Magento
What does a Magento store cost per month?
Short answer
The monthly costs of a Magento store come in four parts: hosting the whole stack, maintenance with security patches, module licences, and further development. Magento Open Source itself is free; Adobe Commerce is a paid licence from Adobe. How high the amount gets depends mostly on traffic, the number of modules and integrations, and how much you keep changing the shop.
What are the monthly costs made of?
A Magento shop has no price tag like a subscription to a hosted shop platform. The costs are built up from parts, and those differ per shop.
| Part | What it is | Recurring or one-off |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | The servers and the whole stack Magento runs on | Monthly |
| Maintenance | Security patches, updates, monitoring, backups | Monthly |
| Modules | Licences for paid extensions | Yearly or one-off, depending on the vendor |
| Magento licence | Only with Adobe Commerce | Yearly, through Adobe |
| Further development | New features, changes, a new theme | Per project or per hour |
| Integrations | ERP, accounting, stock, shipping | Built once, maintained on an ongoing basis |
Is Magento itself free?
Magento Open Source is. The software is under the Open Software License 3.0, and you pay Adobe nothing to use it.
Adobe Commerce is the paid edition. Adobe publishes no fixed prices for it; you request a quote. For most small and medium-sized shops, Open Source with good modules is enough. If you run Adobe Commerce, that licence is often the biggest fixed cost.
Why is hosting a separate item?
Because Magento is much more than PHP and a database. A shop that runs well needs:
- Varnish as page cache. Adobe strongly recommends Varnish for production; the built-in cache is much slower.
- OpenSearch for search and the category pages.
- Valkey or Redis for the cache and the sessions.
- RabbitMQ for tasks that go into a queue.
- Cron, for indexers, emails and everything that has to happen in the background.
- A database tuned to how Magento uses it.
Each of those parts has to run, be updated and be watched. That is the difference from ordinary web hosting. How we put it together is on Magento hosting.
What is in maintenance?
The part you do not see, until it is missing.
Adobe releases security patches for Magento regularly, and each version is only supported for a limited period. After that no more patches come out. A shop that is a few versions behind runs a real risk: online shops with payment data are a favourite target.
Maintenance with us means: patches on a test environment first, test the checkout, only then live. On top of that, backups, monitoring of the server and the background tasks, and keeping PHP and the rest of the stack up to date.
What makes it more or less expensive?
A few things decide most of it.
- The number of modules. Every module is code that has to come along with an update. Ten well-chosen modules cost less to maintain than forty that were added over the years.
- Changes in the core. Changes made directly in Magento itself make every update more expensive. We always build custom modules separately from the core.
- Integrations. An integration with your ERP or accounting saves manual work, but has to keep up when either side changes.
- Traffic and catalogue. More visitors and more products ask more of the servers.
- How much you keep changing. A shop that is finished costs less than a shop where something is added every month.
Where can you save without risk?
On modules nobody uses any more. Every module that goes no longer needs testing at the next update. A well-tuned page cache helps too: the more pages come from Varnish, the less server capacity the shop needs.
Cutting back on security patches or backups is the wrong place. That goes fine for a long time, until the one time it does not.
How do we set the price?
We first look at what runs: the version, the modules, the integrations, the traffic. Then you get a proposal with a fixed monthly price for hosting and maintenance. One-off work, such as a new module or an integration, gets a fixed price up front. If the scope cannot be fixed in advance, we work by the hour and say so plainly.
Everything we do for Magento is on Magento. If your shop is mainly slow, read why a Magento store is slow.