What each stack costs to run, 100 to 1,000,000 readers

Monthly infrastructure and licence cost for a membership publication on two stacks. Change the assumptions or pick a scenario. Click any row to see its breakdown. Stripe fees are the same on both stacks and are shown separately.

WordPress + LiteSpeed + QUIC.cloud Astro + Cloudflare (Pages + Workers)

Readers	Paid subs	Bandwidth	WP origin peak	WordPress	Cloudflare	Revenue

Bandwidth includes the one-off viral views. "WP origin peak" is the peak requests per second that miss the cache and reach PHP. It sets the server size. Revenue is subscriptions only, shown for scale.

Bars use a log scale, so each step to the right is about 10× the cost.

What the numbers say

Assumptions

Readers means monthly unique readers. Anonymous page views are served from the edge cache on both stacks.
WordPress origin load is subscriber page views (they skip the full-page cache or trigger ESI), plus anonymous cache misses, plus bot requests to uncached URLs. Peak is 15× the monthly average. The hosting tier is chosen from that peak and includes the LiteSpeed Enterprise licence that ESI needs.
WordPress licences: MemberPress Growth at ~$699/yr renewal ($58/mo, 0% fee; the Launch tier takes 4.9% of sales), plus backups and a security plugin.
Cloudflare: Workers Paid $5/mo with 10M requests and 30M CPU-ms included, then $0.30 per million requests and $0.02 per million CPU-ms. The paywall middleware runs on every human page view at ~2 ms CPU. KV holds subscriber status at $0.50 per million reads over 10M. Pages bandwidth and static requests are not billed. Bots are blocked at the edge before the Worker runs. Images are optimised at build time.
Not included because both stacks pay it equally: Stripe (~2.9% + 30¢ per charge, shown in each row's breakdown), newsletter/email, domain, and editorial staff.
Not included because it isn't a monthly bill: engineering time. On Cloudflare that's a one-off paywall build (roughly 2–6 weeks) plus upkeep. On WordPress it's plugin, PHP and security updates (roughly 2–6 h/mo, indefinitely).
Unverified: QUIC.cloud's current per-GB rate. Their docs say the dashboard is the only authoritative source, so the default here is a blended NA/EU estimate. Raise it for Asian or Latin American audiences.