What an online store costs: platform or bespoke

Why quotes cannot be compared

Send three suppliers the same sentence, "I want a store, roughly two hundred products", and you get three numbers that differ by multiples. It is not because two of them are expensive. It is because each one imagined a different store.

One priced a stock theme with the colours swapped. The second a template written from the design up. The third a bespoke build with its own admin. All three answered your question correctly, and none of the three answers can be compared with the other two.

The fix is not to ask better. The fix is to send everyone the same brief: the list of pages the site must have, the list of features it must do, and an answer to who will produce the content. Only then are three numbers three prices for the same thing.

What is paid once and what every month

This is the most common trap in a budget. A one-off item fits into a decision easily; a monthly item usually does not fit at all, because nobody adds it up.

• Once: design, the template or the build, content migration, tracking setup, launch and training.
• Every month: the platform licence, add-ons, hosting and domains, updates, small changes, and the time of whoever owns it.

There is a relationship between them that quotes never state: the lower the one-off price, the higher the monthly tends to be, and the reverse. A stock theme is cheapest today and dearest the moment you need to change it. A bespoke build is dearest today, and its monthly item is your own maintenance, which nobody puts a figure on.

Platform: the money goes into add-ons

The platform licence is a clear item. Depending on the tariff it runs from the low hundreds to a few thousand crowns a month, and it buys the order flow, carrier and payment gateway integrations, stock, invoices, and hosting with backups.

What is not clear is add-ons. Each has its own monthly fee and each looks like a small amount on its own. Three or four of them — a stock watcher, an accounting link, a better search, a review tool — can double the tariff. So before deciding, go through the feature list and write next to each one whether the platform does it natively or through an add-on, and what that add-on costs.

The second item not to look for in a quote is the template. A stock theme with the colours swapped is part of the tariff. A template written from the design up is work, and it is the largest one-off item on a platform. The difference between them is exactly the difference between a site that looks like yours and a site that looks like a thousand others.

Bespoke: the cost is not in the build, it is in the upkeep

With a bespoke store, attention goes to the build, because that is the number in the quote. The more interesting number is the second one, which is not in the quote: what it will cost to keep running for the next three years.

In your own store, things nobody notices on a platform are yours, because there they work by themselves: order states you only think of once you are live, changes at carriers and payment gateways that arrive unannounced, updates forced by vulnerabilities, backups and the testing of them. None of it is interesting work and all of it has to work.

So we go bespoke only where there is a reason stronger than aesthetics: a configurator instead of a basket, prices per customer group, a link into manufacturing or an ERP, a B2B interface alongside ordinary retail. When the reason is that, bespoke tends to be cheaper than bending a platform. When the reason is that it should be ours, it tends to be dearer than anyone expects.

Count three years, not three months

The comparison that means something looks like this: add the one-off price to thirty-six months of running cost. For both options. Then look at the gap, and above all at where the gap comes from.

What belongs in that sum and is usually forgotten:

• Content. Photographs, descriptions, text for the content pages. The most common hole in a budget, because the supplier assumes the client supplies it and the client assumes the supplier does.
• Tracking. GA4, Consent Mode v2, e-commerce events and verifying them against the orders in the admin. Leave this item out and the store will run while nobody knows how it is doing.
• The feed. Product data for Merchant Center and comparison sites. It decides advertising performance more than campaign settings do, so it is better to have it right at the start than to fix it after launch.
• Leaving. What happens if in two years you want to move. On a platform you export the content and the template stays; with a bespoke build you take the repository. It is not a theoretical item, it is just paid later.

What to demand in every quote

Five sentences that turn a number into a quote. A supplier who will not answer them now will not answer them later either:

1. A split into one-off and monthly, item by item.
2. The list of features handled by an add-on, and the price of each add-on.
3. What content is included and what we supply ourselves.
4. What we receive at handover: access, the repository or template, documentation — and in whose name.
5. What an ordinary change costs after launch, and how fast it happens.

We do not quote before going through that page list ourselves. Not because we will not name a number, but because a number before the list is an estimate of somebody else's store. How we make that decision is set out on the online stores page, and on a real project in the article about a content-heavy store on a closed platform.