Free Ecommerce Website Creator — What's Actually Free, and What Always Costs Money

You can start an online store for free with an ecommerce website creator, but you can almost never run one without any cost at all. "Free" usually means a billing model: instead of a subscription you pay a commission, instead of a licence you pay for hosting, instead of money you put in your own time. This article shows what's genuinely free in the popular options, based on price lists read on 30 September 2026, what always costs money, and the point at which a free start stops paying off.

We rely only on vendor price lists and help pages, Meta's own documentation, Gemius, Eurostat (Polish figures), and Polish law. Free-plan terms and prices change often — check the current price list at the linked page before you decide.

What can be free in an ecommerce website creator, and what always costs money

A store is made of several layers, and each one has its own bill. One or two of them can be free. Never all of them.

Can be free:

• the store software — WooCommerce and PrestaShop are open source; you download the code with no licence fee;
• the start on a cloud platform — a free trial or a free plan from an online store creator;
• a design template — platforms carry free templates alongside paid ones; on Shopify only templates outside the free pool cost anything.

Always costs money:

• Payments. Every payment processor takes a cut of the transaction, whether or not the store pays a subscription. Standard rates published on 30 September 2026: Przelewy24 — 1.29% + PLN 0.30 for a transfer, BLIK or card; PayU — 1.49% + PLN 0.30 standard; Stripe — 1.6% + PLN 1.00 for BLIK. By our calculation, on a PLN 100 order that's PLN 1.59, PLN 1.79 and PLN 2.60 per transaction respectively. Przelewy24 says fees may be negotiated individually. The full comparison is in payment gateway fees.
• A domain. Your own address costs money at the registrar every year. On every free plan, check whether it allows a custom domain, and whether that requires a paid tier.
• Time. Setup, photos, product copy, order handling, returns and updates — you either do this work yourself or pay someone to. In open source, add ongoing technical maintenance, which a SaaS subscription bundles in.
• Delivery and returns — shipping cost falls on the buyer or the seller; no platform covers it for free.

So the useful question isn't "can I build a store for free" — it's where on this list you pay, and whether you pay a flat amount or a percentage of sales. A flat fee is predictable but still bites in a month with no orders. A percentage doesn't hurt at the start, but grows with your turnover.

Free trials and SaaS plans — state as of 30 September 2026

SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms are stores on subscription: the vendor runs the servers, updates and security, and you pay for access. We cover that model more broadly in the guide to SaaS. Most of these vendors don't keep a permanent free plan — only a trial period. What follows is the state on the day the price lists were read.

Shopify: 3 days free, then PLN 4/month for 3 months

Shopify's Polish pricing page offers a trial of 3 days free, then PLN 4/month for 3 months, with no card required for the trial. After the promotion ends, the chosen plan's regular price applies — Basic at PLN 109/month billed monthly, or PLN 79/month billed annually; the page doesn't state whether these amounts include VAT.

Two caveats from Shopify's Help Center: "The length of your free trial can vary based on different factors", and if it ends before you pick a plan, "your store is paused until you choose a paid plan." During the trial the store is private and checkout doesn't work until a paid plan is chosen — meaning you can build and test a Shopify store for free, but you can't sell on it.

What you pay on top: Shopify Payments on the Basic plan charges 1.95% + PLN 1.20 for a standard online card, and if you connect an external gateway instead (PayU or Przelewy24, say), Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic (falling to 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus) on top of the gateway's own commission. There's no such fee on manual methods like cash on delivery or a traditional bank transfer (third-party fee rules). Apps and premium templates outside the free pool also cost money.

Wix: a free plan that can't accept payments

Wix's plans page describes the Free plan as "No credit card required," with hosting and a drag-and-drop editor included. "Accept payments" and "eCommerce," however, sit only on the Core, Business and Business Elite plans — the Free and Light plans don't have them. On the free plan you can build a site and a catalogue, but to actually take a payment you need a paid plan.

We're not quoting Wix's prices: on the day of reading, the pricing page rendered in a non-Polish currency (USD, with local tax) because of geo-pricing. Check the current price logged in with a Polish billing address.

Squarespace and Weebly: one free plan with a cart

Squarespace offers a 14-day trial; on its pricing page, the Basic plan charges an online-store transaction fee of 2%, falling to 0% on higher plans — a currency-independent fact. Squarespace's price list in złoty shows Basic at PLN 99/month (PLN 69 billed annually).

Weebly is the one builder in this list that still shows a free plan with a shopping cart. Its pricing page (read 30 September 2026) lists Free ("Basic use", $0/month), Personal at $13/month billed annually, Professional at $15 and Performance at $32, with "Shopping Cart" ticked on all four, Free included. Two cautions. First, Weebly is winding down: its notice on changes to global operations covers 67 listed countries, with no new sites from 29 June 2026, sites switched off on 27 September 2026 and account access ending on 26 December 2026; Poland is not on that list (read 5 October 2026), but the product's future is uncertain, so don't build a long-term store on it. Second, we could not confirm which payment methods a Polish seller can use, whether the Free plan allows your own domain, or whether it carries platform branding.

Ecwid: no longer has a free plan

Older guides still describe "Ecwid's free plan for up to 10 products." According to Ecwid's current pricing page, there is no free plan any more: the cheapest is Starter at $5/month, limited to 10 products, with the next tier, Venture, at $35/month ($29 billed annually) for up to 100 products. Ecwid states plainly: "we don't charge any setup or transaction fees on any of our plans" — the platform takes no cut of sales, which doesn't exempt you from the payment processor's own fee.

Other trial windows worth knowing

The Polish platforms offer trials, not free plans: Shoper gives a 14-day test with no card, Sky-Shop 14 days (an unpaid test store is deleted 14 days after the trial ends), and Selly 14 days with no contract and no card. Squarespace's 14-day trial and BigCommerce's 15-day trial are long enough to look at the admin panel and add a few products, but rarely long enough to test real demand. BigCommerce says its trial is fully functional, so you can launch the store and take payments during it. BigCommerce keeps an unpaid trial's data for 90 days, then deletes it — a useful reminder to export early rather than assume you can come back for it later. BigCommerce's own published prices are in USD (Core from $29/month billed annually).

What you give up on a free plan

Before you add your first product on any free SaaS plan, check four things:

1. Can you accept payments — on Wix, no; on Shopify, not during the trial.
2. Can you connect your own domain — an address on the vendor's subdomain is harder to migrate later without losing links.
3. What are the limits — product count, order count, storage for images.
4. What extra fees apply to sales — a platform's own commission (like Squarespace Basic's 2%) or a surcharge for an external gateway (like Shopify Basic's 2%).

On a paid subscription, this same checklist becomes a question about what the vendor guarantees — uptime, backups, how it responds to an outage. We cover what to look for in that kind of agreement in a separate article on SLA agreements in SaaS services.

Open source: WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shopware and Medusa — no licence fee, not free to run

WooCommerce describes itself as "the free, open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress," with "no platform fees, no revenue share" (WooCommerce pricing). PrestaShop's open-source version is free the same way. Shopware's Community Edition is free under the MIT licence, and Medusa's core is MIT-licensed too — except for the Enterprise Edition files called out in its own ENTERPRISE-LICENSE.md. This is genuinely free software — but software is only one layer of a store.

To run a store on any of these, you need:

• hosting — WooCommerce's own estimate is $25–350/month for most stores;
• a domain and an SSL certificate — Shopify bundles SSL into the subscription; in open source you arrange it yourself, usually through your hosting provider;
• extensions — WooCommerce quotes $29–299/year each; the ones a store actually needs, like subscription billing, are often among the paid ones (WooCommerce Subscriptions runs $279/year);
• updates and security — the engine, theme and plugins need updating and testing after every update; a SaaS vendor does this for you, here it's you or your contractor;
• time to configure — payments, shipping, tax, terms and the template are your own setup work.

There are also paid middle grounds. PrestaShop Hosted costs €29/month with no commitment, or €24/month billed annually, excluding VAT, with a 14-day trial and 50 GB of Gandi-provided hosting; the vendor states you can "recover all your ecommerce data" if you cancel. If you need a headless storefront instead, Medusa Cloud starts at $29/month (Develop), rising to $99 (Launch) and $299 (Scale), with a flat 0.0% fee on sales and overage charges past the plan's usage limits. Magento Open Source is distributed under the OSL-3.0 licence; Adobe Commerce's own licence price is not publicly confirmed — ask for a written quote if you're considering it.

Open source makes sense when you want full control over code and data and have someone to handle the technical side. As a free starting point for someone with no technical background, it's usually more expensive than SaaS — not on the price list, in hours.

Facebook and Instagram Shops in 2026

A shop on Facebook or Instagram is the most common association with "selling for free": the profile is free and the customers are already there. The reality in 2026 is different from what older guides describe.

According to Meta's Business Help Center: "As of September 2025, Shops on Facebook and Instagram now use website checkout," and "Payment processing has been discontinued for Shops. You can no longer conduct transactions in your Shops on Facebook and Instagram." Since September 2025, a purchase in a Facebook or Instagram Shop therefore ends on the merchant's own website, and in-app payment processing has been switched off entirely — this applies internationally, not to one market. Poland, moreover, is not on Meta's list of countries supported by Shops. In Gemius's 2026 survey, only 20% of respondents had bought something directly via a social platform in the previous year.

The practical takeaway: Facebook and Instagram are a sales channel, not a free store. You can display products there, talk to customers and drive traffic, but the order and payment have to happen somewhere else — your own online store.

A marketplace instead of a store: you pay commission, not a subscription

A second "no subscription" route is a marketplace. The cost mechanism runs the opposite way from a SaaS store:

• no flat subscription for the storefront — the cost only shows up once you sell something;
• a commission on every sale per the marketplace's own fee schedule, worth adding up alongside payment and delivery costs for a single order;
• traffic comes from the platform — you don't have to build it from zero, but you compete on price and terms in the same search results as everyone else;
• the customer belongs to the platform — it owns the communication, reviews and selling rules, and you have limited say in how you appear next to competitors.

In Poland, a marketplace means above all Allegro. Per the Gemius report "E-commerce w Polsce 2026" (E-commerce in Poland 2026; a CAWI survey of 1,874 internet users aged 15+, 14–22 July 2026; partners Gemius, Polskie Badania Internetu, IAB Polska and Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego), Allegro has "nearly 19 million users a month and over 5.5 million a day". Commission rates depend on the category and change, so we don't quote Allegro's fees here — check the marketplace's current price list before you list. If you run a store on Shoper, note that its Standard plan includes a two-way Allegro integration.

How widely do Polish businesses actually sell this way? Per Eurostat (2025 survey, covering sales in 2024; enterprises with 10+ employees; isoc_ec_eseln2 and isoc_ec_evaln2), 10.69% of Polish enterprises sold via marketplaces (EU average: 9.31%), and those marketplace sales made up 23.35% of the value of their web and app sales (EU: 15.54%). A marketplace is a significant channel for those who use it, and it runs alongside the store, not instead of it.

At low volume, a commission usually comes out cheaper than a subscription. As sales grow, the total commission eventually overtakes the cost of running your own store — and that crossover point is worth calculating, not guessing.

Store creator — when it's enough, and when it stops paying off

A store creator is a platform where you build a shop from ready-made blocks, no coding required — Shopify, Wix and Squarespace all work this way. A free plan or trial has one good purpose: test an idea cheaply. A handful of products, a simple template, one payment method and one delivery method are enough to find out whether anyone will actually buy.

When a free or cheapest plan is enough

• you're testing whether a product sells and have a handful of listings;
• you sell occasionally, and turnover stays well under any VAT-registration threshold;
• you don't need integration with inventory, accounting, or a marketplace;
• you accept the look-and-feature limits of the plan you've chosen.

A reference point for small-scale selling

A useful reference point in Poland is unregistered activity (działalność nierejestrowana). Since 1 January 2026 its limit is quarterly: revenue may not exceed 225% of the minimum wage in any quarter (Art. 5(1) of the Entrepreneurs' Law, Prawo przedsiębiorców, Dz.U. 2025, item 1480). With the minimum wage at PLN 4,806 (Dz.U. 2025, item 1242), that is PLN 10,813.50 per quarter — the same figure appears on biznes.gov.pl. The other condition is that you have had no business activity in the last 60 months. Even in unregistered activity, you must respect consumer rights, including the 14-day right of withdrawal from a distance contract, and meet obligations related to complaints, returns and repairs.

If your sales are approaching that limit, you're running a business, not a test — and it's worth calculating whether commissions, external-gateway surcharges and the limits of a free plan now cost more than an ordinary subscription.

Obligations are the same as in a paid store

A free store doesn't mean fewer obligations. Consumer-protection duties — terms, pre-contract information, pricing rules, the right to withdraw — apply regardless of what you pay for the platform. We cover the full list, with legal references, in how to start an online store.

When a store creator stops paying off

Signs that a free or cheapest plan is starting to cost more than it saves:

• surcharges on sales (platform commission or external-gateway fee) add up to more than the gap between plans;
• you're hitting a product or order limit, and every next step means a plan change;
• you need an integration the plan doesn't include — with a marketplace, an accounting system, a warehouse;
• handling orders takes you longer than the automation on a higher plan would cost.

If you want to compare specific platforms against these criteria, see our e-commerce platform comparison or try the which e-commerce platform quiz.

When to move to a paid plan, and how to take your data with you

Moving from a free plan to a paid one on the same platform is usually simple — pick a plan and pay. Switching platforms entirely is harder, because what matters then is what you can export. That's worth asking before you add your first product, not on moving day.

What vendor help pages confirm you can export (state as of 30 September 2026):

• Shopify — customers, orders and products to CSV (customers, orders, products);
• Ecwid — products, orders and customers to CSV (exporting orders);
• BigCommerce — an unpaid trial's data is kept for 90 days, then deleted;
• PrestaShop Hosted — the vendor states you can recover all your store's data when you cancel.

CSV moves data, but not everything: URLs, redirects, reviews, the template and integrations still have to be rebuilt. How to change platforms without losing your search rankings is covered in store migration, and the step list is in the migration checklist. Who's responsible for your data in a cloud service, and what to ask the vendor, is covered in cloud security.

When should you move to a paid plan? In short: when the free plan stops allowing sales (trial ended, no payments), when sales surcharges exceed the gap to a paid subscription, or when you need your own domain and integrations. What that will cost in your specific case is something you can check in the online store cost calculator — it compares platforms, integrations and payments in a few minutes. All our articles on choosing a platform sit in the platforms section.