Flywheel Pricing (2026): Plans, Visit Overages and the Real Bill

Flywheel's managed WordPress hosting starts at $300 a year for one site, which works out to $25 a month, as of 18 Oct 2026. The page shows no intro discount and no separate renewal price: the annual price already includes two free months compared with paying monthly. The costs to watch are elsewhere, in the 25,000-visit cap on the Starter plan, the $1 charged for every 1,000 visits above it, and add-ons priced per site.

Many review sites still quote a Tiny plan that no longer appears in Flywheel's plan list, or older monthly figures. Everything below comes from Flywheel's own pricing page as read on 18 Oct 2026, including the plan limits, the overage rules and the refund exclusions. Flywheel is owned by WP Engine, whose name and copyright appear on Flywheel's site, which matters when you compare the two.

Flywheel plans and prices

Flywheel says each annual plan 'includes 2 months free', so the annual price equals ten months of monthly billing. That puts monthly billing at about $30, $115 and $290 a month for the three plans (our arithmetic; the page shows only the annual figures). Extra sites can be added to any plan for $20 a month or $200 a year, which helps if you sit between two tiers.

Flywheel's plan comparison lists a Fastly-powered CDN, Flywheel's FlyCache caching, free SSL, staging sites, nightly backups kept for 30 days, SFTP and an SSH gateway, free migrations and plugin security alerts. Flywheel does not host email; it says so plainly and recommends a separate provider.

How visits and overages change the bill

Flywheel prices plans by monthly visits, which it defines as unique IP addresses in a 24-hour period, and it does not throttle or switch off a site that goes over. Instead it bills $1 per 1,000 visits beyond the plan's allowance and $1 for every GB of storage over the limit. Its own example: a Starter site with 30,000 visits in a month pays a $5 overage.

The arithmetic is simple and so is the crossover. A Starter site at 50,000 visits costs $50 a month with overage; at 100,000 visits it costs $100, slightly more than the $96 Freelance plan, which also allows nine more sites. If your traffic sits above about 96,000 visits for months at a time, moving up is cheaper than paying overage. Below that, paying the occasional overage is the better deal.

This visit-based model is the same family as Kinsta's and WP Engine's, and our explainer on per-visit and per-site pricing shows why bots and crawlers make the count higher than your analytics suggest.

Flywheel against other entry managed WordPress plans

On entry plans billed annually, Flywheel sits in the middle of the premium tier. The comparison below uses each host's own pricing page on the same day; where a host advertises a first-year price, we say so.

Pressable's Signature 1 is cheaper at $250 a year with 30,000 visits, but charges $1.20 per 1,000 extra visits. Kinsta's Single 35k costs $350 a year with 35,000 visits. WP Engine shows $28 a month billed annually for its Essential plan, a first-year price for new customers whose renewal figure was not displayed when we checked. Rocket.net's Starter is $25 a month billed annually and limits bandwidth (50 GB) rather than visits, and it offers the first month for $1.

Flywheel's advantages over these are workflow features built for designers and agencies: Blueprints to reuse a theme-and-plugin set-up, billing transfer to hand a site to a client, and Organizations for team access. If those matter, see Flywheel's plans. If the lowest price per visit matters more, Pressable's plans are worth comparing, and our WP Engine alternatives guide prices the wider field at your traffic.

Add-ons and the refund window

Two paid add-ons are priced on the page. Managed Plugin Updates costs $8 per site per month, with Flywheel updating plugins daily or weekly. Performance Insights, a monthly expert report with recommendations, costs $25 a month for the first site and $2 a month for each extra site. On a Starter site, adding plugin updates raises the effective monthly cost from $25 to $33.

Flywheel's refund window runs for 60 days after you buy a new hosting plan, twice the 30 days common among managed hosts. The fine print excludes Agency and Custom plans, and Freelance plans that include custom onboarding; it does not cover upgrades or renewals. If you are testing Flywheel for an agency, start on Starter or a standard Freelance plan so the guarantee applies.

Who Flywheel suits, with a worked example

Flywheel makes most sense for a designer or small agency that builds sites and hands them to clients. Consider a freelancer with four small client sites. Four separate Starter plans would cost $1,200 a year. One Starter plan with three extra sites at $200 a year each costs $900, and the Freelance plan, with room for ten sites and 100,000 visits, costs $1,150. The add-on route is cheapest on paper, but check with Flywheel how the plan's 25,000 visits and 10 GB are shared across the added sites before choosing it.

For a single business site with steady traffic under 25,000 visits, Starter at $300 a year is fair value for a managed host, though Pressable and Rocket.net are cheaper per month on annual billing. For high-traffic single sites, visit-based plans get expensive quickly, and a host that meters bandwidth instead may cost less. Our eight-host managed WordPress ranking weighs those trade-offs, and Kinsta's pricing breakdown shows the same overage maths on a different plan grid.

Edge cases

• The refund fine print still names 'Tiny and Startup plans', which no longer appear in the plan list; ask support how it applies to Starter before relying on it.
• Visits are counted per unique IP per 24 hours, so a site behind heavy bot traffic can exceed 25,000 sooner than its analytics show.
• Storage overage is billed per GB at $1, so large media libraries on Starter's 10 GB can add a few dollars a month.
• Email is not included on any plan; budget for a separate mailbox provider.
• All prices are before tax.