Ask a retailer what their ecommerce platform costs and you will usually hear one number: the monthly licence. It is the number on the sales page and the one in the board pack. It is also, very often, less than half of the real cost.
When we run a Platform Review, the first job is to add up everything. Here is how to do it yourself.
Start with every invoice, not the price list
Pull twelve months of invoices for anything connected to your online store. You are looking for five kinds of cost.
The licence. The headline subscription, including any plan upgrades you were moved onto as you grew.
Apps and plug-ins. Reviews, search, subscriptions, loyalty, translations, shipping rules. Each one is small. Together they are often as large as the licence itself.
Hosting and services. Content delivery, image services, email sending, monitoring. On some platforms this is bundled; on others it is not.
Development and agency time. The retainer, plus every one-off change request. This is the cost most often left out, because it sits in a different budget.
Revenue-linked fees. Many platforms take a percentage of sales, either directly or through payment processing you are required to use. At scale, this is frequently the largest single line.
Turn it into a three-year number
Monthly costs hide growth. A fee of 0.5% of revenue looks modest at R20 million a year in online sales. If you plan to double that in three years, it doubles with you, every month, forever.
So model three years, not one. Take today's costs, apply your growth plan to anything linked to revenue or orders, and add it up. Most businesses find the three-year figure is two to three times what they expected.
Compare it with owning the platform
The alternative is a composable platform you own: open-source software for the store and content, hosted on infrastructure in your name, with a fixed monthly fee for support and improvement.
That model has a real upfront cost. There is a design phase and a build, typically priced as fixed amounts. But it removes revenue-linked fees, replaces most paid apps with features you own, and turns development from open-ended time into a fixed monthly retainer.
The question is not which is cheaper. It is when the lines cross. For a small store, they may never cross, and a hosted platform is the right answer. For a retailer with meaningful online revenue and a growth plan, the break-even point often arrives within 18 to 30 months.
Four mistakes to avoid
- Comparing licence to build cost, and ignoring everything else.
- Forgetting that revenue-linked fees grow with you.
- Assuming a rebuild must be a multi-year programme. A focused build with a clear specification is measured in months.
- Switching without a specification. Most failed replatforms fail on unclear scope, not technology.
Try the numbers
Our cost of ownership calculator lets you enter your own figures and see the three-year comparison and break-even month. It is indicative only. A Platform Review confirms the numbers against your actual invoices and gives you three costed options, including staying where you are.