When people argue "content system or simple page," both sides quote feelings. Some say "it's hard," others say "you don't need it anymore." We gathered the numbers we could find sources for. Not all of them favor the side we expected, and that's exactly why we're publishing them.
42 years
A development studio that sells custom builds puts an example on its own site: "spending $25,000 on a custom build to replace a $49-a-month Webflow site makes no sense."
Let's do the math. 25,000 divided by 49 a month is more than 42 years, and that's before any maintenance at all. The comparison isn't close, it's absurd, which is exactly why no one says the number out loud. The conclusion, uncomfortable even for us: the platform's monthly fee is the cheapest part of a website. If someone talks you out of Webflow or Squarespace on cost, that argument is weak. The real reasons to choose a simple site are elsewhere, and they aren't about 49 dollars.
605 versus 270
But. One developer ran the numbers on the other side: a 200-page site with 100 components and 20 templates. WordPress: 605 developer-days. Custom code: 270. More than double.
The turn comes over three years. With maintenance, the gap nearly disappears: 905 versus 1,020. A content system wins on total cost only once real editing volume shows up. You pay for a CMS in editing, not in building. If there's no editing to do (see the first post in this series, on the update myth), you paid double for nothing.
41 pages in 15 minutes
One American used Claude Code, Astro, and Cloudflare to generate a 41-page site for a local services company: menu, blog, mobile version included. The generation itself took 15 minutes. Learning how to do it took 3 to 4 hours, and that's the number that matters most in this story. Within a few weeks, the site sat in the middle of Google's first page for local searches.
Updates with no editor at all: he sends the AI a link to the page, the AI pushes the change, the site rebuilds. His own caveat, worth quoting: for large teams with non-technical editors, WordPress is still the better choice.
63, 44, and 27 percent
Google's Core Web Vitals test (speed, stability, responsiveness) is passed by 63 percent of sites built with Astro, 44 percent of WordPress sites, and only 27 percent of Next.js sites.
The surprise isn't that a static generator beats WordPress. The surprise is that a modern JavaScript framework, the choice of "serious" teams, scores worse than WordPress. The winner isn't "static" or "modern." The winner is minimal code. One documented migration in the same source: HTML dropped from 38.9 KB to 10.9 KB, CSS from 67.2 KB to 6.6 KB, largest-content paint from 0.81s to 0.44s.
The same author admitted that he used to "drag" WordPress speed scores up to 90 to 100 with optimization plugins, and it felt like gaming the system rather than building the site properly.
One week, two hours a day
Someone with no coding experience built their own site over a week, working two hours a night, for almost nothing. His conclusion after the whole process: "The hard part? That's always been the planning."
He pulled his color palette from photos of his own clothes, because without it the AI produced nothing decent. A sticky header that "sounds simple" ate up several hours. The code was the easy part.
Which leaves us with a line we repeat to everyone who asks us about AI: it ate up the building hours, not the strategy and design hours. We sell the half that didn't get cheaper: deciding what the site should say, to whom, and how it should look. The build itself now takes days, which is why the price is what it is.
What to do with these numbers
If your site will run to a few dozen pages and change a few times a year, the numbers point one way: a simple page, minimal code, no system. If it'll run to hundreds of pages, edited daily by several people, the numbers point the other way, and then it's webflow.lt for you, not us.
Numbers don't always tell you what to do. But they're good at showing which side is arguing from feelings.