The migration debate is settled elsewhere. This post is about what you actually spend every year once the site is built and handed over — Sanity + Next.js on one side, a self-hosted WordPress on the other. Both stacks running in production, both with real editors, both needing to stay secure and fast.
What counts as steady-state cost
I'm counting four buckets: hosting infrastructure, third-party licenses (plugins, themes, SaaS add-ons), the developer time consumed by maintenance and security patching, and the hidden cost of editor inefficiency — the hours content teams lose to a slow, brittle CMS UI. I'm not counting one-time migration work or design fees; those belong in a different post.
All figures below are 2026 market rates, USD, for a mid-size content site: 20–50k monthly sessions, one Sanity project or one WordPress install, two to five editors.
Hosting
