A subscription looks cheaper through the first year, your own store almost always wins in the third - and that is the whole difference between these two bills. A subscription online store (Shopify, Shoper, Shoplo and similar hosted platforms - Shoper and Shoplo being the Polish players) is a low barrier to entry and a fixed monthly fee that grows along with your traffic, your product count and your add-ons. Your own store on WooCommerce is a one-off build cost, and after that only hosting, plugins and maintenance. The point where the two curves cross usually falls between the second and third year - the bigger the store, the sooner.
Below I break both bills into parts, including the items that are not on the price list: sales commissions, paid add-ons and the cost of leaving. Treat the figures as market ranges from July 2026 - platform and plugin pricing changes every year, so check current rates at the source before you decide.
A subscription online store - what the monthly fee covers
A subscription store is a ready-made platform you rent together with hosting, updates and support. You are not buying software, you are buying access to it. In practice the bill has four lines, not one:
- The plan fee - from a few dozen zloty a month for the smallest plan up to several hundred for plans with full integrations and higher limits. The price jumps in steps once you cross a limit on products, variants or user accounts.
- Commission on sales - some platforms take a percentage of turnover if you do not use their own payment gateway. At tens of thousands a month in turnover that is often more than the plan itself.
- Paid marketplace add-ons - wholesaler integration, advanced product filters, B2B pricing, couriers, reviews. Each one a separate monthly fee, usually a few dozen zloty.
- Design and changes - a premium theme may be a one-off, but every modification beyond the panel’s options is work for a developer who happens to know that specific platform.
The domain, payment provider fees, mailing and advertising cost the same in both options, so I leave them out of the comparison.
What your own WooCommerce store costs
Your own store is software you own - it sits on your hosting, with your database and your code. WooCommerce itself is free; you pay for the build and for running it.
With me, a fixed-bid store build usually lands in the range of 5,000-10,000 PLN net (Polish market rates) - that covers the design, configuration, loading products, payments, shipping, testing and go-live. The range is wide, because a store with thirty products and one shipping method is a different job from a catalogue with a thousand variants and a wholesaler integration. I broke those amounts down line by line in the piece on what a WooCommerce store costs.
Running it after launch means:
- hosting - from a few dozen zloty a month for a decent shared plan up to several hundred for a server built for real traffic (see: hosting for a WooCommerce store)
- paid plugins - usually a handful of annual licences; I put the real bill together in the piece on WooCommerce plugin costs
- technical care - updates, backups, monitoring and small fixes; with me that is Basic from 1,000, Pro from 2,000, Premium from 3,500 PLN net per month, depending on how fast the store has to come back up after an incident and how many hours of changes a month you need
Maintenance is formally optional but not really: a store with no updates and no backups is a matter of months away from its first serious failure.
Three years side by side
Below is the same store - a few hundred products, one wholesaler, standard payments and shipping - costed in both models. Net amounts, ranges, excluding advertising and payment provider fees (those are identical on both sides).
| Item | Subscription | Your own on WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Start (year 0) | setup and theme, usually up to a few thousand | build 5,000-10,000 PLN |
| Monthly - platform / hosting | plan from a few dozen to several hundred PLN | hosting from a few dozen to several hundred PLN |
| Monthly - add-ons | several marketplace add-ons, usually a few hundred PLN | plugin licences billed annually |
| Commission on turnover | possible, depends on platform and gateway | none |
| Technical care | included in the plan (for the platform itself) | 1,000-3,500 PLN a month or on demand |
| Changes outside the standard | limited by what the panel allows | anything, quoted per scope |
| After 3 years | the bill grows along with the store | the build cost is already amortised |
The conclusion from that table is simple: for a small store with low turnover, a subscription is cheaper and faster. For a store that genuinely earns, the biggest line in the subscription model stops being the subscription and becomes the sum of add-ons and commissions - and that sum has no ceiling.
The cost of leaving, the item that is not on the price list
The cost of leaving is everything you have to pay to move the store to another platform. In the subscription model it is real and it grows every year, because the number of products, orders, reviews, articles and URLs that have to move without losing rankings grows too.
What it consists of:
- Data export - products and customers usually come out cleanly, but variants, attributes and digital files can need manual work
- Rewriting URLs - the old platform builds addresses its own way; without a redirect map you lose what you built up in search (I covered that in the piece on migrating without losing SEO rankings)
- Rebuilding integrations - couriers, wholesaler, accounting, KSeF (Poland’s mandatory e-invoicing system); each one is a separate connection built from scratch
- Design - you cannot take the platform’s theme with you, the design gets made again
That is why the “subscription or your own” decision is best made at the start, not in the third year. If you are already in that third year, I described a sensible exit path separately in migrating from Shoper to WooCommerce.
Leaving the subscription: what stays yours
The most common question I get from people sitting on a platform is this: what exactly do I take with me if I cancel. I split it into three buckets.
Yours is everything created on your side of the contract. The domain - provided it is registered to your details; if the registration went through the platform’s panel, ask for the authinfo transfer code and move the domain to your own registrar before you cancel, because once the account is closed that gets considerably harder. Your data is yours too: products, customers, orders and content, all of which can be exported to files while the account is still live. That is why I always run the export before the contract ends, never after.
What stays on the platform is whatever is part of the platform: the theme, the marketplace add-ons, the panel configuration, and very often the customer reviews and the URL structure as well. With most providers the exact scope of the export is spelled out in the terms - worth reading before a store on a monthly plan grows to the size where moving gets expensive.
The third bucket is the thing nobody exports: search positions attached to the old URLs. Only a redirect map prepared before the switch saves those. When I run a move like this to a store of your own on WooCommerce, I start with that map and only then with the design - the monthly fees drop off the bill only once the old store can be safely switched off.
When a subscription is the better choice
A subscription wins when the thing that matters most is getting the store live at all - fast and for little money.
- you are testing an idea and do not yet know whether the product sells
- you have a dozen or a few dozen products with no complicated variants
- you sell in a standard way: cart, payment, courier, done
- your starting budget is in the hundreds, not the thousands of zloty
In that situation your own store means overpaying for flexibility you will not use.
When your own store pays back faster
Your own store wins once sales are predictable, or when your sales model departs from the standard.
- you have steady turnover and the commission on sales is becoming a noticeable line in the bill
- you need things the platform’s panel does not do: individual customer pricing, discount thresholds, custom cart fields, a catalogue with no prices
- you integrate with a warehouse system, an ERP or a wholesaler over an API
- you plan B2B selling alongside B2C
- you care that the data and the code are yours, and that moving the store needs nobody’s permission
The line is blurry, so instead of hunting for a universal answer it is worth costing your own case.
How to work it out for yourself in half an hour
- Write down your current bill - plan, every add-on, commissions from the last three months. Multiply the total by 36.
- Cost the self-hosted option - a build in the 5,000-10,000 PLN range, plus hosting and plugins for 36 months, plus maintenance if you want to outsource it.
- Add the cost of leaving on the subscription side - migration, redirects, a new design, integrations rebuilt.
- Add the cost of the missing features - if something cannot be done on the platform, put a number on what working around it manually costs you (hours a month times your rate).
- Compare the totals and see in which month the curves cross.
Point four gets skipped most often and is sometimes the biggest: two hours a day re-keying orders into the warehouse costs more over a year than plenty of full builds.
Before you decide
If you already have a store on a subscription and you are wondering whether moving makes sense, I start with a free diagnosis: I look at the number of products and variants, at the integrations, at the URL structure and at exactly what you pay today. Out of that comes one of three answers - stay, move now, or move at the next major change.
When the answer is a new WooCommerce store, you get a written quote before we start: scope, deadline and amount in a fixed-bid model, with no hours added along the way. Moving a live store I handle as a WooCommerce migration, redirect map included.
FAQ
What does a store on Shoper cost? The plan alone is usually from a few dozen to several hundred zloty net a month, depending on the tier and its limits. On top come paid add-ons and - with some payment configurations - a commission on turnover, so the real bill can be twice the list price of the plan. Rates change every year, so check the current ones before deciding.
What does your own online store cost to start? With me a fixed-bid WooCommerce store build usually lands in the range of 5,000-10,000 PLN net, depending on the number of products, variants and integrations. Add hosting and plugin licences, and optionally ongoing technical care from 1,000 PLN net a month.
Can I start on a subscription and move later? Yes, and it is a common path, but the later you do it the more it costs - migration scales with the number of products, orders and URLs to redirect. If you already know at the start that you will need B2B pricing or a warehouse integration, starting with your own store comes out cheaper.
Which option is cheaper over three years? For a small store with modest turnover, usually the subscription, because there is no build cost. For a store with regular sales, add-ons and commission on turnover, the three-year total most often favours your own store - where exactly the lines cross depends on your turnover and on how many paid add-ons you actually use.
Running a store where something does not work the way it should? I build and rebuild WooCommerce stores - from a single fix to reworking the whole sales flow. Tell me what you are dealing with and I will send back a scope and a price.