Ecommerce Website Cost: Subscriptions, Fees, Setup and Monthly Costs of an Online Store

How much does an online store cost? Ecommerce website cost comes as two separate bills: the one you pay once to get the store running, and the one that comes back every month for as long as it operates. The platform subscription is only one line item on that second bill, and not necessarily the biggest one.

In this article we compare prices from platform and payment-gateway price lists read on 30 September 2026, and show how to work out your own monthly cost. Every figure carries a source and a date. Price lists change often, so check the current version at the link before you decide.

Two bills: setup cost and monthly cost

Setup cost is everything you pay once: configuring the platform or paying a contractor to build it, a template or a custom design, integrations with payments, couriers and your invoicing system, importing products, and activation fees from payment gateways.

Monthly cost is the sum of the bills that keep coming back: the subscription or hosting, paid apps and plugins, payment-processing fees, shipping and returns, marketing, technical upkeep, and people's time. The whole thing is called TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

Why does the subscription alone tell you so little? Because platforms charge in different places. One has a higher subscription but takes nothing per order. Another has a cheap subscription and a flat fee per order. A third adds a percentage on top if you don't use its own payment processor. At a handful of orders a month the difference is negligible; at a few hundred, it can outweigh the subscription itself. That's why the rest of this article compares not just plan prices, but what's included in them, and what gets added per transaction.

If you're still choosing a model, see the ecommerce platform comparison, and for the launch itself, how to start an online store.

SaaS subscriptions, per the price lists read 30.09.2026

A SaaS platform is a store on a subscription: the vendor keeps the servers running, patches the software and is responsible for platform security, and you pay monthly or yearly. The trade-off — what you gain and what you hand to the vendor — is covered generally in our guide to SaaS. Below are the vendors' own published prices, read 30.09.2026.

Shopify

The Polish Shopify price list gives: Basic PLN 109/month billed monthly, or PLN 79/month billed yearly; Grow PLN 319/PLN 239; Advanced PLN 1,630/PLN 1,220; Plus from EUR 2,100/month on annual billing. The page doesn't say whether these include VAT. Trial: 3 days free, then PLN 4/month for 3 months.

The subscription includes hosting, an SSL certificate and an unlimited product catalogue; Shopify doesn't charge a setup fee. What's billed separately: apps, premium themes, and Shopify Payments, which works in Poland — on Basic, a standard online card costs 1.95% + PLN 1.20, BLIK 1.3% + PLN 1.20 and Przelewy24 1.6% + PLN 1.20; the card rate falls to 1.8% on Grow, 1.65% on Advanced and 1.45% on Plus. If you connect a different processor instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus, not charged on manual methods such as cash on delivery or a traditional bank transfer (third-party gateway fees).

PrestaShop Hosted

PrestaShop's open-source Classic edition is a free download. Its hosted plan, PrestaShop Hosted, costs €29/month with no commitment, or €24/month billed annually (€290/year), excl. VAT, with a 14-day trial and 50 GB of Gandi hosting included.

Ecwid

Ecwid no longer has a free plan. Prices are listed in USD: Venture $35/month billed monthly, $29 billed annually (up to 100 products); a "Starter" tier is listed at $5/month (10 products). Prices exclude tax, and Ecwid says it charges no setup or transaction fees on any plan.

Polish SaaS platforms

The Polish platforms publish their prices in złoty, mostly net of VAT.

[Shoper](https://www.shoper.pl/cennik) has Standard, Standard+ and Premium plans. The regular price is PLN 299 net/month for Standard and Standard+ (PLN 367.77 gross) and from PLN 729 net/month for Premium (PLN 896.67 gross); billed annually it is PLN 3,249 net/year for Standard and Standard+ and from PLN 7,849 net/year for Premium. The plan cards show promotional prices (Standard PLN 29 net/month, Standard+ PLN 33, Premium PLN 480 in the first year; the terms are unclear), so budget on the regular price. Standard covers up to 50,000 products, an email in your own domain, a helpline 8:00–20:00, handling of payments, shipping and returns, and a two-way Allegro integration; Premium covers up to 500,000 products, 24/7 support and an account manager. Shoper lists no sales commission, and the fees of payment methods are not in the price list. Trial: 14 days, no card.

[IdoSell](https://www.idosell.com/pl/szczegolowy-cennik-idosell/), per its PDF price list effective 1 August 2026 (net, plus 23% VAT): Start PLN 119, Business PLN 279, Expert+ PLN 729, Enterprise PLN 2,299, Individual PLN 14,299 per month; activation PLN 1. On top comes a flat fee per store order — PLN 1.59 on Business, PLN 1.49 on Expert+, PLN 0.85 on Enterprise (Start includes up to 20 orders a month) — and PLN 0.55/0.49/0.42 per marketplace order. On annual contracts Start costs PLN 29 net/month in year one and Business PLN 2,790/year. From Expert+, an integration fee applies to turnover through external payment gateways. Implementation packages cost PLN 1,199, 3,999 and 14,999 net; add-on apps PLN 39–330 net/month; a wildcard SSL certificate PLN 115/year.

[Sky-Shop](https://sky-shop.pl/cennik_sklepu/) (net, billed monthly): Start Up PLN 129 (100 products, 30 orders a month), Basic PLN 259 (15,000 products, 400 orders), Business PLN 359 (75,000, 800), Supreme PLN 599 (250,000, 1,400); an annual promotion brings, for example, Start Up down to PLN 19 instead of PLN 99 a month.

[Selly](https://www.selly.pl/sklep-internetowy-cena/): Core PLN 352 net/month billed monthly or PLN 299 annually; Pro PLN 823/699; Custom from PLN 1,764/1,499; no commission; 14-day trial.

AtomStore, per its B2C price list (PDF) effective 1 March 2026: PRO PLN 499, PREMIUM PLN 799, PREMIUM+ PLN 1,299, MAX PLN 1,999 net/month, with 0.50%/0.40%/0.30% on gateways other than IdoPay. The price page shows a second, higher table, so ask which applies.

What's in the subscription, and what you pay separately

Across SaaS platforms, the subscription generally covers hosting, software updates and an SSL certificate. You usually pay separately for:

• payments — the gateway's own fee, plus a third-party-gateway surcharge on some platforms (Shopify);
• apps and themes — usually from the platform's own marketplace;
• a higher plan — once you cross a product, order or feature limit.

It's also worth knowing what uptime commitment a vendor makes and what happens if the store goes down — that's the subject of a service-level agreement (SLA).

Open source: WooCommerce and PrestaShop — free code, everything else billed

WooCommerce and PrestaShop are open-source software: you download the code without a licence fee, and nobody takes a cut of your sales. You pay for everything around it.

WooCommerce describes itself as "the free, open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress." Its own pricing page gives estimates in USD: hosting $25–350 a month for most stores, extensions $29–299 a year each — no platform fees, no revenue share. An example extension, WooCommerce Subscriptions, costs $279/year.

PrestaShop in its self-hosted, open-source form is free. Its hosted, subscription version is the PrestaShop Hosted plan covered above.

Beyond hosting and extensions, open source carries two cost lines no vendor price list shows: implementation (configuration, template, integrations — see the implementation section below), and updates and upkeep — the engine, plugins and modules need patching, testing after patching, and securing. A SaaS vendor does this inside the subscription; in open source, you do it yourself or pay a contractor for it every month.

Payment gateways — standard rates

Whatever the platform, every online payment costs something. Standard published rates, read 30.09.2026:

• [PayU](https://poland.payu.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2026/02/Price_list_PL4_01_2026.pdf) (price list 01/2026): BLIK, fast transfers, cards, Google Pay and Apple Pay at a standard 1.49% + PLN 0.30 (promotional 1.1% + PLN 0.30); registration PLN 199 (promotional PLN 29). The list doesn't state whether amounts are net or gross.
• [Przelewy24](https://www.przelewy24.pl/oferta/tabela-prowizji-i-oplat): transfers, BLIK, cards, Google Pay and Apple Pay at 1.29% + PLN 0.30; activation PLN 59, refunded after 10 transactions in the first two months; subscription PLN 0; the first four payouts a month are free, then PLN 0.99 each; a payout to a foreign account costs PLN 40, and a payout in euros (SEPA) EUR 1.50.
• [Tpay](https://tpay.com/user/assets/files_for_download/pakiety-serwisowe-2026.pdf) (2026 packages): Starter PLN 0/month, activation PLN 99, online transfers and BLIK at 1.59% + PLN 0.39; Business PLN 99/month, activation PLN 1, 0.99%; card rates are individual in both packages.
• [Stripe](https://stripe.com/en-pl/pricing) (Poland): standard EEA cards 1.5% + PLN 1.00; BLIK 1.6% + PLN 1.00; Przelewy24 1.9% + PLN 1.00; non-EEA cards and currency conversion cost more; each dispute costs PLN 90.

The operators reserve the right to negotiate individual rates.

The fixed part of a fee (PLN 0.30, PLN 0.39 or PLN 1.00) matters most on cheap orders: on a PLN 30 order, Stripe's PLN 1.00 is over 3% of the sale, before the percentage applies. EU law also caps the interchange fee on consumer card transactions at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit cards (Regulation (EU) 2015/751), bans surcharges on cards whose interchange is regulated this way (PSD2, Art. 62(4)), and sets the strong-authentication exemption for online cards at €30 per transaction — an EU limit set in euro (RTS (EU) 2018/389, Art. 16). More on choosing payment methods and delivery is in payments and logistics.

Implementation and setup — get quotes, not averages

Our report ["Koszty sklepów internetowych w Polsce — edycja 2026" (Online Store Costs in Poland — 2026 edition)](pages:6a881b92d619d2695247642d) is the benchmark we use. It rests on 108 publicly available price observations from 70 entities, collected March–May 2026, all net prices. The medians (P50): a starter store (about 50 products, a template) PLN 5,000 (n=20); a mid-size store (100–2,000 products, own branding, 2–4 integrations) PLN 15,000 (n=34), with quartiles at PLN 9,000 and 30,000; an enterprise store (1,000+ products, ERP/CRM) PLN 46,000 (n=29); a dedicated B2B store PLN 226,500 (n=9, direction only). By platform: WooCommerce PLN 9,999 (n=21), PrestaShop PLN 15,000 (n=16), Shopify PLN 35,000 (n=6 only). The caveats: these are published price lists and offers, not invoices, and about half come from interactive agencies, so the sample is not random. Build costs still depend on your scope and on who does the work, so use the report as a starting point and get two or three comparable quotes for your own scope. Add the start costs that sit outside the build: implementation packages (IdoSell's, for instance), paid templates and payment-operator activation fees.

If you're considering a store in a headless architecture — a separate front end connected over an API — that's its own cost category, covered in headless vs. classic store.

Monthly store costs (TCO) — how to work them out

The monthly cost of running a store is the sum of small, recurring bills that grow with sales. The simplest approach is to lay them out once across seven categories, then update them every month. We don't give "typical" figures for whole scenarios here — they depend on your category, basket size and order volume. What follows is what to write down and how to calculate it.

Separate one-off costs from recurring ones first

One-off costs are the launch or a migration: a template or design, configuring tax and shipping, integrations, importing products, training your team. Recurring costs are everything that comes back every month. Mixing the two leads to a familiar problem: the store has money for launch, but no reserve for the fixed bills that show up a few months in.

1. Platform and technology

The SaaS subscription or hosting, paid apps and plugins, the domain, monitoring. On SaaS, check the plan's limits — products, orders, admin accounts — since crossing them moves you to a higher tier. On open source, add hosting; on a headless store, add front-end hosting and a test environment too.

Once a quarter, review the list of add-ons: what each one costs, what it does, whether it duplicates another one, and whether it slows the store down. Every app is another script loaded in the customer's browser — a cost, and also a speed problem.

2. Payments

What matters here is the effective payment fee — how much you actually hand to processors relative to sales:

> effective fee = (total processing fees + chargeback costs + payment-refund costs) ÷ online payment volume

Add the flat per-transaction fee, payout fees, any third-party-gateway surcharge the platform charges, and the cost of chargebacks (Stripe in Poland, for instance, charges PLN 90 for every dispute received) on top of the headline rate. Check your contract on whether the processor refunds its fee on a returned order — if not, every return costs you the processing fee on a sale that no longer exists.

3. Delivery and returns

Shipping cost isn't one rate but a matrix: size, weight, zone, surcharges for odd-shaped parcels. On top of that, returns — a label, inspecting the goods, repackaging, staff time — and, if you use one, a third-party fulfilment warehouse that charges for receiving, storing and picking. One metric rolls all of it up:

> logistics cost per order = (shipping + returns + fulfilment + packaging + operational labour) ÷ orders fulfilled

Compare it against your average order value and your free-delivery threshold — it immediately shows whether that threshold is set sensibly.

4. Marketing and content

Ads, email and SMS tools, a product-feed tool, photos and copy, translations. This is spend meant to produce revenue, so measure it against sales, not just as a number: what it costs to acquire a customer, and whether you're still making money on that customer once returns are deducted.

5. Technical upkeep and security

Updates, testing after each update (does checkout, login, discount codes and payment still work), backups with a periodic restore test, uptime and error monitoring. On SaaS the vendor does most of this; on open source it's a fixed budget line — your own time or a contractor's retainer.

6. People and operations

Customer service, entering products, fixing data, handling returns, reporting. Even if you do it yourself, count the hours — it's a real cost that grows with order volume.

7. The cost of leaving a platform

This category doesn't show up on an invoice until you try to switch platforms. At that point, what matters is what data you can take with you, and in what format. Per each vendor's own documentation (read 30.09.2026):

• Shopify — CSV export of customers, orders and products (customers, orders, products);
• PrestaShop Hosted — the vendor states plainly: "you're free to recover all your ecommerce data if you want to stop your subscription";
• Ecwid — CSV export of orders, customers and the product catalogue (orders, customers, catalogue);

A CSV is data, not a store: the design, the configuration, the URLs and redirects all need rebuilding on the new platform. How to move without losing search rankings is covered in ecommerce migration and SEO; the store migration checklist helps too. Why it pays to check a SaaS vendor's exit terms before you sign, not after, is covered in cloud data security.

A worked example: platform and gateway on 100 orders at PLN 150

To show how different billing models translate into an actual figure, we worked out one month for three combinations. This is a worked example, not an offer or a recommendation.

Assumptions: 100 orders a month at PLN 150 each, so PLN 15,000 in sales; every order paid online by standard card or BLIK at the named operator; the platform billed monthly, no promotional pricing; no one-off fees (activation, setup), apps, returns or chargebacks. Rates from the price lists read 30.09.2026; net where the price list says net, while Shopify and PayU don't state VAT, so their amounts are summed as given.

Shopify Basic + Shopify Payments (standard card). Subscription PLN 109. Fee: 1.95% × 15,000 = PLN 292.50, plus PLN 1.20 × 100 = PLN 120. Total: 109 + 292.50 + 120 = PLN 521.50. Billed yearly (PLN 79), it's PLN 491.50. If the same store took payments through an external gateway instead — say Przelewy24, at 193.50 + 30 = PLN 223.50 — Shopify would add its 2% third-party surcharge: 2% × 15,000 = PLN 300, for 109 + 223.50 + 300 = PLN 632.50.

IdoSell Business + PayU. Subscription PLN 279 net. Order fee: PLN 1.59 × 100 = PLN 159. PayU: 1.49% × 15,000 = PLN 223.50, plus PLN 0.30 × 100 = PLN 30. Total: 279 + 159 + 223.50 + 30 = PLN 691.50, without the integration fee, which the price list applies from Expert+. With IdoPay (a combined rate of 1.49% net on Business), the payment part is PLN 223.50 and the total PLN 661.50.

Shoper Standard + Przelewy24. Subscription PLN 299 net (regular price). Przelewy24: 1.29% × 15,000 = PLN 193.50, plus PLN 0.30 × 100 = PLN 30. Total: 299 + 193.50 + 30 = PLN 522.50.

What does this show? Under these assumptions, the gap between the cheapest and most expensive combination is PLN 170 a month, and in every case the payment fees are comparable to or larger than the subscription. Change one assumption and the ranking can flip: a higher basket makes the percentage matter more, a lower one makes the flat per-transaction fee matter more. Calculate it on your own numbers.

A rhythm for reviewing costs

TCO calculated once goes stale fast. A simple rhythm: every month, compare costs against plan across the seven categories; every quarter, review apps and plugins, courier and processor rates, and before signing a new contract, ask two or three vendors for comparable quotes under the same terms. Bring your own data to that conversation: a few months of sales, the mix of payment methods used, and the number of disputes.

Your own ecommerce website cost — working it out

To turn these prices and formulas into your own numbers:

1. Setup cost — work it out in the store setup cost calculator, which compares platforms, integrations and payments in a few minutes.
2. Monthly cost over a few years — the ecommerce TCO calculator sums the subscription or hosting, add-ons, fees and upkeep for Shoper, IdoSell, Shopify and the open-source options. Check subscription and fee rates one last time against the price lists linked above — those are the ones that bind you.
3. Choosing a platform — if you're torn between models, try the which e-commerce platform quiz, or read the platform comparison.
4. Starting with no budget — what's genuinely free, and where the free tiers stop, is in our article on a free online store.

More on platforms is gathered in ecommerce platforms.