Open source vs SaaS e-commerce: what a store really pays over five years

"Open source is free" and "SaaS is cheap" are both half true. A store on Shopify or BigCommerce pays a subscription and fees; a store on self-hosted open source such as GrandNode pays for hosting and for people who keep it running. The useful question is not which one is free, but where your money goes - and what you get for it.

Where the money goes with SaaS

• The plan. Monthly or yearly, usually in tiers. For example, Shopify's Basic plan is $39 a month billed monthly (October 2026); higher tiers cost several times more.
• Fees tied to your sales. Some platforms add a fee per order when you use a payment provider other than their own, and some move you to a higher plan automatically once your yearly sales pass a threshold. Read this part of the pricing page twice: it is the part that grows with your business.
• Apps. Features the plan does not include - reviews, subscriptions, B2B price lists, advanced search - often come as monthly apps. Ten apps at $20-50 each is common for a growing store.
• Theme and development. A premium theme, and developer time for anything the platform allows you to customise.

What you get: hosting, security patches, scaling and uptime are the vendor's problem. For a small team without developers, that is worth a lot.

Where the money goes with self-hosted open source

• Hosting. A virtual machine or containers plus a database. For GrandNode that means a .NET host and MongoDB - self-managed, or a managed cluster such as MongoDB Atlas.
• Setup and development. Installing, configuring, a theme, the integrations you need. This is the largest one-off cost.
• Maintenance. Applying updates and security fixes, monitoring, backups. Budget a few hours a month, every month.
• Optional support. Paid long-term support if you cannot upgrade to every new release - for GrandNode, GrandNode Official provides LTS releases with backported security fixes.

What you get: no fees tied to your revenue, your data in your own database, and no limit on what you can change in the code.

Payment processing (card fees charged by Stripe, PayPal or similar) costs about the same in both models, so we leave it out of the comparison below.

A worked five-year example

A store selling $600,000 a year, with a small in-house team and a freelance developer at $60 an hour. These are assumptions for illustration, not quotes - replace them with your own numbers.

Cost	SaaS (mid-tier plan)	Self-hosted open source
Platform plan	$300 / month	-
Apps	8 apps, $200 / month	-
Fee for an external payment provider	0.6% of sales	-
Hosting and database	included	$150 / month
Setup and theme (once)	$3,000	$6,000 (100 hours)
Maintenance	included	4 hours / month ($240)
Long-term support	included	$990 / year (optional)
Five years	$51,000	$34,350

How the totals add up: SaaS is $3,000 + 60 months x $500 + 5 years x $3,600 in fees. Open source is $6,000 + 60 months x $390 + 5 x $990.

Change the assumptions and the answer changes. Without the external payment provider fee the SaaS total falls to $33,000 - about the same as open source. A smaller store on a $100 plan with three $25 apps and the platform's own payments pays about $13,500 over five years, far less than the fixed costs of running its own servers. With a large catalog, B2B pricing or several stores, the SaaS plan and apps grow faster than the hosting does. The real lesson: at mid-size the money is similar; what differs is what you control.

What the money does not show

• Control. On your own code you can change checkout, pricing rules or data models. On SaaS you can change what the platform exposes.
• Data ownership. With self-hosting, the database is yours; leaving is a matter of exporting it. With SaaS, check what an export includes before you need it.
• Lock-in by revenue. Revenue-based tiers and fees mean the platform's share grows with your success.
• Responsibility. With self-hosting, security updates are your job - or your support provider's. Do not choose open source if nobody will apply them.

Which one fits you?

Choose SaaS if you sell a straightforward catalog, have no developers, and want to launch this month.

Choose open source if you have (or hire) developers, need B2B, several stores or a marketplace, want your data in your own database, or your revenue makes per-order fees expensive. If your team works in .NET, GrandNode runs on ASP.NET Core and MongoDB and is free under GPL-3.0 - see features, download it, or ask us to quote a migration from your current platform.