TL;DR
- Yes, Webflow charges a monthly hosting subscription for any site published to a custom domain. You pay this directly to Webflow, not to your agency.
- For most small business sites with a blog or CMS content, the CMS plan at approximately €23 per month is the right choice.
- There are no surprise fees beyond the hosting subscription. SSL, CDN, and bandwidth are all included.
- The monthly cost is broadly comparable to quality managed WordPress hosting, and removes the plugin, security, and maintenance costs that typically come with WordPress.
You are looking at Webflow as a platform for your new website. You have seen the pricing page. Now you are trying to work out what you will actually pay every month and whether there are any hidden costs you are not seeing.
This is a fair question and one that deserves a plain answer rather than a sales pitch.
How Webflow billing actually works
Webflow charges for hosting separately from any agency or development fee. When your agency builds your site and hands it over, they transfer the site to your own Webflow workspace. From that point, you pay Webflow directly for hosting your published site on a custom domain.
The agency fee is a one-time project cost. The Webflow subscription is an ongoing monthly cost that you pay independently. These are two separate things and it is important to understand that before you start a project.
Which Webflow plan do you actually need
Webflow offers several site plans. Here is what each one actually covers for a typical small business.
The Starter plan is free but does not allow a custom domain. Your site would be accessible at yoursitename.webflow.io. This is only useful for development and testing, not for a live business site.
The Basic plan at approximately €14 per month allows a custom domain and is suitable for simple sites with no CMS. This means no blog, no team pages that are managed through collections, no case studies that update automatically. If your site is a simple five to seven page brochure with no updatable content, the Basic plan works.
The CMS plan at approximately €23 per month is what most small business sites need. It includes up to 2,000 CMS items, which covers a blog, team pages, testimonials, case studies, and service listings for virtually any small business. This is the plan we recommend as a starting point for most clients.
The Business plan at approximately €36 per month is for high-traffic sites or sites that need more than 2,000 CMS items. If you are a small business, you almost certainly will not need this at launch.
Ecommerce plans start from approximately €29 per month and are relevant only if you are selling products directly through your Webflow site.
What is included in the monthly fee
The Webflow hosting subscription includes SSL certificate, CDN hosting through Fastly, bandwidth for your traffic, and all platform updates and security maintenance. There is no separate CDN cost, no SSL renewal to manage, and no security plugin to pay for.
This is a meaningful difference from self-hosted WordPress, where managed hosting, an SSL certificate, a CDN configuration, and a security plugin can easily add up to €30 to €60 per month separately.
Are there any hidden costs
No hidden costs from Webflow itself. The monthly plan covers what the plan page says it covers.
Where people sometimes get surprised is domain registration. Your domain (yourcompany.fi or .com) is registered through a domain registrar like Namecheap or GoDaddy, separately from Webflow. A .fi domain costs roughly €15 to €20 per year. A .com is roughly €10 to €15 per year. This is not a Webflow cost, but it is worth factoring into your total budget.
If you use Webflow's own domain registration service, it charges a similar rate. It is slightly simpler to manage in one place but not meaningfully different in cost.
How it compares to WordPress hosting
The comparison people make most often is between Webflow's monthly plan and managed WordPress hosting.
Budget WordPress hosting on a shared server costs €3 to €10 per month. This is not a fair comparison because shared hosting produces significantly worse performance and reliability. A meaningful comparison is managed WordPress hosting on a platform like Kinsta or WP Engine, which costs €25 to €50 per month for a comparable performance level.
Add a security plugin at €5 to €15 per month and an image optimisation or CDN plugin at €5 to €20 per month, and a properly maintained WordPress setup costs €35 to €85 per month. The Webflow CMS plan at €23 per month with everything included is genuinely cost-competitive.
For a full cost comparison between platforms, read our post on Webflow vs WordPress for small businesses in 2026.
If you have questions about which Webflow plan is right for your specific site, ask us directly and we will give you a straight answer.
