How much does Magento cost
- opinion
You’ve decided to build your shop on Magento, so you’re now looking around at how much that would cost.
At Zento, we have a Software-as-a-Service offering for everything you need to build a shop using Magento 2 and the huge benefit of having a PWA frontend.
But you’re probably also exploring the more traditional approach of building your own Magento with a development agency (or Solutions Integrator).
So what’s the cost of Magento?
You have 4 main cost centers:
- software license
- 3rd party modules
- development
- hosting
There’s a great video from our friend TJ Gamble, aka “Ecommerce Aholic” that you can check out: Magento 2 eCommerce Platform Versions & Pricing [Everything You Need to Know] for a very entertaining presentation on this.
Software license
You have the option of going for Magento Commerce (aka Enterprise) or Open Source (aka Community), and Magento Commerce comes in 2 flavors: Cloud and On-Prem. The cost with Magento Commerce depends on your yearly turnover, but it starts around $30k/year for sales of up to $1M.
Magento Open Source is free to download and use, so the license cost for Open Source is $0, although the rest of the costs will stay mostly the same.
3rd party modules
These costs are relatively low, so the extensions a typical shop needs are usually a few hundred to a few thousands of $US.
There are also themes available, but if you’re serious about eCommerce, you’ll want a bespoke design so they are generally useless and your developers will prefer to start from their internal bootstrap theme or something like Hyvä theme on which they can then build a bespoke and optimized version for your shop.
Development
Magento Open Source might be free, but your shop certainly won’t be, and this is the part where the big expenses are.
Typical Magento development costs start around $100/h and even in offshore markets, it costs $50/h.
A minimal cost for a Magento shop, without PWA and without any bespoke features start at $50k and for PWA it usually is at least double (since the hourly rates will also be higher for such specialized work). The more features needed, the more that cost goes up.
After launch, you should budget at least $1,000/mo for maintenance that includes security and version updates. It’s critical this is budgeted, as skipping the updates will cost you even more in the long run.
Hosting
Specialized Magento hosting generally start at $200/mo and can go to thousands depending on your traffic volumes. Magento 2 is a complex software and with large traffic volumes, you need a hosting company with Magento experience and capable of scalable cloud setups.
Grand Total
So if you’re based in the US and planning on a Magento shop using Magento Open Source, with a bespoke design on a PWA frontend, without any custom features, you should budget at least $100k to build the shop and then at least $12k/yr to maintain it and $2400 to host it.
The SaaS alternative
If you’re interested in a Software-as-a-Service alternative to the above, read on.
Our product Zento is built on the solid foundation of Magento 2 Open Source, has a custom-built PWA frontend, and runs on a state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure based on Kubernetes and Serverless. Our pricing is based on a setup fee that includes a bespoke design and a monthly subscription that includes beside our license fee, the maintenance of the solution, infrastructure monitoring, and support.
Our pricing starts at $5000 for the setup and $490/mo for the subscription plus an estimated $120/mo for hosting costs.
If you’d like to learn more, check out our Product description and our Wiki.
