A recent RFP asked us to match a competitor’s $18,000 build quote for an enterprise WordPress site with ERP integration and four languages. We declined to match it — not because we are expensive, but because $18,000 was the fantasy number. Here is the honest line-by-line, from projects we have actually run.
The costs that never make the proposal
- Premium licenses. Themes, page tools, forms, SEO, translation, staging. For a serious B2B stack: $1,500–4,000 per year, recurring. Cheapest line, most often forgotten.
- Integration phase two. Everyone budgets the ERP connector; nobody budgets the second pass when real order data exposes the edge cases — see our ERP integration cost breakdown.
- QA across the real stack. Testing the theme with your plugins, your CRM forms, and your tracking scripts is a distinct phase. Skipping it is how enterprise sites ship with broken forms nobody noticed for weeks.
- Content migration depth. Copy-pasting 200 pages is mechanical; rewriting them to match a new design system is editorial work. Quotes often assume the former and projects need the latter.
- Multilingual true cost. Translation plugins are cheap; translation itself, plus per-locale layout fixes, plus per-locale QA is not.
The annual line items
| Item | Typical annual range |
|---|---|
| Premium licenses | $1,500–4,000 |
| Hosting (enterprise-grade) | $1,200–6,000 |
| Maintenance retainer (updates, backups, monitoring) | $3,000–12,000 |
| Integration upkeep (ERP version bumps) | 15–20% of integration build |
| Content updates (if outsourced) | $2,000–10,000 |
How to budget honestly
Add a 20% contingency to any build quote and ask the vendor what it excludes. “Excludes” is the keyword — a good agency tells you the boundary of the quote; a bad one assumes you will not ask. Require the maintenance quote in the same document as the build. If maintenance is an afterthought now, the site will be an orphan in 18 months.
Where spending is worth it
In our experience, two places return their cost quickly: a performance pass at launch (the numbers in our B2B speed benchmark show 8–15% form-rate swings) and a security/patching retainer (breach cleanup costs multiples of prevention — the context is in the B2B security guide). The free audit is the zero-cost starting point for both conversations.
For a B2B build with integrations and multilingual content, expect $30,000–80,000 in year one including licenses and QA, plus $6,000–20,000 annually for maintenance and licenses. Recurring licenses, enterprise hosting, patching, and integration upkeep. Sites that produce leads justify these; the mistake is budgeting year one and treating maintenance as optional. $8,000–25,000 for middleware patterns, more for direct custom integrations — plus 15–20% of that annually for version-bump testing. Yes — abandoned updates are the top breach vector we find, and performance debt compounds quietly. A retainer is cheaper than one emergency rebuild.What does an enterprise WordPress site really cost?
Why are annual WordPress costs so high?
How much should ERP integration add to a build?
Is a maintenance retainer worth it?
