Real Cost of an Online Store in 2026: SaaS vs Open Source

Platform pricing pages show a monthly number. Your bank statement shows a different one. This post walks through what a store selling about $10,000 a month actually pays on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and AbanteCart in 2026, including the fees that only appear once you are already live.

The short answer

For a store doing roughly $120,000 a year in online sales, the platform-related cost (everything except the card-processing fees you would pay anywhere) looks like this in 2026:

• Shopify: about $1,900 a year on the entry plan with a typical app stack, rising to $4,300 a year if you use a payment gateway other than Shopify's own.
• BigCommerce: after the June 2026 plan changes, a store at this sales volume no longer fits the $39 or $105 tiers and is priced at the $399 a month tier, about $4,800 a year before apps.
• WooCommerce: around $1,000 to $1,500 a year for managed WordPress hosting plus the paid plugins most stores end up buying.
• AbanteCart: about $200 to $700 in the first year (hosting plus a few one-time extensions), then roughly $60 to $360 a year after that, because the software is free and there is no platform surcharge on payments.

The rest of this article shows where each number comes from, so you can plug in your own sales figures.

Why the pricing page is never the whole bill

Ecommerce platforms make money in four places, and only the first one is on the pricing page:

1. The subscription. The monthly plan price. Easy to compare, and the smallest line item for most growing stores.
2. Payment surcharges. A percentage the platform keeps on every order when you use a gateway it does not own. This is separate from, and on top of, the processor's own 2.9% + 30¢.
3. Apps and add-ons. Reviews, SEO tools, subscriptions, back-in-stock alerts, product compare, live chat. On SaaS platforms these are almost always monthly rentals.
4. Sales thresholds. Plans that cap how much you may sell before you are moved up a tier. Your costs rise because you succeeded, not because you asked for more features.

Open source platforms remove items 2 and 4 entirely and usually turn item 3 from a rental into a one-time purchase. That structural difference is what the five-year table at the end of this post is really measuring.

The example store

To keep the comparison honest we use one store across every platform:

• $10,000 a month in online sales ($120,000 a year)
• 200 orders a month at a $50 average order value
• Needs: an SEO toolset, product reviews, back-in-stock notifications, live chat, and PayPal plus a card gateway
• Card processing at the standard 2.9% + 30¢ per order, which comes to about $4,200 a year and is excluded from every total below because you pay it on any platform

Shopify in 2026

Shopify's plans are Basic at $39 a month ($29 billed annually), Grow at $105 a month and Advanced at $399 a month. Our example store fits Basic, so the subscription is $468 a year.

Two costs sit under that number. First, apps: the average merchant spends roughly $120 a month on Shopify apps, which is $1,440 a year, and the five needs in our example (SEO, reviews, back-in-stock, chat, and PayPal is included) land right around that figure. Second, the third-party payment surcharge: if you process through a gateway that is not Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. On $120,000 in sales that is $2,400 a year on Basic.

Shopify yearly total for the example store: $1,908 with Shopify Payments, or $4,308 with an outside gateway. Add a paid theme ($0 to $400, one time) if the free ones do not fit.

BigCommerce in 2026

BigCommerce renamed and restructured its plans on June 1, 2026. Standard became Core ($39 a month), Plus became Growth ($105 a month), Pro became Scale ($399 a month) and Enterprise became Performance (from $1,499 a month, billed annually). More importantly, each self-service tier now carries a trailing-twelve-month sales cap: Core is available up to $30,000 in GMV, Growth up to $100,000, and Scale includes $33,333 a month with a 0.9% charge on sales above that.

The "no transaction fees" promise also gained conditions. Gateways on BigCommerce's embedded-provider list are still free of platform fees, but any other gateway is now an "Open Payment Provider" and is charged 2% on Core, 1% on Growth or 0.6% on Scale.

Our example store sells $120,000 a year, which is above the Growth cap, so it is priced at Scale: $4,788 a year before apps. Even at $95,000 a year it would be on Growth at $1,260 a year, and it would move up the moment it crossed $100,000. This is the clearest illustration of item 4 above: growth itself triggers the price increase.

BigCommerce yearly total for the example store: about $4,788, plus whatever apps you add (BigCommerce includes more natively than Shopify, so app spend is typically lower). Always confirm the current thresholds on BigCommerce's own pricing page, since this structure is new and may be adjusted.

WooCommerce in 2026

The WooCommerce plugin is free, but the store is not. A host that actually understands WooCommerce starts at around $30 a month ($360 a year), and cheaper shared hosting is possible for a small catalog. The WooCommerce marketplace averages about $65 a year per paid plugin, and a typical store runs about seven paid plugins, so $200 to $500 a year in plugin renewals is normal. Several independent 2026 cost breakdowns land a lean production store at roughly $1,000 to $1,200 a year, and considerably more once you add a premium theme, a page builder, security and backup plugins, and email marketing.

There is no platform surcharge on payments. The trade-off is operational: WordPress plus WooCommerce plus twenty or thirty plugins is a stack that needs regular updates and compatibility testing, and that time is a real cost even when it is not a line item.

WooCommerce yearly total for the example store: about $1,000 to $1,500.

AbanteCart in 2026

AbanteCart is a free, open source ecommerce platform written in PHP with a MySQL database. You download it, install it on any hosting that runs PHP, and own the store outright. Here is what our example store pays.

Software: $0. There is no license, no plan, no sales cap and no percentage of revenue. Version 1.4.4, released in May 2026, ships with catalog management, multi-store, customer groups and B2B pricing, promotions with percent-off, fixed-price and the new fixed-amount-off discounts, a layout and page builder, multi-language and multi-currency, SEO URLs, and a Fast Checkout flow, all in the core.

Hosting: $60 to $360 a year. AbanteCart runs comfortably on shared or entry cloud hosting at $5 to $30 a month. Several hosting partners have tested their platforms specifically for AbanteCart and offer one-click installs.

Payments: no platform surcharge. The PayPal Commerce extension is free and was updated in 1.4.4 to the current PayPal server SDK with Pay Later messaging, product-page checkout buttons and 3D Secure support. Stripe ships with the download, updated to the latest SDK with idempotent payment intents and Stripe Connect. Authorize.Net, Instamojo and regional gateways are on the marketplace. Whichever you choose, AbanteCart takes 0% of the transaction.

Extensions: one-time, not monthly. The five needs in our example map to the AbanteCart Marketplace like this:

• SEO toolset: SEO Boost Tools & Pack, $85 one time (core already includes SEO URLs, meta fields and sitemaps)
• Product reviews: included in the core, free
• Back-in-stock notifications: Back to Stock extension
• Live chat: JivoChat or Smartsupp integrations, free
• PayPal and cards: PayPal Commerce (free) and Stripe (bundled)

Even adding a premium theme such as the "The First" theme at $80, or the Whitelabel extension at $15 to remove AbanteCart branding, the first-year extension spend for this store is in the $100 to $300 range, and it is not billed again next year.

AbanteCart yearly total for the example store: about $200 to $700 in year one, then $60 to $360 a year. If you would rather not touch a server at all, the AbanteCart managed service handles hosting, updates and support for a flat fee, which still comes in below the SaaS totals above and, crucially, never scales with your sales.

Five-year total cost of ownership

Same $120,000-a-year store, card processing excluded, no growth assumed (which is generous to the SaaS platforms, since growth pushes them into higher tiers).

The gap is not a rounding error. Over five years the example store spends between five and eighteen times more on a SaaS platform than on AbanteCart, and the only thing it gets for that money that AbanteCart does not provide is someone else operating the server.

What you are actually buying with the difference

It would be dishonest to pretend the SaaS premium buys nothing. It buys managed infrastructure, a support desk, and freedom from ever thinking about PHP versions or backups. For some merchants that is worth $4,000 a year. For most stores under a few million in revenue, it is a very expensive way to avoid a $30-a-month host and an occasional update.

It also buys a set of constraints you cannot pay your way out of: the platform decides when your theme must be rebuilt, which gateways are "approved", how much you may sell on your tier, and whether you can export everything and leave. Open source reverses each of those. With AbanteCart the code, the database and the customer list are yours, on a server you control, and if you ever want to move to another host you copy a folder and a database dump.

A note for developers

If you build stores for clients, the cost model above changes your margin, not just theirs. There is no per-store platform fee eating into a maintenance retainer, and no revenue-share app model standing between you and the client. AbanteCart 1.4.4 added a pluggable Mail API, dozens of new hooks across checkout, cart, product and admin templates, extension-namespaced model loading, and a PHP 8.4 compatibility fix, so custom work can be packaged as an extension and reused, or sold on the marketplace. The developer documentation and the public GitHub repository are the place to start.

How to run this comparison for your own store

1. Take your last twelve months of online sales and order count.
2. For each SaaS platform, find the tier you are allowed to be on at that volume, not the cheapest tier.
3. Multiply your sales by the platform's outside-gateway surcharge if you use, or may want to use, a gateway it does not own.
4. List the apps you actually rely on and total their monthly fees, then multiply by twelve.
5. For AbanteCart, price a host, then search the marketplace for the same features and note that the prices are one time.
6. Multiply everything by five. That is the number to compare, because that is how long you will likely be on the platform.

Then try the AbanteCart demo, or download version 1.4.4 and install it on a $5 host this afternoon. The store you see is the store you keep, at a cost that stays flat while your sales do not.

Frequently asked questions

Is AbanteCart really free?

Yes. The platform is open source and free to download, install and use commercially, with no plan, sales cap or transaction percentage. You pay only for hosting, any premium extensions or themes you choose from the marketplace, and optional managed services or paid support.

Does AbanteCart charge a fee on payments?

No. You pay your payment processor's rate directly (for example Stripe or PayPal at their standard rates) and AbanteCart adds nothing on top, regardless of which gateway you use.

How much does hosting for AbanteCart cost?

Typically $5 to $30 a month on shared or entry cloud hosting. AbanteCart is a PHP and MySQL application with modest requirements, and several hosting partners offer tested one-click installs.

Are AbanteCart extensions subscriptions?

Most marketplace extensions are one-time purchases that you own, with many popular integrations offered free. Some extensions that connect to third-party SaaS tools (chat, tax automation) may carry a fee from that third party.

Can I migrate from Shopify, BigCommerce or WooCommerce to AbanteCart?

Yes. Products, categories, customers and orders can be imported through AbanteCart's built-in CSV import and data management tools, and migration services are available through the AbanteCart team and community developers.

What did BigCommerce change in 2026?

On June 1, 2026, BigCommerce renamed its plans (Core, Growth, Scale, Performance), added trailing-twelve-month sales caps to each self-service tier, and introduced an "Open Payment Provider" fee of up to 2% on orders processed through gateways outside its approved list. Check BigCommerce's pricing page for the current terms.

Prices in this article are list prices in US dollars as published or reported in 2026 and are subject to change by each vendor. Card-processing fees are excluded from all totals because they apply on every platform. Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce are trademarks of their respective owners.