What it costs to maintain an Astro site

A WordPress site costs money every month even when nobody touches it. Hosting renews, plugin licenses renew, and someone has to click update before a plugin with a known hole gets found by a bot. An Astro site that nobody touches costs the price of its domain.

That gap is real, and it’s also where most “static site maintenance cost” pages stop. The bill for software almost disappears. The bill for time does not, and on an Astro site it lands in two places: changing the content and keeping up with Astro.

TLDR

A static Astro site can run for about $10 a year: a domain plus free hosting and a free form service. A typical WordPress setup with managed hosting and three premium plugins runs around $585 a year before anyone maintains it. What an Astro site still needs is time: text edits if there’s no content editor, and an upgrade when Astro ships a new major, which happened three times between December 2024 and June 2026.

The yearly bill for a static Astro site

Here is every line item for a five to twenty page business site, built with Astro and served as static files.

That’s $10.46 in cash for the year. The free hosting guide explains what each free plan is meant for and which one pauses your site when it runs out of credits.

Some sites pay a little more on purpose. Netlify’s Personal plan at $9 a month removes the risk of a paused site on a busy month. Formspree at $120 a year handles forms with no code and 200 submissions a month. Neither is required.

The yearly bill for a typical WordPress site

WordPress can be cheap too. A lean site on budget hosting with only free plugins costs far less than the setup below. But the common small business setup has managed hosting and a few premium plugins, so that’s what we priced.

That’s $584.26 a year before anyone updates anything. Add a maintenance plan and it climbs fast: WP Buffs’ Maintain plan is $89 a month for weekly updates, uptime monitoring and backups, which brings the total to $1,652.26 a year.

The WordPress side buys things the Astro side doesn’t have. The owner can log in and edit any page in a visual editor. Plugins add a booking system or a members area in an afternoon. On Astro, the editing screen comes from a CMS set up for you, and a booking system or members area is built with a database instead of installed. The Astro vs WordPress comparison covers when each is worth it.

Where the Astro hours go: content edits

An Astro site keeps its text in files. A blog post is a Markdown file, a service page is a component or a data file. That’s fast and safe, and it means there’s no admin screen unless someone builds one in.

So the first question for any Astro site is who changes the words. Three answers work.

1. You edit the Markdown files yourself in GitHub’s web editor, and the host rebuilds the site when you save. Fine for a blog, awkward for anything with layout.
2. A content editor is connected, so you edit in a form and the site rebuilds. This adds setup and sometimes a monthly fee, and it’s worth it if you publish weekly.
3. A developer makes the change. Cheapest when changes are rare, expensive when they’re not.

If you change the site twice a year, option three costs almost nothing. If you change it twice a week, plan option two from the start, because paying a developer for every typo fix is how a “cheap” static site ends up costing more than WordPress.

Where the Astro hours go: upgrades

Astro moves quickly. Astro 5.0 shipped on December 3, 2024. Astro 6.0 followed on March 10, 2026, and Astro 7.0 on June 22, 2026. That’s three majors in about nineteen months.

You don’t have to take every major on release day. A static site that is already built keeps working, because the visitor only ever receives the finished HTML. The pressure comes from the support policy. Astro’s upgrade docs say the core team provides “extended maintenance for security fixes only for one previous major version”. On Astro 7, version 6 still gets security fixes and version 5 gets nothing.

For a fully static site, an unpatched Astro version is a low risk, since Astro runs at build time and not when someone opens the page. For a site with a server route, like a contact form or a small checkout, it’s a real one. That route runs on every request.

The upgrade itself starts with one command, npx @astrojs/upgrade, which updates Astro and its official integrations together. The Astro 7 upgrade guide then lists what may break: the move to Vite 8, a new Rust compiler, a new default Markdown processor and a change to how whitespace in HTML is compressed. On a small site with no custom integrations, that’s usually an hour or two of testing. On a site with a lot of custom Markdown handling, it can be a day.

Between majors, GitHub’s Dependabot can open a pull request when a dependency has an update. Someone still has to read it, build the site and check that nothing looks different before merging.

What we’d budget

For a brochure site that changes a few times a year: the domain, free hosting, and a developer’s hour or two around each Astro major. Under $50 a year in cash, plus a few hours a year.

For a site that changes weekly or has a contact form route: a content editor so the owner can publish without help, and someone who watches the dependencies and the form. That’s what our Site care plan does at $79 a month, on the pricing page: the free-tier hosting set up properly, uptime checks, dependency and Astro updates, a check that the form still delivers, a monthly backup of the repository, and an hour of edits. $948 a year plus the domain lands below the WordPress setup above with a maintenance plan, and above it without one.

The fair comparison is not Astro at $10 against WordPress at $1,652. It’s what each one needs a person for. WordPress needs one for updates whether or not the site changes. Astro needs one when the content or the framework changes. If you’re coming from WordPress and want the move done without losing rankings, the migration guide covers the redirect map, and the Astro website service covers the build.

Before signing any maintenance quote for an Astro site, ask one question: what happens when Astro 8 ships? The answer tells you whether the price includes the upgrade or bills it separately.

Questions