What three years cost: a custom build or a subscription
The comparison between paying once and paying every month almost always looks different after three years than it did on the day the contract was signed. This calculator draws both cumulative cost curves across 36 months and shows whether and when they cross.
You enter all four numbers yourself — we substitute no rates and no averages, because we do not know your contract. The result is arithmetic from those assumptions, and the full formula unfolds under the chart.
What three years cost: a custom build or a subscription
Setup, migration, configuration. If the alternative costs nothing at the start, enter 0.
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.
What this calculation does not include
The build price is not the ownership price
Above you are comparing two paths by price. Code, however, is not something you set up once: libraries, plugins and the platform itself age on their own — even while nothing on the site changes. Someone has to keep watch, and that is a separate budget line, not a “warranty”.
End-of-support dates are announced in advance
A platform's end-of-support date is not a surprise — it is announced years ahead. The bill is the surprise: shops that did not plan the migration still had to do it, only under deadline pressure and without a budget for it.
Adobe announced the end of support for Magento 1 in 2018, effective 30 June 2020. — this is a historical fact about one platform, not a forecast for yours
You are responsible for customer data, not the contractor
If the system collects personal data, the controller is its owner — regardless of who built it and whether they still look after it (art. 4(7) GDPR). An abandoned project does not transfer that responsibility to anyone else, and it stops receiving updates.
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.