CE Phoenix Cart Forum

Modern SaaS platforms like Shopify have built their entire pricing model around scaling against you.

• Per user.
• Per order.
• Per API call.
• Per additional customer.

The more successful your business becomes, the more the SaaS and 3rd parties insert themselves between you and your own growth. It's the mechanics of recurring revenue software. A merchant starting on Shopify Basic at $29/month can easily find themselves on Shopify Plus at $2,000+/month a year later - paying exponentially more for fundamentally the same capability, simply because they grew.

Here's the truth, and it's why we built Phoenix Cart and the surrounding ecosystem the way we did:

When your business doubles, your open source stack should not double its price. Your hosting costs might go up modestly. Your development time might increase a bit. But there is no 3rd party standing between you and your success, automatically demanding a larger recurring payment.

You retain ownership. You retain control. You decide where the money goes - better hosting, faster servers, a developer you trust, or simply higher margins for yourself.

I'm not saying open source is free. Hosting costs. Development costs. Maintenance costs. We all know that. But the economics are fundamentally different from SaaS rent, and you're already benefiting from that difference every month.

So my question to you - the people who already chose Phoenix Cart over the Shopify path:

Have you ever calculated what you'd be paying if you were on Shopify instead?
Not just the base plan, but the apps, the transaction overages, the per-order fees, the inevitable push to Plus?

I'd love to hear your numbers, your stories, your frustrations. Nothing is perfect - we have our own challenges with hosting, updates, and ecosystem gaps.

But we built Phoenix Cart so you could own your store, not rent it.
I think that's worth talking about more than we do.

burt wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2026 9:17 am Have you ever calculated what you'd be paying if you were on Shopify instead?
Not just the base plan, but the apps, the transaction overages, the per-order fees, the inevitable push to Plus?

That is actually quite tricky, seeing as a lot of what we have, simply isn't possible on Shopify. Further, it seems as if we would need to use more expensive plans for some of the integrations that do exist. Also, it's hard to see exactly what you get for the money you pay, so my calculations are very "ish".

Shopify: 840 USD / a month (this is the cheapest combination I can find for us and with only the absolutely required add-ons)
Phoenix: 53 USD / a month (hosting (and not a good and cheap one) and transaction fees only)

The transaction fees from Shopify are the biggest difference. But only three add-ons (two of which are legally required and the last one is essential for us) would cost us 86 USD/a month. That figure would likely be much higher, before we were anywhere near, what we have now.

//Daniel