.

Every card payment carries a processing fee, whichever gateway you pick. For WooPayments in the United States, WooCommerce’s fee table lists:

• 2.9% + $0.30 per payment with a US card.
• An extra 1.5% when the card was issued outside the US.
• An extra 1% when the payment currency differs from your payout currency.
• A $15 fee when a customer disputes a payment.
• No setup fee and no monthly fee for online payments.

So a $50 order paid with a US card costs $1.75 in fees, and the customer pays nothing extra. Stripe and PayPal set their own rates, so compare them for your country and the cards your customers use. On a busy store, payment fees are usually the biggest cost of all.

Most stores need a handful of extensions at most. The WordPress.org directory has thousands of free ones, and WooCommerce.com sells official extensions as yearly plans with updates and support. Two examples:

• WooCommerce Subscriptions, for recurring payments: $279 for a one-year plan.
• Woo’s Shipment Tracking extension: $59 a year, though a free plugin covers the basics; see how to send shipment tracking emails.

Every paid extension is another yearly renewal and another thing to keep updated, so add one only when a free option can’t do the job.

Hosting is the main fixed cost. A store needs more from its host than a brochure site, because carts, checkout and account pages can’t be served from a page cache: every one is built fresh. Pick hosting that names WooCommerce in its plans and keeps daily backups. A domain is a yearly fee. Most hosts now give you a free SSL certificate, which every store needs so checkout runs over HTTPS.

1. Start with the free core features and add extensions one at a time, when you need them.
2. Compare payment gateways on their fees for your country, not on their install counts.
3. Spend on good hosting before you spend on speed plugins.
4. Use a free block theme such as Twenty Twenty-Five and customize it, rather than buying a heavy theme.
5. Keep plugins few and updated: a hacked store is the most expensive kind. Patchstack counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, 91% of them in plugins.

After launch, the bill that keeps growing is time: adding products, changing prices, running sales, updating stock and answering order questions. That is the work an AI agent can now take off your hands.

WPOS works on WooCommerce through WooCommerce’s own APIs, covering products, stock, orders, refunds, customers, coupons, tax rates and shipping zones, from inside wp-admin on the store you already run. A request looks like this:

“Create a 10% coupon called AUTUMN10 that expires on Sunday and doesn’t apply to sale items.”

Our WooCommerce page covers what the agent touches. WPOS is our product, so weigh this section accordingly; you can try it free for 30 days with 5,000 credits, a live site plus a staging sandbox, and no card.