The true cost of owning your eCommerce platform: a 3-year TCO

An owned eCommerce platform typically costs tens to low hundreds of thousands of złoty (or the euro equivalent) to build, plus a few thousand a month to maintain and grow. A SaaS store costs a few hundred in subscription, plus transaction fees and apps that grow with your sales. This asymmetry makes price-list comparisons meaningless: the only honest comparison is total cost of ownership (TCO) over three years. This article breaks both models into parts and gives you a simple rule for when ownership starts to pay.

Why the SaaS price list tells less than half the story

The subscription is the most visible and usually the smallest line on the bill. The real cost of a SaaS platform is transaction fees (typically 0.2 to 2 percent depending on plan and payment setup), a dozen apps at 20 to 200 dollars a month each, and plan limits that periodically force an upgrade. At around 300 thousand in monthly revenue, platform fees alone can exceed the subscription many times over. That is not an accusation; it is the SaaS business model: you pay a percentage of your growth.

The chart below shows the mechanics of both curves. An owned platform has a high first-year cost (the build), then the curve flattens into maintenance and hosting. SaaS starts low but grows linearly with revenue and app count. The crossover point usually lands between month twelve and month thirty, depending on scale.

The easiest way to compare the two models is to put them side by side across a few dimensions:

A comparison of cost models. The exact amounts depend on scale; we calculate them in a TCO on your numbers.

What a SaaS store actually costs

Four items make the bill. First, the subscription, often higher than the starter plan because B2B features, multi-language and advanced reporting sit in upper tiers. Second, a fee on every sale, flat as a percentage but growing in absolute terms with every good month. Third, apps that patch platform gaps while occasionally conflicting with each other and slowing the store down. Fourth, and most underestimated: team hours burned on workarounds, all the tasks in the category of possible, but only through three plugins and a spreadsheet export.

What an owned platform actually costs

The build is a one-time cost driven by scope: catalog size and complexity, the number of integrations, and business logic (B2B, subscriptions and marketplace features raise the bar). Maintenance is a flat, predictable monthly cost: updates, monitoring, backups, small improvements. Hosting a modern headless platform runs on commodity cloud infrastructure for tens, not thousands. There are no licence fees and no revenue share. The most important difference is an accounting one: this money buys an asset. The code, the data and the integrations are yours and travel with you.

The spending structure shows the different characters of the two models: most SaaS positions are variable and grow with sales, while ownership is dominated by a one-time build and flat upkeep.

When ownership starts to pay: the three-year rule

A simple rule of thumb: annual SaaS cost equals subscription times twelve, plus annual revenue times total fee percentage, plus apps times twelve, plus workaround hours times your team rate. If the result exceeds 25 to 35 percent of the cost of building your own platform, the break-even point falls within three years. Example: a store doing 250 thousand a month with 1.2 percent in fees, 2.5 thousand in apps and ten workaround hours a week spends roughly 90 thousand a year on SaaS. Against a 180 thousand build, the crossover lands around year two, and every following year works in your favour.

Hidden costs both sides forget

SaaS has three traps: the exit cost (data export is often lossy, and customer history and SEO require a migration you will pay for eventually), API limits that surface only when you integrate an ERP or a data warehouse, and the cost of impossible features, meaning the sales that never happened because the checkout could not work the way your process requires. Ownership has its own: software without care rots, so maintenance is part of the bill, not an option. And the most expensive hidden cost of all: the wrong vendor. The gap between a good and a bad build is bigger than the entire gap between SaaS and ownership.

What drives the build price

Three levers decide the number. Catalog complexity: a thousand simple products is a different league than ten thousand with variants, technical attributes and files. Integrations: every sync with an ERP, WMS or loyalty system is a separate module to design and test. Business logic: contract pricing, order approvals, subscriptions or split payments move the project up a tier. That is why the honest answer to the price question is a range that becomes a fixed number after analysis, not a figure from thin air. In our case that analysis is the Blueprint, and after it the price stops creeping.

When we honestly say: stay on SaaS

If you are validating your first product, your catalog and processes fit the platform standard, and revenue stays below roughly 50 to 100 thousand a month, SaaS is the rational choice and there is no point forcing an exit. Repeat the calculation yearly though, because fees grow exactly as fast as your sales do. Stores usually mature into ownership at the moment they start losing to limits: of the checkout, of integrations, or of app costs.

How to calculate TCO for your store in 15 minutes

Collect twelve months of invoices: subscription, apps, platform and payment fees. Add the hours your team spends on workarounds, multiplied by a real rate. Set the result against build and maintenance ranges from vendor conversations. If you want to see what makes up a quote on our side, the scope estimator on our pricing page breaks it down without asking for an email. We are also building a free TCO calculator that will compute both curves automatically.

TCO is not an ideology in the SaaS versus open source debate. It is plain arithmetic that comes out differently for different revenues and processes. Do the maths properly once and the decision makes itself. And when the result points to ownership, the good news is that you do not have to choose between a price known upfront and quality, because a fixed scope at a fixed price is exactly how we work.