jetpack

Free

The plugin and this monorepo are GPL v2 or later. The free tier covers site stats, the image and static-asset CDN, social sharing, downtime monitoring, basic brute-force protection, and a subset of Akismet spam filtering. No seat limits.

Paid Bundles (list price, billed yearly)

• Security: $19.95/mo. VaultPress Backup with 10GB, malware scanning, and Akismet at 10k API calls/mo.
• Complete: $49.95/mo. The full suite including real-time security, performance tools, and the growth products.
• VaultPress Backup on its own: $9.95/mo, starting at 10GB with one-click restores.

Automattic runs a standing 50% discount on the first year, which is why the site shows $9.95, $24.95, and $4.95 next to those numbers. Renewal is at list.

Self-Hosted Costs

The plugin is free, but the paid features are services, not code you can run yourself. Backups live on Automattic's infrastructure and the scanner runs there too. Self-hosting Jetpack means self-hosting WordPress, which is $5 to $30/mo of hosting, and the Jetpack paid tiers sit on top regardless.

When to Pay

Security is worth buying once the site earns money and losing it would hurt, because $19.95/mo against a real recovery is not a close call. Skip it on a hobby site where the free stats and CDN are the whole reason you installed it. If you only want backups, UpdraftPlus and other plugins do that for less, and Akismet can be bought separately.