What an eCommerce build costs on every platform, and who publishes the number

What it costs to build a store depends more on scope and on where your build team sits than on which platform you pick. The licence is usually the smaller part of the bill; implementation, integrations and data migration are the larger one. The same store can cost several times more with a team in another country, on identical technology.

Below are the public implementation ranges for eight platforms. Next to every figure we state who publishes it, because that is the only way to read these numbers honestly. Checked at source on 13 August 2026.

The important column is not the price, it is the publisher

A platform vendor benefits when implementation looks cheap and fast, because it sells subscriptions. An agency benefits from the opposite, because it sells exactly that work. Neither is lying. They are two framings of the same project.

The third case is worse. Plenty of comparisons quote figures produced by a competing platform for marketing purposes and present them as market data. Such a number looks exactly like any other until you check who calculated it.

What a build costs on each platform

The table collects what is publicly available. Where a vendor publishes nothing, it says so, because the absence of a number is itself information about the market.

Checked 13 August 2026. Dollar and euro figures come from English-language publishers, złoty figures from Polish agencies; these are two different labour markets, not conversions of one number. Euro equivalents of złoty amounts use a rounded 4.30 PLN to 1 EUR, the NBP mid rate of 11 August 2026, and are orientation only. Agency bands collected 12 August 2026 and given in aggregate, because the same publisher often changes them between months.

What this table does not say

Four conclusions that suggest themselves, and all four are wrong:

• That one platform is cheap and another expensive. Within the Polish market alone the spread between the bottom and the top end is roughly fiftyfold for a nominally identical product. Scope decides, not the logo.
• That dollar and złoty figures can be lined up directly. They describe two markets for the same labour.
• That an average of these ranges means anything. Averaging a 3,000 PLN store and a 200,000 PLN build produces a number that describes no real project.
• That a missing number means a missing cost. commercetools, Saleor and Medusa publish nothing. That does not make implementation cheaper there, it makes it unpriced in public.

“What does migrating to Shopify Plus cost” is the wrong question

It is the most common question about the cost of moving, and it has no single answer. It has one per source platform, and the spread between them reaches thirtyfold. Where you migrate from decides how much data, integration and business logic has to travel.

Source: Elogic, an agency implementing Shopify. Ecommerce Replatforming Cost Index, updated 3 August 2026, checked at source 13 August 2026. The same page gives a narrower band for WooCommerce in a second cut of the data: 15,000-40,000 USD over 6-12 weeks for scopes without heavy ERP work. One publisher, two figures, and the only difference is the definition of scope.

The last row gets misused. The 20-28 week band describes a move off Salesforce Commerce Cloud on an SAP or Oracle stack, priced at 200,000 USD and above. Placed next to a mid-market quote it implies the two are the same kind of project.

Almost nobody publishes implementation costs

The surprise in this research was not how far the numbers diverge. It was how few of them exist. Out of eight platforms, only two say anything about the cost of the work in their own voice.

• commercetools: neither licence nor implementation. The pricing page is a contact form.
• Saleor: no implementation ranges at all. The vendor prices its own service packages, which is a different thing from the cost of a project.
• Medusa: nothing. The vendor communicates the speed of change after launch, never the cost or time of getting there.
• WooCommerce: nothing, and here it makes sense. No company sits behind the project selling implementations, so there is nobody to publish a range.
• Shopify and PrestaShop: both publish their own. Shopify quotes “$2,000 to $20,000 or more” for custom work, PrestaShop 2,000-8,000 EUR with a freelancer and 5,000-25,000 EUR with an agency.

The one fixed price list is narrower than it looks

BigCommerce is the only vendor publishing fixed implementation prices with a defined scope and deadline. The packages cost 15,000, 30,000 and 50,000 USD, and the announcement promises a working storefront in “90 days or less”.

The caveat without which that claim is dishonest: this is the B2B Quick Start Accelerator, announced on 24 July 2025, aimed at mid-market B2B sellers and delivered exclusively by agencies holding the BigCommerce B2B Specialized certification.

It is not a general price list for BigCommerce implementations and should never be quoted as one. The vendor’s general implementation services page carries no figures at all and says only that customers launch, on average, “in four months or less”.

Currency tells you the market, not the technology

The most common mistake in build-cost comparisons is dropping dollar figures from English-language publishers and złoty figures from Polish agencies into one table. They are not conversions of the same number. They are two labour markets.

Collected 12 August 2026. Rates as publicly advertised by the firms themselves, not rates as negotiated.

The top of a certified partner’s rate is roughly three times the top of the Polish band. Same work, same technology, different bill. Before concluding that one platform costs more than another, check where the build team sits in each quote you are comparing.

And do not multiply those rates by an invented number of hours. That is precisely how most of the figures in the next section came into existence.

Numbers you should not trust

We discarded these three while collecting the data, even though all of them rank well in search. We list them because you will run into them the same way we did.

336,000-500,000 USD for a Medusa build

This figure circulates through headless platform round-ups. It originates from a competing eCommerce platform and was produced by multiplying marketing salary assumptions by an arbitrarily chosen project duration. It is advertising dressed as research, and since it works against us, we have every reason to point at it.

Saleor Cloud at 159 USD per month

Netguru lists the Saleor Select plan at 159 USD per month, at exactly the same revenue thresholds for which the vendor lists 1,599 USD. That is a dropped digit, not a discount and not a different offer. A figure understated tenfold looks just as credible in a table as any other.

The EY study on Shopify migrations

Shopify commissioned and paid for the study, which does not invalidate it but has to be stated alongside the result. The worse problem is what happens to it in circulation: the source reports “20% faster migration” and “23% lower budgeted costs”, and it gets quoted as proof that implementation in general is faster.

Where we sit in this table

We build on Medusa, so it is only fair to say where our own numbers land. The Medusa licence costs nothing, because the project is MIT licensed. Everything a client pays us for is labour and infrastructure.

There is no public market range for Medusa implementations. One data point from an interested agency is not a band, so rather than lean on somebody else’s figure we publish our own.

• Building the platform: from 60,000 PLN net, about 14,000 EUR, typically 80,000-200,000 PLN, about 18,500-46,500 EUR, depending on catalogue, integration count and migration scope.
• Time to launch: 8-12 weeks, the same window other Medusa agencies quote independently.
• Running it after launch: from 3,500 PLN net per month, about 800 EUR.

This is a range, not an offer. The exact figure comes from a conversation about a specific project and the written assumptions a Blueprint then verifies. The billing model is on our pricing page and the build itself on Medusa development. We set these ranges in Polish złoty and convert here at a rounded 4.30 PLN to 1 EUR, the NBP mid rate of 11 August 2026.

What our numbers do not prove

They do not show that building on Medusa is cheaper than building on a paid platform. Public data does not settle that question, and pretending otherwise would be the exact mistake this article is about.

• The ranges overlap. The lowest band for a Shopify Plus migration starts at 15,000 USD and lands in the same territory as Medusa builds.
• Part of the gap is geography, not technology. Polish agencies advertise 50-99 USD/h, Shopify Plus Certified Partners 175-300 USD/h. The same work is cheaper in Poland regardless of what is being implemented.
• We do not launch faster. A theme-based store goes live in 2-4 weeks and we will not catch that. On complex scopes we are comparable: 8-12 weeks against 12-20 for a migration to Plus.

The stronger argument sits elsewhere: not in the cost of the first launch, but in the three-year bill and the cost of changing things afterwards. We work through both in the true cost of owning your platform and in BEAM and Medusa against Shopify Plus with an agency.

What to do with this when you budget

Four things worth doing before you compare any two quotes:

• Ask about scope, not about the platform. SKU count, the integration list and the extent of the data migration move a quote further than the choice of engine.
• Check who published the figure you are reading. Vendor, agency, competitor or independent research. In three of those four cases you know the direction of the bias in advance.
• Do not put a dollar figure next to a local quote. Establish which labour market each quote comes from first.
• Count over three years. A build is a one-off, subscriptions and revenue shares keep running. Launch day is the worst possible moment to compare.

If the question is direction rather than budget, we cover it separately in Medusa vs Shopify, Medusa vs WooCommerce and in Shopify alternatives for brands outgrowing the platform.

Checked on 13 August 2026

We revisit this page quarterly. An out-of-date cost round-up does more harm than good, because people budget against it. If any line has moved since, tell us and we will correct it along with the check date.

• Shopify Plus migration costs and the licence share of the bill: Ecommerce Replatforming Cost Index, Elogic, updated 3 August 2026, checked 13 August 2026.
• The 15/30/50k USD packages and “90 days or less”: BigCommerce press release of 24 July 2025. The “on average, launch in four months or less” line: BigCommerce implementation services page.
• Medusa Cloud tiers: medusajs.com/pricing.
• Vendor-published ranges: Shopify (“$2,000 to $20,000 or more” for custom work) and PrestaShop (2,000-8,000 EUR with a freelancer, 5,000-25,000 EUR with an agency, and 200-600 EUR doing it yourself). Verified at source on 13 August 2026.
• Agency bands and hourly rates: public price lists and agency profiles, Polish and English-language, collected 12 August 2026. Given in aggregate, because the same publisher often changes them between months.
• Our ranges and pricing model: the pricing page, as of 12 August 2026. Conversion rate: a rounded 4.30 PLN to 1 EUR, the NBP mid rate of 11 August 2026.