What does a webshop cost? Platforms, prices and hidden costs
Shopify, WooCommerce or custom-built? Here is the full bill including transaction fees, shipping modules and the costs that only appear after launch.
This article was translated from Danish. Read the original.
A webshop has two price tags: the one you pay to have it built, and the one you pay on every single order for the rest of the shop’s life. Most people compare only the first.
Here are both.
The three platforms
Shopify — a subscription, everything included, you build it yourself or get help.
- From DKK 300/month for the basic plan, DKK 800+/month as you grow
- A transaction fee of 0.5–2% on top of the payment fee, if you don’t use Shopify Payments
- Apps for shipping, VAT and accounting: typically DKK 300–1,000/month in total
- Setup with help: DKK 10,000–40,000
WooCommerce — a plugin for WordPress, free in itself.
- The plugin itself: DKK 0
- Hosting that can handle it: DKK 200–800/month
- Necessary extensions (shipping, VAT, payments): DKK 2,000–8,000 a year
- Setup: DKK 15,000–50,000
- Maintenance: DKK 500–2,000/month — not optional
Custom-built — built for your business.
- Setup: from DKK 30,000, typically DKK 40,000–120,000
- Hosting: DKK 100–500/month
- No licences, no app subscriptions
- Maintenance: by agreement
The costs nobody mentions in the quote
This is where budgets slip.
Payment fees. 1.5–2.5% of every order plus DKK 1–2. At DKK 100,000 revenue a month that is DKK 1,500–2,500. Every month. Forever. It is nearly always the webshop’s largest running cost, and it rarely appears in any quote.
Shipping integration. GLS, PostNord and DAO have to talk to the shop, and the parcel-shop picker has to work. On Shopify and Woo that is an app or plugin at DKK 100–400/month.
Product photography. Consistently underestimated. 50 products photographed properly costs DKK 5,000–15,000 at a photographer. Bad images cost more in lost sales than the photographer would have cost.
Product copy. 50 products × 20 minutes is 17 hours. Somebody has to spend it.
Accounting integration. If orders should go automatically into your accounting software, that is an app at DKK 150–500/month. If not, it is manual work every week.
Returns handling. Not a technical cost, but a real one. Budget for 5–15% returns on clothing and footwear.
The sums over three years
A small webshop with 30 products and DKK 100,000 revenue a month:
| Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom-built | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | 15,000 | 25,000 | 45,000 |
| Platform, 36 months | 18,000 | 0 | 0 |
| Hosting, 36 months | 0 | 14,000 | 7,000 |
| Apps/licences, 36 months | 18,000 | 12,000 | 0 |
| Maintenance, 36 months | 0 | 25,000 | 10,000 |
| Total | 51,000 | 76,000 | 62,000 |
Payment fees are left out, because they are roughly the same whatever the platform — and they are larger than everything above put together: at DKK 100,000/month over three years that is around DKK 70,000.
That is the most important realisation in the whole article. The debate about platform cost is about less than half the money.
The second is that three years is an arbitrary cut-off — and, as it happens, the only one where Shopify wins. Carry the same numbers on: Shopify costs DKK 12,000 a year in platform and apps, however long you stay. The custom-built one costs around DKK 5,700 a year in hosting and maintenance.
| After | Shopify | Custom-built |
|---|---|---|
| 3 years | 51,000 | 62,000 |
| 5 years | 75,000 | 73,000 |
| 8 years | 111,000 | 90,000 |
It flips after just under five years, and after that the gap grows every single year. The reason is simple: you pay the setup once, you pay the subscription forever. If the shop is going to outlive a typical car, the sums look different from what most articles show.
What you should choose
Shopify, if you want to get going quickly, sell physical goods and have no special requirements. It works, and you spend your time selling instead of on technology.
WooCommerce, if you already have WordPress and people who can look after it.
Custom-built, if something about your business doesn’t fit in a standard box — subscriptions, configurable products, B2B pricing per customer, or a production process that has to be run from the same place. Or if you expect to still have the shop in five years and would rather own it than rent it.
There is no single right answer. There is only a right answer for your business.
The technical parts that decide whether you sell anything
Speed is revenue, directly. Every extra second on load costs conversions. On mobile, where most of the traffic comes from, it is the single factor that moves the most.
Product schema. Without structured data on price, stock status and reviews, you miss out on the rich results in Google — stars, price and “in stock” right in the search result. It is free to set up and affects how many people click.
The category pages are your landing pages. People search for “black running shoes men”, not for your company name. A category page with real copy ranks; one with only product images doesn’t.
The checkout needs as few steps as possible. Every extra field costs orders. Requiring people to create an account before buying is the most expensive single decision many webshops make.
What we do
We build webshops and booking systems custom when the standard platforms don’t fit. Among other things we built NBS Food, an ordering system for restaurants where menus, add-ons and pickup times had to work together in a way no standard shop could manage.
The DKK 45,000 in the table is the market price for a custom shop. We don’t price the setup in advance, but it usually lands well below that figure, and the market number is still correct. The difference is our costs, not the quality: we are three developers with no project managers, salespeople or open-plan office downtown, and that is the cost you would otherwise be paying on top of the work itself.
Put a worked example into the table and the sums flip completely. With DKK 10,000 in setup instead of DKK 45,000, the custom-built one is cheapest from day one, because the setup is already lower than Shopify’s DKK 15,000. After three years it is DKK 27,000 instead of DKK 62,000, against Shopify’s DKK 51,000. The running costs are unchanged. Only the starting price moves.
“From” is a real from: many product variants, B2B pricing per customer or an integration with an inventory system costs more. You get the price after a conversation and before we begin, as a fixed price — see prices.
And if you just need to sell 30 items with no special requirements, we will say so honestly: take Shopify. It is faster for you, and we would rather build the things that actually need building.
Frequently asked questions
Can I move from Shopify to something else? Products and customers can be exported. Design and apps cannot — those get rebuilt. Budget for a project about the size of the original setup.
How long does it take to get a webshop? 2–6 weeks depending on the number of products and integrations. The bottleneck is almost always product photos and copy, not the code.
Do I need MobilePay? In Denmark, yes. A large share of customers expect it, and it is one of the cheapest ways to avoid abandoned purchases.
What about VAT and accounting? Every platform can handle Danish VAT. Automatic bookkeeping requires an integration — settle the price of that before you choose a platform.
Why us
Cheaper than most, and not worse for it
We are three developers. No project managers, no salespeople, no open-plan office downtown. That overhead is what you would otherwise be paying on top of the work itself, and it is why we can keep the price down on websites, webshops, web apps and mobile apps alike. Every price is published and fixed in writing before we start — from DKK 375 a month or DKK 3,995 one-time. See prices.
Cheaper does not mean less. We build and run our own products: NBS Booking, NBS Food and the KalorieTracker app, which is live in the App Store and Google Play. So we have already paid for the mistakes we advise you about. You talk to the person writing the code, and you own the code afterwards. If you want to move on without us, you can.