Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Wix: the two-year bill

The subscription is the number everyone compares and almost never the biggest line on the bill. That is why the shopify vs woocommerce vs wix argument is usually settled with the wrong arithmetic: three sticker prices, one of which is zero, and none of which predicts what you spend.

So here is a full two-year build-up for one modeled store, with the lines people leave out — hosting, renewals, a theme, apps, the transaction fee that only applies sometimes, and your own hours priced like the scarce resource they are. Redo it with your figures at the end; that is the point of the exercise.

The store we are modeling

All illustrative, chosen to be unremarkable rather than flattering to anyone:

• 60 products, some with sizes and colors
• Average order $45
• Year one: $3,000 a month. Year two: $8,000 a month. Twenty-four-month total: $132,000 and roughly 2,900 orders
• One founder doing the work, with their time valued at an illustrative $25 an hour
• A domain at an illustrative $15 a year, which is the same on all three and so is left out

The two-year cash bill

Note what has already happened. The free platform is not the cheapest, because the free thing was the license and the license was never the expense. It is also not the most expensive, because the app stack on a hosted platform is a subscription that never stops.

Now price the hours

This is the half that decides it, and the half nobody puts in a table.

Three notes on those assumptions, because assumptions are where this kind of post usually cheats.

The WooCommerce admin figure is not hostility — it is core updates, plugin updates, checking that a backup actually restored, and one annual PHP version bump. Two hours a month when nothing is wrong is a fair number, and "when nothing is wrong" does not describe every month.

The Wix build figure is higher than the hosted platform's because a free-positioned canvas is a design job you take on personally, and the mobile layout is a second layout you maintain by hand. That is the cost side of the freedom people choose Wix for.

The bad week is not optional on any of them. Something breaks, something gets rejected, something silently stops syncing.

Two-year totals

The near-tie between the first two rows is a coincidence of my inputs, not a law of nature. The convergence is the real finding: once hours are priced at all, the three options land within about $2,250 of each other over two years — roughly $95 a month on a store that will be doing $8,000 a month. Platform cost is not your problem.

The line that dwarfs all of them

Payment processing. At an illustrative 2.9% plus $0.30 per order, $132,000 across 2,900 orders costs about $4,700 over the two years.

Read that against the table. Processing alone is larger than any platform's entire cash bill, and it is roughly the same wherever you host, because you are paying a processor rather than a platform.

Which makes one line the genuinely consequential platform difference: the extra cut some platforms take when you bring your own gateway. An illustrative 1% surcharge on $132,000 is $1,320; 2% is $2,640. That single row can outweigh every subscription difference in this post, and it applies only if you decline the platform's own payments. If you are happy to use them, it is zero. The mechanics are in ecommerce platform fees explained and the comparison in platforms with low transaction fees.

The lines people forget

Six of them, in rough order of how often they are missed.

Extension renewals that stop being optional. A self-hosted store's paid extensions are usually annual licenses. Stop paying and updates stop, which is fine until the one that handles shipping rates breaks against a new core release.

App creep on a hosted platform. Five apps at $20 is the modeled figure. Most stores pass it. Each one arrived solving a real problem and none of them ever gets cancelled.

The second mobile layout. On a free-positioned canvas this is real work, every time you edit a page. It is in the hours table and it is the line Wix users recognize immediately.

Your own hours, at a real rate. If you would not do a day's freelance work for $25 an hour, the model above understates every row — and understates the self-hosted row most.

Migration, once. Most stores change platform once. Budget a few weeks of attention, URL mapping and redirects. How to migrate an ecommerce platform has the sequence.

The custom domain and email. Small money, occasionally bundled into a tier you did not plan to buy. Worth checking against do I need a custom domain.

What changes the answer

Change one input and the ranking moves. That is the whole reason to do the arithmetic yourself rather than trust anyone's conclusion, including this one.

Where an all-in-one changes the shape

One more column, for completeness, and with an honesty warning attached.

mAutomate's published plans are $29 to $349 a month. The $79 Grow plan — the first with a custom domain — is $1,896 over twenty-four months. The structural difference is not the subscription, it is that the apps row and the theme row largely disappear, because the storefront, copy, on-page SEO, marketing and customer support are in the platform rather than purchased around it. Plan detail is on the pricing page.

And now the warning, because this is a numbers post. The hours row is the one number nobody can honestly hand you, including us. Any vendor publishing "saves you 14 hours a month" invented it. What is true and checkable is the structure: fewer vendors, fewer renewals, no marketplace to fill a gap, and a review step that costs you time on purpose — the AI drafts and recommends, and nothing publishes until you approve it, which means the hours do not go to zero by design. Put your own estimate in the row and see what it does to the total.

Redo this with your numbers

Six lines, one page, fifteen minutes. This is the deliverable.

1. Revenue over 24 months, and your average order value. Divide for order count.
2. Processing, at your processor's rate plus the per-order fee times that order count.
3. Platform cash: subscription, hosting, theme, apps, renewals — all times 24.
4. Gateway surcharge: your platform's extra percentage, if any, times revenue. Zero if you use their payments.
5. Hours: setup, plus monthly admin times 24, plus one bad week. Multiply by what your hour is genuinely worth.
6. Add them up and compare the all-in totals, not the subscriptions.

If your totals land within $100 a month of each other — which they usually do — then cost has told you nothing and you should choose on fit instead. WooCommerce vs Shopify covers the ownership argument and Wix vs Shopify the design one. Cost is the question people ask first and the one that decides least.