Platform or custom store — when the costs meet
An off-the-shelf platform costs nothing at the start, but it takes a subscription, paid apps and a commission on every sale. A custom store costs once, and after that only maintenance. When the two roads meet depends above all on your turnover.
The calculator knows neither your platform nor its price list — you enter all six numbers yourself. The full formula sits under the chart, including how the commission is counted.
Platform or custom store — when the costs meet
The monthly sum of every paid plugin, theme and integration.
Fill in every field — without them there is nothing to calculate. We substitute no default values, because each of them would be our assumption rather than yours.
Off-the-shelf or custom: what the numbers show and what they do not
Off-the-shelf: fast start, someone else's calendar
Entry is cheaper and faster, and the vendor maintains the core — that is a real advantage and there is no point hiding it. In exchange you inherit their release pace and their end-of-support dates, while the subscription and the revenue commission grow with your sales, including in months when you get nothing new.
Custom: no commission, but the upkeep has to be someone's job
There is no platform subscription and no commission on revenue, and the change calendar is yours. The price of that is fair and we say it plainly: updates do not happen by themselves. That is why care for a running system is a separate, named line with us, not a silent part of the build price. Separate on purpose: a cost that is missing from the quote still arrives later — only by then it looks like a surcharge.
The largest risk surface is add-ons, not the core
On both paths the maintenance work is driven mostly by extensions rather than the engine itself. This is the part of the bill that is invisible on the day the contract is signed, because on that day nothing has aged yet.
Patchstack, “State of WordPress Security 2026”: 11,334 new vulnerabilities were recorded in the WordPress ecosystem during 2025 — 42% more than the year before; 91% were in plugins rather than the core, and 46% were disclosed before a fix existed. — this is statistics for one ecosystem; it shows the scale of maintenance work, not the state of any particular shop
This is arithmetic from the assumptions you entered, not our forecast. Every number in the result comes from the fields above — there are no market averages and no estimates of ours in it.
You have the numbers. Let us talk about them.
Pick a time for a call or leave your number — we will go through your assumptions together and say which of them do not hold up in practice.