BEAM + Medusa vs Shopify Plus and an agency: two routes, not two products

Shopify Plus with an agency and a Medusa platform delivered as BEAM are two routes to the same destination, not two products to compare feature by feature. The first buys a finished platform on a subscription plus somebody’s work on top of it. The second buys a platform you own, together with the care that keeps it running. What settles the choice is a three-year bill and one question: what stays with you when the relationship ends.

Putting BEAM next to Shopify on its own compares an offer with a product. Shopify Plus is a licence. To sell on it, somebody has to implement it, wire it into the ERP, move the data and keep it alive. That somebody costs money and belongs in the bill, even though no pricing page mentions them.

So the honest line-up has a full package on each side. Route A is Shopify Plus plus an agency on a retainer. Route B is a Medusa platform we build and then run. The rest of this piece compares those two packages in commercial terms.

One sentence of definition, so the rest reads clearly. BEAM is the platform you end up running your whole eCommerce from: store, sales channels, product data and processes in one place, with AI agents that know your context. We build it most often on Medusa, and the four stages below are how we deliver it.

Six commercial questions instead of a feature list

The technical differences between the two platforms are covered separately, in Medusa vs Shopify. This page asks something else: what you are buying, who runs it, and what you are holding after three years.

Commercial dimensions, not technical ones. Shopify figures checked at source on 11 August 2026. Agency terms depend on the individual contract and nobody publishes them, so what we describe here is the mechanism, not the rates.

Two rows decide most of it: whose platform it is, and what happens if you part ways. The rest is money, and money can be counted.

The three-year bill, built as a model you can overwrite

A monthly comparison always favours a subscription, because building a platform is a one-off cost spread over years. Thirty-six months is the sensible horizon. That is roughly how long a platform decision survives before it comes back to the table.

And here is the problem most comparisons walk past. Agency rates are not published. Neither are the real Plus terms for a larger business, because the vendor moves those accounts onto a variable fee agreed with sales. Guessing either number would produce fake precision.

So what follows is not a verdict, it is a model. Every line states where its number comes from: either a public source, or an assumption we flag as an assumption. Put your own figures in and the arithmetic answers for your case, not for our example.

The store in the example

A model needs a concrete store to be readable. Ours looks like this:

• A D2C brand with roughly 2,000 SKU, selling into two markets.
• 150,000 EUR net revenue per month, which is 5.4 million EUR over three years.
• ERP and warehouse integrations, plus a catalogue and order history migration.
• A 36 month horizon and a three-year Plus term, because that is the cheaper of the two published options.

Route A: Shopify Plus and an agency

Payment processing is excluded, because you pay it on both routes. The variable Plus fee for larger businesses is excluded too, because its size is not public.

Route B: Medusa and BEAM

The same ongoing rate as route A and the same exclusion of payment processing. The gap between the routes does not come from what people charge for their time.

In this example the gap is 79,200 EUR over three years. It is not created by labour: we priced ongoing care identically on both sides, and we assumed the Plus implementation costs less than our own build. It is created by the subscription.

What this bill leaves out

• Payment processing: you pay it on both routes, so it cancels out.
• The variable Plus fee: for more complex, higher volume businesses the vendor switches to a fee based on revenue and business model, agreed with sales. We do not know its size, so we do not guess it. It can only push route A higher.
• Your own team’s hours: workarounds, manual exports, babysitting integrations. It grows on whichever side has more constraints and never shows up on an invoice.
• Performance: we have no measurements of both setups under the same conditions, so we make no claims about it.
• The cost of leaving: migrating off a platform you do not own is its own project, and it only counts when it arrives.

Overwrite the numbers and find where the answer flips

The point of a model is to break it with your own data. Three substitutions are worth making immediately:

• The top of our build range. At 46,500 EUR instead of 35,000, route B rises to 106,500 EUR and still lands lower.
• You stay on Shopify Payments. Drop 10,800 EUR, route A falls to 163,400 EUR and the gap narrows to 68,400 EUR.
• Your agency proposal differs from our assumption. That line moves the result one for one, and over a three-year horizon the retainer weighs more than the build.

The answer flips when the build and the running costs on route B climb faster than the subscription, apps and agency on route A. With a simple catalogue and few integrations that is a realistic scenario, which is what the next section is about.

When the other route is the better one

We write this as a company that builds on Medusa, which is precisely why it is worth saying plainly. For a good number of brands, Shopify Plus with a competent agency is the right answer, and our route would be spend without a return.

• Your catalogue and processes fit the standard: a straightforward assortment, one channel, no contract pricing and no per-customer logic. An owned platform buys control you will not use.
• You need to be selling in two weeks: a platform built around you is measured in weeks, not days. When the deadline is counted in days, a finished platform wins.
• There is nobody on your side to talk to us: the Blueprint needs one decision maker available during the project. Without them we cannot verify the assumptions, and the whole fixed-price mechanism stops working.
• You want an ecosystem that already exists: the App Store advertises over 16,000 apps, so a common requirement is a configuration task there. With us the same thing is often a build.
• Plus features you would otherwise have to build: expansion stores for extra markets, unlimited staff accounts, round-the-clock priority support and a published 99.99% uptime SLA come with the plan.
• Your team already knows Shopify: people, processes and integrations are tuned to one platform. Switching costs you the implementation and the retraining.

None of that is politeness towards a competitor or towards agencies. Agencies do work we do not do, for brands our model does not suit. The argument is not about who is better, it is about what you are left holding after three years.

The BEAM stages as answers to risk

BEAM has four stages, but it does not sell as a feature list. It sells on the risk each stage removes, and three risks come up in every conversation about changing platform.

The Blueprint removes scope risk

The Blueprint maps product data, integrations and processes before anyone writes a line of code. It produces a plan you can build from, and it verifies the assumptions the price rests on. That is the point where a range turns into a firm number.

We do not sell the Blueprint separately. A separately sold plan is a second buying decision and a real obstacle at first contact, so one agreement covers both the Blueprint and the build.

A fixed price on written assumptions removes budget risk

The mechanism is public and works the same way on every project:

• A short conversation and light research produce a range. At no cost and with nothing to sign.
• One agreement covers the Blueprint and the build, and the assumptions behind the number go into an annex: SKU count, integrations, migration scope, what you supply.
• The Blueprint verifies those assumptions and the price becomes final. Small differences we absorb.
• A material discrepancy triggers a correction procedure. We show you what diverged and what it costs, and you choose: accept the corrected price, or trim scope to fit the original one.

The Blueprint amount sits in the contract from day one precisely so that it is not up for argument if you leave. The full model is on our pricing page, and the reasoning against hourly billing is in fixed scope versus hours.

Maintenance & Growth removes the “what happens after launch” risk

The most expensive outcome with an owned platform is not a bad build, it is no care afterwards. Maintenance & Growth is a monthly retainer: updates, monitoring, backlog and development, with larger features priced separately as Feature Sprints.

The price ranges

A comparison of offers without numbers cannot be quoted, and price is every reader’s first question. So here are the ranges we actually work in.

Net of VAT, as of 12 August 2026. We set these ranges in Polish złoty (from 60,000 PLN, typically 80,000 to 200,000 PLN for Engineering, from 6,000 PLN per workflow, from 3,500 PLN per month) and convert here at a rounded 4.30 PLN to 1 EUR, the NBP mid rate of 11 August 2026. Rates move, so treat the euro figures as orientation.

This is a range, not an offer. The exact number comes out of a conversation about a specific project and the assumptions that conversation writes down. Catalogue size, integration count and migration scope move the result in both directions.

What stays with you when the work ends

This is the question asked least often and the one that decides most. On route A the licence runs on and the store keeps selling, but the platform, the checkout and the runtime stay with the vendor. Rights to what the agency built depend on your contract, so settle that point before signing, not after.

On route B you take the application code, the database, the documentation and the Blueprint plan. That plan is specific enough that you can send it to three other firms and get comparable quotes back. The move itself is described on our Shopify migration page, and the build on Medusa development.

Checked on 11 August 2026

The Shopify figures above were checked at source on 11 August 2026, and we revisit this page quarterly. An out-of-date comparison does more harm than good. If any line has moved since, tell us and we will correct it along with the check date.

• Shopify Plus entry price: shopify.com/plus/pricing. 2,250 EUR per month on a one-year term, 2,100 EUR on a three-year term, plus a variable fee for larger businesses agreed with sales.
• The 0.2% charge on Plus when using another payment provider: shopify.com/pricing. Plus plan features: Shopify Help Center.
• App count: apps.shopify.com. Medusa Cloud tiers: medusajs.com/pricing.
• Conversion rate: 4.30 PLN to 1 EUR, the rounded NBP mid rate of 11 August 2026 (4.2996), table 154/A/NBP/2026.
• Our ranges and pricing model: the pricing page. The wider owning-versus-renting arithmetic: three-year TCO.