Can you decipher WP Engine’s pricing? We tried, we failed

When we research our competitor comparison pages, like MyHost vs WP Engine, we make sure that we get our facts right.

It’s not uncommon for web hosts to disguise their real prices behind short-term discounts, expensive last-minute add-ons, or high “renewal” costs. So we always look for the ongoing, regular price that you’d pay at each provider. You want your WordPress Hosting to last longer than a discounted month or year, so it’s the ongoing price that matters.

So we’ve gotten pretty good at reading small print, finding full renewal prices hidden on separate webpages, or even clicking through entire purchase “journeys” - sometimes very long ones - just to see what dollar amount actually gets spat out the other end (and how different it is to the number that we started with).

It can get disheartening but we’ve always been able to find the answer to, “how does this provider actually price its services?”

Until now.

For the first time, we’ve found a provider whose prices are a literal mystery. Join us for a quick look at WP Engine’s WordPress Hosting packages.

A displayed price that you will never pay

If you want to play along at home, go to WP Engine's website and open "Pricing" from the main menu. You’ll see three options called Essential, Core, and Professional. So far, so standard. Above those, you can pick your currency and your billing period (monthly or annual).

We’ve picked AUD and monthly pricing. We also added an extra site to the Essential package, just to make it more comparable to our Small Web Hosting package (which gives you 2 websites and unlimited storage for $8.95/mo, incidentally). The result is…confusing:

What’s going on?

What’s a “billed at” price, and why is it higher?

Usually when you see one big bold price and one small grey price, the trick is that there's a short-term special. Your first month would cost $62 but then your bills go up to $70.

But as far as we can tell, even after clicking through to the cart to check for discounts, the $62 price doesn’t actually exist, not even for your first month.

We are not off to a great start.

Annual pricing that could be designed to confuse you

Time to leave the weird monthly pricing behind and switch to annual prices.

The first thing you notice is a common trick. If you pick annual pricing, the most obvious dollar amount isn’t the annual price.

You still see a monthly price, even though you won’t be charged monthly. If you want to know the actual amount that you’ll be charged, you need to look at the small grey text rather than the big bold number.

But that small grey text shows two amounts. One is crossed out, and the other is marked by an asterisk. The one bit of maths that ought to be easy doesn’t work, either. Let’s list out the issues here:

1. $51 x 12 = $612, not $616. An extra $4 has snuck in.
2. If you follow the asterisk to the small print at the bottom of the page, you learn that $616 is actually a one-off discount.
3. Next year you’ll pay $840, which works out to $70/mo. That’s the higher of the two monthly amounts that we saw earlier.
4. Nothing in this pricing section mentions a one-off discount, or says what the monthly equivalent of $51 will go up to, or explains why the actual amount billed is more than 12 times the monthly amount. You have to work all of that out for yourself.

Build your plan or build your costs?

But we haven’t even got to the most confusing bit yet. Scroll down to “Build your plan”, and the oddities really kick in. (For this bit we’ve switched back to our normal comparison setting of monthly billing).

As already mentioned, we added an additional site for an extra $23/mo. Two websites are what you get with our smallest Web Hosting plan.

Pay attention to the 'eCommerce Package' and the 'Extra Layer of Security'. Together they look like they’ll cost 6 + 27 = $33, right?

And yet:

If you’re running a webstore, you’d want the best security that your host can offer. Maybe that's why, when you pick WP Engine’s 'eCommerce Package', the 'Extra Layer of Security' gets more expensive. Or pick the 'Extra Layer of Security' and the 'eCommerce Package' gets more expensive.

You can’t avoid it. These add-ons literally add costs onto each other. We’ve checked out a lot of competitors, but we’d never seen this particular trick before.

Our guide for shoppers just got longer

If you shop around for Web Hosting, you’ll encounter a lot of pricing practices that range from hard-to-understand to downright trickery. We reckon that shoppers ought to be able to compare hosts fairly and easily, so we’ve collected a few examples in our Web Hosting Shopping Guide.

Some work is never done, though. WP Engine has given us some new material to add. Perhaps we should thank them?

As for you, it’s your decision who you host with. We’d recommend that you pick someone with fair prices and a straight-up way of communicating them. But of course we’d say that.