A self-hosted MainWP dashboard is one of the best deals in WordPress tooling, and I say that as someone who builds a competing hosted product. Free core, unlimited sites, your data on your server. Nobody leaves it because of the price.
People leave for a different reason: the dashboard is a WordPress site, and someone has to look after it. This post is an honest ledger of what you gain by moving to a hosted dashboard, what you give up, and how to tell which side of that ledger your agency is on.
What MainWP costs, exactly
The free MainWP Essentials tier lists unlimited sites. MainWP Pro is $29/month or $199/year for unlimited sites, and there is a $599 one-time lifetime option (pricing page, checked September 2026, MainWP pricing). At the yearly price that is about $16.58 a month, and the lifetime price equals roughly three years of the yearly plan.
Those are the licence costs. The pricing page cannot show you the rest: the hosting for the dashboard site, the time you spend keeping that site patched, and the cost of it being down. Add those up honestly before deciding, because they are the numbers a hosted tool actually competes with. If you host it on a server you already pay for and rarely think about it, the marginal cost is tiny and MainWP wins on price at almost any portfolio size.
What you gain by leaving
A dashboard that is not one of your own liabilities. A self-hosted dashboard has admin credentials or keys to every client site. It is a single, very attractive target, and it sits on a stack that you patch. A hosted tool moves that patching and hardening off your plate. You still need strong passwords and two-factor authentication, but you no longer own the server.
Monitoring from outside your own infrastructure. If the dashboard and the uptime checks live on the same server, a server outage can take out the thing that would tell you about the outage. Checks that run from outside your hosting are independent of it, so you find out about a client's downtime from an alert, not from the client.
Client-facing pieces in the same place. MainWP is a management dashboard; you assemble the client experience around it. In a hosted product such as WPClientHub, the help desk and Stripe billing sit in the same account (the agency-branded ticket portal is in early access, so do not plan around it yet).
Less to explain to a new hire. Onboarding a developer onto your stack is easier when the tool is an account with a login rather than a WordPress install with a custom set of extensions and a note that says "don't update this one".
What you give up
This is the longer list, and it deserves respect.
Flat cost at scale. At 100 or 200 sites, a flat licence is hard to beat with anything priced per site or per tier. If your economics depend on running a large portfolio at the lowest possible tooling cost, that is a real argument for staying.
Full control of the data path. With MainWP, the dashboard's database, logs and credentials sit where you put them. With a hosted service, they sit with the vendor. For some clients, in regulated sectors, that matters, and you should check what the vendor's terms say before you migrate those sites.
Open source and extensibility. MainWP's extension model lets you bend the tool. If you have written custom extensions or rely on a specific one, check for an equivalent before you move, and be realistic about whether it exists.
The comfort of knowing exactly how it works. When you own the stack you can debug it at any layer. A hosted dashboard is a black box you contact support about. If you are the kind of agency owner who reads the source before trusting a tool, that trade may not suit you.
The decision test
Answer these four questions honestly.
- In the last twelve months, how many hours did you spend maintaining the dashboard itself, not the client sites? If it is under a few hours, keep it.
- Have you had an incident where the dashboard was unavailable when you needed it? One is a warning; two is a pattern.
- Do clients ever ask for something the dashboard cannot give them, such as a support portal, invoices or a report they can open without a login?
- Would a hosted bill, at your site count, be a rounding error against your care-plan revenue, or a material cut?
If the answers are "few hours, no incidents, no client asks, material cut", stay on MainWP and stop reading vendor blogs. If two or more point the other way, a hosted dashboard is probably worth a trial.
If you decide to move
Do it site by site, not all at once. The one rule that matters is that no site should ever be without a verified backup during the switch, so connect the new tool, take a fresh backup, restore it to staging to check it, and only then remove the MainWP child plugin from that site.
Two practical notes. First, keep your existing backup archives outside the tool you are leaving; the reasoning is in where should WordPress backups live. Second, treat updates as a separate step from the migration. Do not change dashboard and update workflow in the same week. When you do get to updates, safe WordPress updates explained covers what a restore point and a screenshot comparison buy you.
You can also run both. Nothing stops you connecting five low-stakes sites to a hosted tool for a month while the rest stay on MainWP. It costs you a little duplicate monitoring and buys you a real answer instead of an opinion.
Where this leaves you
Leave MainWP if the dashboard has become a job of its own, or if clients want a support and billing experience you would otherwise have to build. Stay if you enjoy owning the stack and your site count makes a flat licence a bargain. WPClientHub is free for 3 sites, with paid plans from $19/month, if you want to try this on a real client site: register here.