Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom: which, and what each costs

Shopify, WooCommerce and a fully custom build all end up in the same place — a shop that takes orders — but they get there on very different cost curves. The sticker price is the least interesting part; what matters is the three-year total cost of ownership once you add transaction fees, hosting, extensions and the hours you or an agency spend keeping it alive. Here is a neutral, practical head-to-head, with 2026 pricing and a clear view of who each one suits.

The quick version

• Shopify — pay a monthly fee, get almost everything managed for you. Fastest to launch, predictable, but you pay a card rate on every sale and rent the platform forever.
• WooCommerce — the plugin is free and open-source, but "free" is the price of the software, not the shop. You pay for hosting, extensions and your own maintenance. Most control at the low end, most fiddly to run.
• Custom build — bespoke code (often a headless storefront). Highest upfront cost, lowest per-sale friction, total ownership. Only worth it once volume or complexity justifies it.

For a first store doing modest volume, the ranking on cost is usually Woo ≈ Shopify << custom. As you scale, the maths shifts. That crossover is the whole game.

Shopify: predictable rent, per-sale fees

Shopify is a hosted (SaaS) platform — you never touch a server. On the European pricing page the tiers are, on annual billing, roughly Basic from about €19–27/month, Grow around €56/month, Advanced around €289/month, and Plus from about €2,100/month. Card rates run from 1.8% + €0.25 per transaction on Basic down to 1.6% + €0.25 on Advanced (Shopify pricing). Prices differ by country and currency — the US tiers, for example, are $39 / $105 / $399 — and change periodically, so treat these as current-order-of-magnitude, not carved in stone.

The fee that catches people out: if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a surcharge on top of your gateway's own fees — 2% on Basic, down to 0.2% on Plus. Stay on Shopify Payments and you avoid it, but you're then locked to their processor.

Where the money goes: monthly plan + card fees + paid apps (most stores add a few, €5–€40/month each) + your theme. There's no hosting bill and no security patching — that's the trade you're buying.

WooCommerce: free plugin, paid everything-else

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress, with 0% revenue share and no platform fee (WooCommerce pricing). That headline is real — and also the source of most confusion. You're not paying for the software; you're paying for everything around it:

• Hosting — WooCommerce's own page cites roughly $25–$350/month depending on traffic and performance; entry-level shared hosting can be cheaper, managed WooCommerce hosting sits at the higher end.
• Extensions — $29–$299/year each for subscriptions, advanced shipping, bookings, marketing automation and the like. A real store often stacks several.
• Payment fees — set by your processor (Stripe, Mollie, PayPal), typically around 1.4–2.9% + a fixed fee in Europe. Woo itself takes nothing.
• Maintenance — updates, backups and security are your responsibility (or your developer's).

Independent 2026 breakdowns put a production-ready WooCommerce store at roughly $1,800–$15,000/year all-in once hosting, plugins and processing are counted (WizCommerce, Swell). It can be far cheaper if you keep it lean and do the work yourself — that flexibility is exactly the point.

Custom build: highest ceiling, highest floor

A custom build means bespoke code — frequently a "headless" storefront (a React/Next.js front end talking to a commerce API). You get total control over design, performance and integrations, and you pay no platform tax, but you fund the engineering.

Realistic 2026 figures: a minimal production storefront from a small studio starts around €10,000–€15,000; most serious custom or headless projects land at €25,000–€80,000+, and enterprise builds run past €150,000 (Weaverse, OuterBox). Agency rates drive most of that — roughly €100–€200/hour in Western Europe, €40–€80/hour in Eastern Europe. Then add ongoing hosting and a maintenance retainer, because bespoke code doesn't patch itself.

Custom only pays back when the platform genuinely constrains you — unusual pricing logic, deep ERP integration, or margins so thin that per-sale platform fees dwarf a developer's day rate.

The three-year TCO angle

One-year snapshots flatter the cheap option and hide the expensive one. Stretch it to three years and the picture clarifies. As a rough illustration for a small store doing modest volume:

• Shopify — say Basic at ~€25/month plus a couple of apps and card fees on your sales. The plan and apps are predictable; the variable is transaction fees, which grow directly with revenue. Three-year platform-and-app cost is often €2,000–€6,000 before card fees.
• WooCommerce — managed hosting plus a handful of extensions plus occasional developer time. Often €3,000–€12,000 over three years, heavily dependent on how much you self-manage.
• Custom — a large upfront build amortised across the period plus hosting and maintenance. Rarely under €20,000 over three years for anything real.

Two forces decide the winner: your sales volume (which inflates Shopify's per-sale fees) and how much maintenance you're willing to own (which is WooCommerce's hidden cost). High volume plus a willing developer pushes you toward Woo or custom; low volume plus wanting a quiet life points at Shopify. Rather than eyeball it, model your own numbers with our build-vs-buy TCO calculator, and if you're unsure which platform even fits, the ecommerce platform quiz narrows it in a couple of minutes.

Who each one suits

• Choose Shopify if you want to launch fast, value predictability over control, have limited technical appetite, and your margins comfortably absorb a card rate. Ideal for first stores and lean teams.
• Choose WooCommerce if you already run on WordPress, want to avoid per-sale platform fees, need flexible content and merchandising, and have a developer (in-house or on retainer) to keep it healthy.
• Choose custom if an off-the-shelf platform actively blocks how you sell, you have the volume to justify the spend, and you want to own the asset outright rather than rent it.

Fit it into the bigger budget

Platform choice is one line in a larger sum. For the full picture, see what an ecommerce website costs end to end, what it takes to start an ecommerce business in 2026 beyond the shop itself, and how all of this sits inside how much a website costs in 2026.

Where web1o comes in

We build all three — Shopify, WooCommerce and fully custom — so our advice isn't tied to one platform. That means we can point you at the option with the lowest total cost for your volume and roadmap, not the one that's easiest for us to sell. See web development to explore how we work, or book a free consultation and we'll run your numbers together and recommend the platform that actually pays back over three years.