admin“Start your store for $39 a month.” It’s a great headline, and for a brand-new store it can be a fair deal. But a year later, many merchants look at their statements and find they are paying for much more than the plan: a percentage of every sale, a growing stack of app subscriptions, and upgrades triggered by their own success.
This guide breaks down the real cost of hosted SaaS platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce, and of running a self-hosted, open-source store. We’ll be honest about both sides, because the right choice depends on your size, your team and how much control you want. As you plan your budget for 2027, these are the numbers worth checking.
Key takeaways
- On SaaS platforms, the monthly plan is usually the smallest part of the bill. Percentage
- fees and apps grow with your revenue.
- Using a payment gateway other than the platform’s own can add a 0.6% to 2% surcharge on every order.
- Some platforms force plan upgrades once your annual sales pass set limits.
- Self-hosting has real costs too (hosting, maintenance, developer time), but they are mostly fixed, not a cut of your sales.
- Small stores may save little money by self-hosting. The bigger wins are ownership, flexibility and costs that don’t rise with every sale.
The Five Layers of SaaS Cost
A hosted platform’s pricing page shows one number. Your real cost is built from five layers:
- The plan fee: the monthly or annual subscription.
- Payment surcharges: extra fees for using a payment gateway other than the platform’s own.
- Apps: monthly subscriptions for features the core platform doesn’t include, such as reviews, upsells, subscriptions, advanced filters or B2B pricing.
- Revenue-based upgrades: plans that become mandatory once you sell more.
- Price changes: increases you don’t control and can’t easily escape.
Layer 1 and 2: Plans and payment surcharges
Here is how Shopify’s main plans looked in 2026 (USD; prices vary by country, so check the current pricing page for your region):
Plan Monthly billing Annual billing Shopify Payments Third-party gateway online rate surcharge
Basic $39/mo $29/mo 2.9% + 30¢ 2%
Grow $105/mo $79/mo 2.7% + 30¢ 1%
Advanced $399/mo $299/mo 2.5% + 30¢ 0.6%
Plus from Contract Varies 0.2% $2,300/mo
Source: Swell pricing summary, March 2026. The surcharge applies when a third-party provider is your main gateway.
The surcharge is the part many merchants miss. It is charged on top of your payment provider’s own processing fee. If Shopify Payments isn’t available in your country, or you prefer a local gateway, PayPal or a provider with better rates for your market, every order carries that extra percentage.
Layer 3: The app stack
Apps are where costs quietly multiply. An Eightx analysis of Shopify stores, published in June 2026, estimated typical monthly app spending by store size:
$50–$300 per month in apps for stores under $1M in $1,000–$3,500 per month in apps for stores doing $1M–$5M a annual revenue (3–5 apps). year (6–9 apps).
Eightx, 2026 Eightx, 2026
Some of that spending is for services you would pay for on any platform, such as email marketing. But a large share pays for store features (filters, bundles, size charts, custom fields, B2B pricing) that you rent month after month and lose the moment you cancel.
Layer 4: Revenue-based upgrades
BigCommerce ties its plans to your sales. Based on its 2026 pricing, a store is moved up automatically when trailing 12-month online sales pass each plan’s limit:
Plan Monthly / annual billing Online sales limit (last 12 months)
Core $39 / $29 per month $30,000
Growth $105 / $79 per month $100,000
Scale $399 / $299 per month Overage fee above set sales levels
Performance From $1,499 per month Custom contract
Source: ecomm.design BigCommerce pricing guide, updated August 2026.
In other words, your bill grows because you grew, even if you need no new features.
Layer 5: Price changes you don’t control SaaS prices change. In 2023, Shopify raised monthly subscription prices for new merchants by roughly a third. In October 2026, its annual Grow and Advanced plans briefly appeared at higher prices ($89 and $359 a month) before reverting a day later, which observers read as a pricing test. Neither is unusual for a SaaS company, but both are a reminder: on a hosted platform, your costs are partly someone else’s decision.
The Percentage Problem: Why Costs Scale With
Success
Fixed costs stay flat as you grow. Percentage costs don’t. Here is what Shopify’s third-party gateway surcharge alone adds up to at different sales levels, choosing the cheapest plan for each:
Annual online Best-value Surcharge Surcharge per Typical apps per year sales plan rate year
$250,000 Grow 1% $2,500 $600–$3,600
$750,000 Advanced 0.6% $4,500 $600–$3,600
$2,000,000 Advanced 0.6% $12,000 $12,000–$42,000
Surcharge applies only when a third-party gateway is your primary provider. App ranges use Eightx’s 2026 estimates for each revenue band.
What Self-Hosting Really Costs
Self-hosting is not free, and anyone who tells you it is isn’t being straight with you. With an open-source platform you pay no licence fee, but you do pay for:
- Hosting: a cloud server for a small to medium store typically costs $10 to $50 a month, rising as traffic grows.
- Domain, SSL and backups: a domain is a small yearly cost, SSL certificates are free through
Let’s Encrypt, and automated backups add a few dollars a month.
- Maintenance and security: applying updates, monitoring the server and fixing issues. Budget developer time for this, either your own team, a freelancer or an agency.
- Custom features: building what you need instead of renting it. This is a one-off cost that you then own.
- Payment processing: your gateway’s normal fees, with no extra platform surcharge on top.
Worked Example: A Store Selling $20,000 a Month
Let’s compare a store with $240,000 a year in online sales that uses a third-party payment gateway. Card processing fees are left out because you pay them on both models.
Annual cost Shopify Grow (annual Self-hosted open source billing)
Platform plan or licence $948 $0
Third-party gateway surcharge (1%) $2,400 $0
Apps / extensions (assumed $150/mo) $1,800 Built in or custom
Hosting, backups and domain Included $375
Maintenance and development (about — $1,800 2–3 hrs/mo)
Services you’d use anyway (email, In apps above $600 reviews)
Total per year $5,148 $2,775
Illustrative estimate. Hosting at about $30/month; maintenance at a typical freelance rate. Your numbers will differ, so plug in your own.
In this example, self-hosting saves roughly $2,400 a year, or about 46%. Now the honest part: if this store used Shopify Payments instead, the surcharge would disappear and the two totals would be almost equal. At this size, the case for self-hosting is less about money and more about ownership and flexibility.
The picture changes as you grow. Self-hosting costs rise in steps (a bigger server, more developer time), while SaaS percentage fees and app tiers rise with every extra sale. For stores doing millions a year, the difference can reach tens of thousands of dollars annually.
The Costs That Never Appear on an Invoice
SaaS: hidden trade-offs Self-hosted: real responsibilities
Lock-in. Moving away later means rebuilding Security. You (or your developer) must keep the themes, apps and integrations. server and software updated.
Limited control. You can only customise what the Uptime. Hosting quality, backups and monitoring platform allows. are your job.
Platform rules. Policy changes or account reviews Skills. You need access to technical help, in-house can affect your store at short notice. or outsourced.
Rented features. Cancel an app and the feature Setup time. Launching takes more planning than disappears. clicking “sign up”.
A note on security: the safest way to take payments on a self-hosted store is through a hosted payment gateway, so card details never touch your server. This keeps your compliance work much simpler.
Which Model Is Right for You? A SaaS platform is often the better fit if you:
- are just starting out and want to test an idea quickly,
- have no access to technical help and don’t want any,
- can use the platform’s own payments, keeping surcharges at zero,
- need only standard features that the core plan already covers.
A self-hosted, open-source store is often the better fit if you:
- are growing and watching percentage fees and app bills climb,
- need a local payment gateway or custom checkout flows,
- want full ownership of your code, data and customer relationships,
- need custom features, B2B rules or integrations that apps can’t deliver well,
- are an agency building stores for clients and want to keep margins in your own services.
Where WentoCart Fits
WentoCart is a free, open-source eCommerce platform built on Laravel and React and released under the OSL-3.0 licence. There are no licence fees and no platform cut of your sales. You host it on your own server and get a complete admin dashboard out of the box: product catalog, categories and attributes, inventory, orders, customer accounts, coupons and promotions, and multi-language and multi-currency settings. Because the code is yours, any feature you build stays yours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is open-source eCommerce really free? The software is free to use, modify and run commercially. Hosting, maintenance and development are not, so budget for them as fixed operating costs.
Is a self-hosted store less secure than SaaS? Not necessarily, but security becomes your responsibility. Keep software updated, use a reputable host, run automatic backups and take payments through a hosted gateway.
Can I move from Shopify to a self-hosted store later? Yes. Products, customers and orders can be exported and migrated. Plan redirects carefully so you keep your search rankings.
The Bottom Line
SaaS convenience is real, and for some stores it is worth the price. But convenience is billed as a percentage of your growth, a stack of rented features and prices you don’t control. Before you plan 2027, add up all five layers of your current costs, compare them with a self-hosted setup, and decide with real numbers rather than a headline price.
Zero licence fees. Zero cut of your sales. WentoCart is free, open-source and self-hosted, built with Laravel and React. Explore the live storefront and admin demo, or download v1.0 and start building a store you truly own.