If you sell online and are wondering how much an e-commerce site costs, the price of the platform is the small, well-known part of the bill: it is the only one that sits on a price list, which is why it gets talked about so much. But what moves the figure is not the subscription: it is how much of your way of selling the ready-made platform does not cover.
Platform prices, today
Numbers taken from the official price lists on 10 September 2026; they change often, so they are an order of magnitude.
- Shopify (by subscription, SaaS): the Basic plan starts at 19 €/month with annual billing (27 €/month with monthly billing), Grow 56 €, Advanced 289 €, Plus from 2,100 €/month (Shopify price list). You install and update nothing; in exchange the subscription grows with the plan, and there is a commission on sales if you do not use their payment system.
- WooCommerce: the plugin is free and open source, as stated by woocommerce.com. The cost is elsewhere: hosting and the paid extensions for the features the core does not have.
- PrestaShop: the Classic edition is free (you download the code and install it), while the Hosted edition is paid (prestashop.it). As with WooCommerce, the bulk of the spend is hosting and modules.
- Magento, today Adobe Commerce: the open source edition is free; the enterprise version is priced on quotation, with no public list price.
Why the subscription is not the cost
Two shops on the same Shopify plan can spend very different amounts, depending on how much of their process has to go into the shop: the stock levels that come from the management system, the orders that go back into the ERP without being copied by hand. It is the item no price list shows.
SaaS or open source
A SaaS like Shopify has a low entry price and a subscription that rises with turnover: you pay for the convenience of not thinking about infrastructure. With an open source platform like WooCommerce or PrestaShop the licence fee disappears, but hosting and security updates become your job. Below a certain volume of sales the subscription is the better deal; above it, owning the platform is.
When building it to measure pays off
Almost never for a standard shop: the ready-made platforms do it better and cost less, because many others have already put them to the test. It pays off when the way of selling is yours and no module covers it: product configurators, B2B prices that depend on variables only the management system knows, a catalogue that changes with production. In those cases the platform stays for the catalogue, and the piece no module covers is written to measure, as a web app.