Free calculator
News site cost calculator
Choose your number of sites, traffic and the features you want, and see your news site's setup and monthly running costs line by line.
Step 1 of 3
Describe your site
How many news sites will you run?
Monthly visitors per site
How much does a news website cost?
A news site's cost isn't a single number: servers and hosting, a domain, a news theme, plugin licenses for SEO, security and backups, and above all regular maintenance all add up. As traffic grows, servers, CDN and DDoS protection cost more too.
This calculator estimates your setup and monthly running cost line by line based on your number of sites, monthly visitors and the features you want. Maintenance cost changes depending on whether you, a freelancer or an agency handles the technical work.
Results use approximate list prices from common providers; use your own quotes for an exact budget.
How to calculate your news site cost
- 1
Choose how many sites you'll run and monthly visitors per site.
- 2
Select the features you want on your site.
- 3
Choose who handles the technical work and your currency, then press "Calculate cost".
How is it calculated?
- Server: by traffic, shared hosting / small VPS (≈$15), mid-size VPS or managed WordPress (≈$40), a powerful server (≈$120) and a multi-server setup (≈$350), per site per month.
- Features: approximate monthly cost of common premium plugins or services for each feature, from yearly licenses (e.g. SEO ≈$8, security ≈$10, backups ≈$6). CDN and web push costs grow with traffic.
- Maintenance: base hours by traffic plus 0.5 hours per feature and 1.5 hours per extra site, multiplied by the hourly rate of your chosen support.
- Setup: a premium news theme license per site (≈$59) and about 10 hours of setup work.
- The calculation covers infrastructure and technical costs only; content team costs such as editors and reporters are not included.
- Prices are approximate and vary by provider, exchange rate and period.
News site cost FAQ
On your own stack, the one-time cost is a news theme license plus setup work. If you do the technical work yourself you only pay for the theme; with a developer, setup cost is added based on their hourly rate. The calculator shows this separately.
A news site's cost is made up of servers, a domain, a theme, plugin or service licenses and regular maintenance. It ranges from tens of dollars a month for a small site to several hundred for high-traffic sites. Calculate your own scenario with the tool above.
Usually maintenance and technical support: time spent on updates, security issues, plugin conflicts, backups and server tuning during traffic spikes.
More visitors need a more powerful server, a paid CDN and DDoS protection; web push services priced by subscriber count cost more too.
Paying yearly, removing unused plugins and considering all-in-one cloud news software that bundles servers, security and features in one subscription are the most effective ways.
Values are based on approximate list prices from common providers and may change over time. Use your own quotes for an exact budget.
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