Own Your Stack
vs Rent Shopify
A transparent 36-month model of what a $2.0M-GMV brand pays to rent Shopify Plus versus own a Next.js stack. Every assumption is listed below; change any of them in the calculator.
Authored: Arpan Tyagi, Panarch Digital Prices verified: Next review:
Every input is editable. Third-party prices default to the vendors' published rates; the rest are our assumptions, labelled as such.
Currency & list price
Shopify Plus (36mo)
$105,600
- Licence
- $82,800
- Gateway fee
- $12,000
- Apps
- $10,800
Owned stack (36mo)
$26,339
- Licence
- $0
- Vercel seats
- $2,160
- Usage & data
- $19,440
- Build
- $4,739
Capital retained
$79,261
over 36 months, after paying for the Scale build.
Not a valuation, forecast or investment advice. Buyers set multiples from growth, margins and market, not from a tech stack alone. The 10x and 20x defaults are an illustrative scenario; replace them with the multiples your advisor uses.
- Recurring fees removed per year
- $28,000
- Those fees at today's 10x
- $280K
- Enterprise value today (EBITDA $200K × 10)
- $2.0M
- Scenario value ((EBITDA + fees) × 20)
- $4.6M
- Hypothetical difference
- $2.6M
Card-processing rates are comparable on both stacks and excluded. Shopify-side theme or agency build costs are not modelled, which favours Shopify. Owned stack = $0 licence + Vercel seats + usage + the one-time build.
Reference scenario line by line
$2,000,000 annual GMV, 36 months, Shopify's US list price, Scalebuild. These are the calculator's defaults, so the totals match.
Swipe to compare
| Cost line | Shopify Plus | Owned (Panarch build) | 36-month delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform licence | $2,300/mo × 36 = $82,800 | $0 | +$82,800 |
| Third-party gateway fee (0.2%) | 0.2% × $2,000,000/yr × 3 yrs = $12,000 | $0 (gateway MDR only, as on Shopify) | +$12,000 |
| Paid apps (our assumption) | $300/mo × 36 = $10,800 | $0 (features live in your codebase) | +$10,800 |
| Hosting & edge delivery | $0 (bundled) | 3 Vercel seats × $20 + $540 usage, per mo = $21,600 | -$21,600 |
| One-time build | Not modelled | Scale tier ₹4,50,000 ≈ $4,739 | -$4,739 |
| Total | $105,600 | $26,339 | $79,261 retained |
Assumptions & Sources
- 01
Shopify Plus: $2,300/mo on a 3-year term ($2,500 on 1-year). High-volume merchants can be moved to a variable platform fee Shopify does not publish; it is excluded, which favours Shopify.
- 02
Gateway fee: Plus charges 0.2% on orders paid through third-party providers, which is every order in India because Shopify Payments is not offered there. Card and UPI processing (MDR) is charged on both stacks and excluded.
- 03
Vercel Pro: $20/mo platform fee with one deploying seat and $20 of usage credit; extra deploying seats $20/mo; viewer seats free. The $540/mo usage, database and monitoring allowance is our assumption and deliberately high.
- 04
Paid apps: $300/mo is our assumption, not survey data. Replace it with your own app invoices in the calculator.
- 05
Build: Panarch's published web-dev Scale tier (₹4,50,000) at ₹94.95/$, the ECB reference cross-rate. Shopify-side theme or agency costs are not modelled.
- 06
India check: at Shopify India's list price (₹1,75,000/mo) and the same assumptions in INR, the model retains ₹59.7 L over 36 months.
- 07
Prices verified 31 Oct 2026, reviewed quarterly. Next review: 31 Jan 2027.
Non-Financial Costs: SaaS Debt
- Vendor lock-in
Checkout customisations are written against Shopify's own extension APIs and do not move with you if you leave.
- Rendering ceiling
A theme store renders on Shopify's servers with every app's scripts injected; you cannot choose static, cached or streamed rendering per route.
- SEO ownership
A custom Next.js build gives you full control over URL structure, sitemap logic, structured data and rendering strategy.
Shopify vs Next.js Key Questions
Direct answers to the architectural, fee and concurrency questions founders and engineering leads ask during platform evaluation.
What is the primary cost difference between Shopify Plus and a custom Next.js storefront?
Shopify lists Plus at $2,300/month on a 3-year term ($2,500 on a 1-year term); Shopify India lists it from ₹1,75,000/month. On top of that, Plus charges 0.2% on orders paid through third-party gateways. A custom Next.js build has no platform licence: recurring spend is hosting you control (Vercel Pro is $20/month per deploying seat plus usage), and you own the codebase.
How do Shopify India charges impact scaling D2C brands?
Shopify Payments is not available in India, so stores take payment through Razorpay, Cashfree or PayU and pay Shopify's third-party provider fee on every order: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. That is on top of the gateway's own MDR. An owned stack pays the gateway MDR only, on UPI, cards and COD alike.
Which storefront architecture scales better during flash sales and high checkout concurrency?
On an owned Next.js build, product and category pages are served from the edge cache, so a traffic spike mostly hits cached HTML instead of the database. Cart, checkout and inventory writes go through pooled PostgreSQL connections, and stock can be reserved inside a database transaction so two buyers cannot take the last unit. The peak a build must sustain is agreed up front and load-tested before launch.
Can existing Shopify product catalogs be migrated to Next.js?
Yes. Products, orders and customer accounts are exported through Shopify's APIs and imported into the new database. With the strangler-fig pattern, traffic moves route by route, so the existing store keeps taking orders until each section is cut over and old URLs are redirected to preserve search equity.
Check the model against your store
Send your store URL and we will rerun this model with your real app invoices, gateway mix and traffic, then tell you whether owning the stack pays back at your volume. If it does not, we say so.
Or WhatsApp triage: +91 79855 58211Cite as: Panarch Digital (2026), Shopify Plus vs owned-stack 36-month TCO model, panarchdigital.com/cost-comparison. Prices verified 31 Oct 2026.