Magento · 22 July 2026 · 9 min read
What a Magento 2 store really costs
Development, licences, hosting and maintenance — every cost of a Magento 2 store, including the ones agencies leave out of the quote.
The question comes up in the first conversation, every time, and the honest answer is “it depends”. The problem is that “it depends” helps nobody. So let's set out what it depends on, and what the real ranges are.
The four components of the cost
Any serious quote breaks down into four parts. If you get a single round number with no breakdown, ask for one — it's the first sign that somebody estimated rather than calculated.
1. Development
The largest part, paid once. It varies most with catalogue complexity (configurable products, many attributes, group pricing), the number of integrations (ERP, couriers, invoicing) and how custom the design is.
A standard store, designed on a Hyvä theme with ordinary integrations, takes six to ten weeks. One with B2B logic, multi-store and its own ERP can reach four to six months.
2. Licences
- Magento Open Source — free. For most stores, it's enough.
- Adobe Commerce — an annual licence, calculated on turnover. It makes sense from high volumes upwards, where the enterprise features actually get used.
- Hyvä: bought directly from Hyvä Themes, with the licence tied to your domain. Their model has changed over time, so the current price is worth checking at the point of decision. As a partner we handle it and tell you the exact cost before we start.
- Commercial extensions — search, marketing automation, specific features. They add up; we inventory them in the estimate rather than leaving them as a surprise.
3. Hosting
This is where most of the surprises live. Magento wants serious resources: PHP, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, Varnish. Realistically, between €150 and €600 a month depending on traffic — against €30–80 for an average WooCommerce setup.
A Magento store on €20-a-month hosting will be slow no matter how well the code is written. It's a saving you pay for in lost orders.
4. Maintenance
The cost almost everyone underestimates. Security patches arrive several times a year, extensions need updating, major versions have to be migrated. Without maintenance, within two years the store becomes a more expensive problem than building it was.
What pushes the cost up most
| Factor | Effect on cost |
|---|---|
| ERP integration | Large. Depends entirely on how well documented the ERP is. A clean API costs days; an ERP with no API costs weeks. |
| B2B logic | Large. Group pricing, accounts with multiple users, order approvals — each adds real complexity. |
| Data migration | Medium. The import is fast; attribute mapping and validation are the long part. |
| Fully custom design | Medium. On Hyvä, implementing a new design is significantly faster than on the stock theme. |
| Multi-language and multi-currency | Small to medium. Magento has both natively; the cost is more in content than in development. |
When Magento isn't justified
If you have under a few thousand products, no B2B and no special checkout requirements, Magento is probably oversized. Total cost of ownership over three years will exceed the benefit.
In that situation, Shopify or WooCommerce get you further, faster and cheaper. We've written separately about choosing between Magento and Shopify. If you want other options, PrestaShop and OpenCart each have their own cases.
The next step
If you already have a store and want to know what taking it further would cost, the code audit shows you exactly what you have and what the accumulated technical debt is worth. If you're starting from scratch, request an estimate — you get a breakdown by stage, not a round number.