A typical small-business WordPress site — a blog, a portfolio, a local shop's brochure site — gets a few hundred visits a month and changes a handful of times. It still pays for a box that runs a database and executes PHP on every single request, whether anyone is looking or not. That's usually $8–30 a month, plus the time spent patching plugins that break on their own schedule.
What "free" actually means here
offloadcms's self-host tier isn't a trial — it's a full instance that runs entirely on Cloudflare's free-tier allocations: D1 for content, R2 for media, KV for sessions, and Workers + Pages to serve both the admin and the printed site. Setting one up today goes through us rather than a public installer — see the docs — but the limits are Cloudflare's own and they are generous: 100,000 requests a day, 5 GB of database and 10 GB of media with free bandwidth. For a blog, a portfolio, or a small brochure site, that ceiling is rarely the constraint people expect it to be.
When you'd actually outgrow it
offloadcms itself adds no bill on top: every feature is free on every site. You pay only if you run the AI assistant on our key instead of your own, or want someone to do a migration for you. See pricing. A very busy site may need Cloudflare's Workers Paid plan at $5 a month, paid to Cloudflare.
The point isn't that hosting should be free forever regardless of scale — it's that a site with a hundred visitors a month shouldn't be paying server rent for traffic that barely exists. Most small WordPress sites fall on the free side of that line.