Ask "how much does an online store cost" and you will get answers from $29 to $250,000, all technically true and all useless. The $29 answer is a platform subscription with nothing on it. The $250,000 answer is an enterprise replatform. Neither is you.
This is the breakdown we walk through with clients before quoting anything. Every number is a range because your catalog size, design ambition, and integrations move the total, but the ranges are honest, including the parts where hiring us is not the cheapest option.
The seven cost lines
1. Platform fees
Shopify Basic runs around $39 per month at the time of writing, less on annual billing. WooCommerce itself is free, but it runs on WordPress, which runs on hosting you pay for (next line). Other hosted platforms cluster in the $20 to $80 per month band. Call it $0 to $480 per year depending on path.
The trap here is not the base fee. It is what the base fee does not include: on hosted platforms, apps are where the real subscription money goes. A reviews app, a bundle app, and an email tool can quietly add $60 to $150 per month.
2. Hosting
Only a real line item on WooCommerce and other self-hosted stacks. Shared hosting at $5 per month will run a store the way a scooter will tow a trailer: technically, briefly, badly. Hosting that keeps a store fast under real traffic runs $25 to $60 per month, and it is one of the highest-return dollars in this whole breakdown. We have written before about why cheap hosting is one of the top causes of slow stores.
3. Theme and design
A good stock theme is $0 to $350 one time. Custom design is where budgets diverge: template customization runs a few hundred dollars of work, a fully custom design runs into the thousands. Our honest advice for a first store: launch on a well-chosen stock theme, spend the custom-design money after you have real customer data telling you what to design for.
4. The build itself: DIY vs freelancer vs agency
The line everyone actually wants numbers on.
DIY: $0 in cash, real money in time. On Shopify with a stock theme, a competent non-developer can get a standard catalog live in 20 to 60 hours. On WooCommerce, double it. The risk is not that you cannot do it; it is the decisions you do not know you are making (URL structure, plugin choices, tax setup) that cost real money to unwind later.
Freelancer: roughly $500 to $2,500 for a small store, and yes, that is cheaper than us. A good freelancer is genuinely great value. The trade you are making is concentration risk: one person's availability, one person's skill ceiling, and no bench when they get a full-time job mid-project or disappear after launch. In our audits, "the freelancer who built it is unreachable" is one of the most common opening sentences.
Agency: roughly $2,500 to $15,000 for small-to-mid stores (ours start at $2,500 fixed price). What the premium buys is process rather than magic: staging environments, tested launches, documentation, and someone answering the phone in month 14. If your store is a side project, that premium may not be worth it. If the store is the business, it usually is.
5. Payment processing
The cost line nobody budgets and everybody pays. Standard online card processing in the US runs around 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. On Shopify plans below Plus, using an outside payment provider adds an extra platform fee on top (2% on Basic at the time of writing), which is why most Shopify stores use Shopify Payments.
Run the math on your own numbers: at $100,000 in annual sales, processing costs roughly $3,000 per year. It will likely be your single largest store cost by year two, and no platform choice makes it disappear.
6. Maintenance
Hosted platforms carry most of this for you. Self-hosted stores need updates, backups, security patches, and compatibility fixes, either your hours or someone's invoice. Care plans (ours is $199 per month) exist because the alternative, in practice, is deferred maintenance until something breaks during a sale. Budget $0 to $2,400 per year depending on platform and who owns it.
7. The hidden costs nobody quotes
These are the lines that make real three-year totals diverge from launch quotes:
- Plugin and app renewals. That $79 plugin was $79 per year. A typical WooCommerce store we audit carries $200 to $600 per year in renewals the owner had mentally filed as one-time purchases.
- Emergency fixes. A broken checkout on a Friday costs whatever it costs. Stores without a maintenance arrangement pay rush rates, typically $100 to $200 per hour, at the worst possible moments.
- Migration debt. Every shortcut at build time (wrong URL structure, hacked theme, abandoned plugin) is a loan. It gets repaid, with interest, when you eventually rebuild or migrate. This is the most expensive line on this page and it never appears on any invoice until years later.
What three years actually costs
A realistic small store (under 200 products, standard features, modest custom design), three paths, three years. Ranges rounded; your numbers will vary, the proportions will not.
| Cost line (3 years) | DIY on Shopify | Freelancer on WooCommerce | Agency (either platform) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform / hosting | $1,100 to $1,700 | $900 to $2,200 | $900 to $2,200 |
| Apps / plugin renewals | $1,000 to $3,600 | $600 to $1,800 | $600 to $1,800 |
| Theme / design | $0 to $350 | included in build | included in build |
| Build | $0 (your 40+ hours) | $500 to $2,500 | $2,500 to $8,000 |
| Maintenance / fixes | $300 to $1,500 | $500 to $3,000 | $0 to $7,200 (care plan) |
| 3-year total | $2,400 to $7,200 | $2,500 to $9,500 | $4,000 to $19,200 |
Payment processing is excluded from the table because it scales with revenue, not with your build path, and dwarfs the rest as you grow.
Two things the table shows that quotes hide. First, the paths overlap: a well-run freelancer build can cost more over three years than a lean agency build, once emergency fixes are counted. Second, the build fee is a minority of the three-year total on every path. Optimizing the launch quote while ignoring the running costs is optimizing the smaller number.
How to use these numbers
Decide your path from the answer to one question: what does an outage or a botched launch cost you? If the store is an experiment, DIY and keep your cash. If the store is meaningful but small, a vetted freelancer is honest value, just get the login credentials, documentation, and a maintenance answer in writing. If the store is the business, pay for process.
If you want the agency path with no estimate roulette: our builds are fixed price from $2,500, quoted after we understand your catalog and integrations, with the scope in writing before anyone pays anything.
See what a fixed-price build includes
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to build an online store with 100 products? Catalog size below a few hundred products barely moves the build cost; what moves it is product complexity (variants, bundles, custom fields) and data quality. A 100-product store with clean data lands in the same ranges above. A 100-product store with data trapped in photos and old spreadsheets can add days of catalog work.
Is it cheaper to build a website yourself or hire someone? In cash, yourself, always. In total cost, it depends on the value of your hours and the cost of mistakes. A 40-hour DIY build is free if your evenings are free, and expensive if those hours should have gone into products and marketing, or if a wrong early decision forces a paid rebuild later.
How much should I pay for ecommerce website maintenance? On hosted platforms like Shopify, often nothing beyond app fees, because the platform maintains itself. On WooCommerce, budget either a few hours per month of someone's time or $100 to $300 per month for a professional care plan. Paying zero is possible; in our audits it reliably shows up later as a larger emergency bill.
Why are agency websites so expensive compared to freelancers? You are paying for redundancy and process, not better HTML. An agency has staging environments, code review, more than one person who understands your store, and continuity when any individual leaves. Whether that is worth two to five times a freelancer's rate depends entirely on what downtime and dead ends cost your business.