What the four WordPress SEO plugins really cost in year two

The short answer

The headline price of a WordPress SEO plugin tells you almost nothing, because the four main ones treat the second year in four different ways — and only three of them say so on their pricing pages. SEOPress renews at the same price. AIOSEO's advertised price is introductory and renewals go to full list. Rank Math prints a specific, higher renewal figure beside its discounted one. Yoast publishes no renewal price on its plugin page at all.

On a one-site licence, that turns a set of near-identical first-year prices into a spread that roughly doubles at the bottom end. Everything below is what each vendor's own page printed on 24 September 2026, in the currency it printed it in.

Why this is the one purchase where renewal matters most

A plugin is not a subscription you re-evaluate every month. It writes your titles, meta descriptions, schema and sitemaps into every page on the site, so switching means auditing the output of the old one and checking the new one reproduces it. People do not switch plugins casually; they renew.

Which is precisely why the renewal line is the number that matters, and precisely why it is the number hardest to find. Three of these four vendors do publish it. The fourth simply does not, and this post will not invent one for it.

SEOPress: the same price every year, stated

SEOPress's pricing page carries a banner that leaves no room for doubt: "No hidden costs: renew at the same price every year!" Every plan on the page repeats it as a caption under the price — "(ex. VAT) - Renew at same price".

The plans, as displayed to this reader in US dollars, with a currency switcher on the page offering euros:

• SEOPress PRO, 1 site — $49 / year
• SEOPress PRO, 5 sites — $59 / year
• SEOPress PRO, unlimited sites — $149 / year

So a one-site licence is $49.00 in year one and $49.00 again in year two. The page also carries the vendor's own claim, quoted as theirs: "Join 350,000+ websites using SEOPress." Nobody here has verified that figure.

AIOSEO: introductory pricing, and it says so

AIOSEO's pricing page shows each plan at roughly half a struck-through list price, and states the consequence in one line: "Special introductory pricing, all renewals are at full price."

Read the Basic row against SEOPress's one-site plan and the comparison gets interesting. Year one: $49.50 against $49.00, which is a difference of fifty cents. Year two: $99.00 against $49.00, because AIOSEO's renewals go to the full price its own page prints.

The page also offers a 14-day money-back guarantee, worded as: "if AIOSEO isn't the best fit, simply reach out! We'll happily refund 100% of your money".

To be completely fair to AIOSEO: it publishes both numbers, prominently, on the same page. Nothing is hidden. It is just that most write-ups quote the first one.

Rank Math: a discount with the renewal printed next to it

Rank Math takes the third approach — a discounted first term with the renewal stated explicitly, in euros.

• PRO — € 6.99 / month billed annually, struck through from €8.99, marked "22% OFF!", for "Unlimited personal websites". The page states: "Renews at €8.99 per month + taxes".
• Business — € 22.99 / month from €27.99, "Renews at €27.99 per month + taxes", supporting 200 client websites and 20,000 keywords.
• Agency — € 52.99 / month from €64.99, "Renews at €64.99 per month + taxes", 750 client websites and 75,000 keywords.

Because those are monthly figures on an annual bill, the yearly totals follow directly from Rank Math's own numbers: €83.88 across the first year and €107.88 across the second, on the PRO plan.

The page also offers a "30 day money-back guarantee", and Rank Math has a capable free version — schema generation, Google Analytics 4 integration, keyword optimisation and SEO scoring are all listed as free features.

These are euros. They are not placed in the same column as the dollar figures anywhere on this site, and you should not mentally convert them either — check what Rank Math's page shows in your own country before comparing.

Yoast: everything published except the renewal

Yoast's plugin page prices Yoast SEO Premium at "Only $9.90 / month, billed annually at $118.80 (ex VAT)", for a licence that "can be used on 1 website or domain". Extra seats for its Google Docs add-on are "$5 (excl. VAT) per month each". The subscription bundles the Local SEO, News SEO and Video SEO plugins, one Google Docs add-on seat, Yoast SEO Academy access and 24/7 support.

What that page does not state is what happens when the year ends. There is no renewal figure, no "renews at" line, and no statement that the price holds. So this post records that Yoast's renewal price is not published on the page read, and leaves the second-year column empty rather than filling it with a guess.

There is a second thing worth saying about Yoast here, because it concerns this site rather than the plugin. Yoast sits on the fleet's unverified list — nobody has read its current affiliate terms — so there is no partner link to it anywhere on Searchbench and there will not be one until somebody has. It is named in this post purely because it is one of the four plugins people actually choose between.

The four side by side

Three honest readings of that table:

SEOPress and AIOSEO are the like-for-like pair. Both are US dollars, both are a one-site licence, both are annual. Fifty cents apart in year one, fifty dollars apart in year two.

Rank Math's row is not comparable to the others. It is a different currency and a different licence scope — "unlimited personal websites" rather than one site — which for someone running three or four of their own sites changes the maths entirely in its favour.

Yoast's empty cell is the finding, not a gap in the research. A vendor that publishes a renewal price is telling you something a vendor that does not is not telling you.

Which one to actually pick

If you run one site and want the number to stay still: SEOPress, on the strength of a published commitment that the price does not move.

If you run several of your own sites: Rank Math's PRO tier covers unlimited personal websites at one price, which no other plan here matches — check the euro figure against what your country is shown.

If you are already inside the Awesome Motive ecosystem or want the largest feature surface on a single site: AIOSEO, with the renewal price written in your calendar rather than the introductory one.

If the bundled Local, News and Video plugins are things you would otherwise buy: Yoast, bought with the knowledge that you do not currently know what year two costs. That link is deliberately not a partner link.

All four have free versions that do the core job — titles, meta descriptions, schema, sitemaps — and for many small sites the free version is the correct final answer. A plugin, paid or free, is not one of the six jobs SEO tools are actually bought for; it writes tags rather than reporting on search results, and no plugin will tell you whether anyone found the page.

Three of the four links above are partner links, marked sponsored and nofollow. The order in this section was decided by what the vendors publish about renewal, and the plugin recommended first is not the one that pays this site the most.