Free software has the highest bills. And no one sees them until it's too late.

There's a conversation that repeats in budget meetings at any university: "Why pay for a CMS when WordPress/Drupal are free?"

It's a reasonable question. Open Source software has no license cost. You can download it, install it, and start using it without paying a single euro. In theory, this should translate into significant savings compared to proprietary solutions.

In practice, exactly the opposite happens.

The illusion of zero cost

When a university evaluates implementing WordPress or Drupal, the initial financial analysis usually considers:

With these figures, the decision seems obvious. Why pay $50,000 or $100,000 per year for a SaaS platform when you can have the same thing "free"?

The problem is that this analysis systematically ignores between 60% and 80% of the real cost of operating these platforms.

The costs nobody budgets for

1. The hosting you actually need

Shared hosting at $10/month works for a personal blog. For a university with tens of thousands of visitors, multiple sites, and availability requirements, the reality is very different.

Enterprise WordPress:

Enterprise Drupal:

According to data we handle in real implementations, the Drupal enterprise infrastructure cost for a medium-sized university ranges between $420,000 and $500,000 over five years. Just in hosting.

2. The plugins that aren't optional

WordPress has over 60,000 plugins available. Many are free. But the ones you actually need to operate a professional site are not:

Essential plugins and their typical annual costs:

A typical professional WordPress site has between 15 and 30 active plugins. If 40-50% are premium, you're looking at $500-1,500/year just in plugin licenses. Per site.

For a university with 50-100 microsites, landing pages, and departmental portals, multiply that figure.

And here comes the additional problem: every premium plugin has annual renewal. If you don't renew, you lose security updates and support. And an outdated plugin is a vulnerability waiting to be exploited.

3. The IT time nobody counts

According to a Marketpath analysis, average maintenance for a WordPress site requires between 6.82 and 24.5 hours per year. At a developer cost of $61-140/hour, we're talking about $416-3,185 annually. Per site.

But that figure assumes everything goes well. It doesn't include:

The reality is that IT teams at universities dedicate between 40% and 60% of their time to web maintenance tasks that add no value to the business. Every hour that an $80/hour developer spends resolving a plugin conflict is an hour not dedicated to strategic projects.

4. The updates you can't do

In the previous article, we talked about version lock-in. But there's a direct economic cost associated.

When it's time to update from one major version to another (WordPress 5.x to 6.x, Drupal 7 to 10), it's not an update. It's a project.

Typical migration costs:

And these projects tend to exceed budget. According to our experience, 70% of CMS migration projects exceed the initial estimate by at least 30%.

The business model that funds "free"

Here we get to the part that's rarely discussed openly: if the software is free, how do the companies behind it make money?

Automattic (WordPress):

Acquia (Drupal):

The software is the bait. Optimized hosting services, enterprise support, premium tools—that's where the business is.

And this creates a structural incentive: the more complex it is to operate the base software, the more valuable the premium services become.

The WP Engine case: when interests collide

The conflict between Automattic and WP Engine in 2024-2025 perfectly illustrates this tension.

WP Engine built a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars offering optimized hosting for WordPress. To improve performance, they disabled by default certain features (like revision history) that consumed resources.

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, publicly accused WP Engine of "degrading the experience" and demanded a licensing fee of 8% of their gross monthly revenue.

When WP Engine refused, Automattic:

The implicit message was clear: if your business depends on the WordPress ecosystem, you're subject to the decisions of whoever controls that ecosystem.

For a university that has its digital infrastructure built on WordPress, this represents a risk that doesn't appear in any traditional TCO analysis.

Calculating the real TCO: an uncomfortable exercise

Let's put concrete numbers for a medium-sized university (10,000 students, 50-100 sites, 100-200 content editors):

WordPress scenario (5 years)

| Concept | Cost | | :---- | ----- | | Managed enterprise hosting | $120,000-300,000 | | Premium plugins (50 sites x $500/year) | $125,000 | | Initial development | $100,000-150,000 | | Annual IT maintenance (40 hrs/month x $80/hr x 60 months) | $192,000 | | Major updates (1-2 in 5 years) | $75,000-150,000 | | Contingencies and incident resolution | $100,000 | | Estimated total | $712,000-1,017,000 |

Drupal scenario (5 years)

| Concept | Cost | | :---- | ----- | | Acquia enterprise hosting | $420,000-500,000 | | Initial development | $275,000-350,000 | | Dedicated technical staff (3-5 developers) | $750,000-900,000 | | Updates/migrations (D7→D10) | $250,000 | | Custom integrations | $100,000 | | Contingencies | $150,000 | | Estimated total | $1,945,000-2,250,000 |

These numbers are not speculative. They're based on documented real implementations and on price ranges published by the providers themselves.

The "free license" ends up costing between $700,000 and $2.2 million over five years.

The invisible opportunity cost

Beyond direct costs, there's a cost that never appears in spreadsheets: opportunity cost.

Every week your marketing team waits for IT to publish a landing page is a week of lost lead capture.

Every campaign that doesn't launch because "the web can't support the changes in time" is revenue not generated.

Every hour your technical team dedicates to "keeping the web running" is an hour not dedicated to digital transformation projects.

At IE University, before migrating, the average time-to-market was 2 years per business school. After, they published 30 sites in one year. The difference isn't just operational. It's competitive.

The right question about budget

When someone in your organization says "WordPress/Drupal is free," the answer isn't to argue about licenses.

The right question is: "How much does it really cost us to operate this platform, and what could we do with those resources if we didn't have this operational burden?"

If you honestly calculate all the costs, you'll probably discover that "free" software is one of the most expensive items in your technology budget.

And that there are alternatives with predictable costs that, over 5 years, are significantly more economical.

In the next and final article of this series, we'll talk about what marketing teams really need: freedom to execute, not autonomy to configure servers.