Shopware Store Costs 2026: What a Finished Shop Really Costs

Shopware store costs consist of five line items — and the one everybody writes about is the smallest in almost every calculation. Ask what a Shopware store costs and you get licence tiers. We measured something else instead: what a finished, running shop actually consumes per month. In doing so we found a line item that, at €200,000 monthly revenue, comes to 1.6× the licence fee and appears in almost no budget.

This article does not recycle second-hand agency ranges. The numbers come from four measurements we made on 17 August 2026: 720 extensions from the official Shopware Store with their real price fields, Hetzner’s live pricing data taken from the file their own website uses, the fee pages of PayPal, Stripe and Mollie verbatim, and payment-mix shares from the EHI study “Zahlungssysteme im Einzelhandel 2026”. Where we did not measure something, we say so explicitly.

We run Shopware in production ourselves — including Pastaclean — which is why we know which line items only become visible in month six.

Shopware store costs at a glance

The short answer for anyone who just needs the order of magnitude (all prices excluding VAT, as of 17 Aug 2026):

Payment fees and plugin rentals are our own calculations, methodology below. Build and maintenance ranges are market experience, not a measurement — see “What we did not measure”.

The key observation is not the total but the ratio: even in the mid-size scenario the licence accounts for only 23.6% of recurring costs. In the small scenario it is zero — and the shop still costs €550 a month.

The line item almost everyone misses: payment fees

Here is the most important number in this article, and it appears in no licence comparison: for any growing shop, payment fees cost more than the Shopware licence.

The reason is structural. The licence is a fixed amount; the payment fee is a percentage of revenue. The two curves cross, and earlier than most people expect.

To quantify this, taking one provider’s card rate is not enough. In Germany, hardly anyone pays by credit card. So we modelled the real payment mix. Revenue shares come from the EHI study “Zahlungssysteme im Einzelhandel 2026” (published 5 May 2026, panel: 172 companies with €50.7bn net online revenue):

Shares: EHI Retail Institute, “Zahlungssysteme im Einzelhandel 2026”, e-commerce revenue shares, retrieved 17 Aug 2026. Fees: provider pages, retrieved live 17 Aug 2026. The remaining 15.8% of revenue (instant bank transfer, prepayment, cash on delivery and others) was priced at the weighted average of the known methods.

This produces a blended rate that depends on average order value — because fixed fees hit small baskets far harder in percentage terms:

Our own calculation: for each method the fee was applied to the given basket (percentage + fixed fee), then weighted by the EHI revenue share.

Now the comparison that matters. A shop with €200,000 monthly revenue and a €150 basket pays:

• Shopware Evolve licence: €28,800/year
• Payment fees: €46,560/year

The fees are 1.6× the licence. In the mid-size scenario (€50,000/month, Rise) it is 1.7×. And in the small scenario with Community Edition the licence is zero, while €2,772 a year still flows to payment providers.

The lever almost nobody pulls

Because the fee is percentage-based, any shift in the payment mix hits profit directly. One percentage point off the blended rate at €200,000 monthly revenue is €24,000 a year — more than most shops spend on their entire maintenance.

Two concrete starting points from the numbers above:

Basket size drives the fee. Going from a €45 to a €150 basket drops the blended rate from 2.31% to 1.94%. That is not a negotiation win, it is arithmetic: PayPal’s €0.39 fixed fee is 0.87% of revenue on a €45 basket but only 0.26% on a €150 one. Introducing bundles or free-shipping thresholds lowers payment fees as a side effect.

The card rate has a trap. Stripe advertises 1.5% + €0.25 in Germany — but that applies only to standard EEA cards. The same page lists 2.8% + €0.25 for premium EEA cards and 3.15% + €0.25 for non-EEA cards, plus 2% where currency conversion is required. Corporate and gold cards are premium cards. Anyone budgeting with the advertised rate is modelling the cheapest case of their card mix and will be surprised by the statement. Mollie discloses the same spread openly: 1.80% for EU consumer cards, 2.90% for commercial EEA cards, 3.25% for non-EEA cards.

What the licence really costs — and one widespread false claim

The official prices from the Shopware pricing page (retrieved 17 Aug 2026):

Two things here are notable, and both contradict what many guides say.

First: Beyond no longer has a published price. The figure “from €6,500/month” circulates through numerous agency articles — yet the string 6,500 now appears zero times on Shopware’s pricing page. It says “Individual”. We take that seriously and will not quote a number we cannot substantiate. An estimated number looks identical to a measured one in a table, and that is precisely the danger. Anyone budgeting Beyond has to request a quote. For the record: our own older article What does Shopware 6 cost? still carries that €6,500 figure — it was market-typical when published and is no longer backed by the vendor page.

Second: the widespread “€1M GMV limit” on Community Edition is not in the licence. This claim appears in several well-ranked guides. So we read the only source that counts — the licence file of the Shopware core. It is an unmodified MIT licence: “Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software […] to deal in the Software without restriction”. The words revenue, GMV, turnover and million appear in it not once. The pricing page likewise states no revenue cap for Community Edition, describing it simply as the “open-source, MIT-licensed core”.

That distinction matters for planning: commercial plans are attractive for support, SaaS operation and extra features — not because a licensing obligation kicks in above a revenue threshold. Believing otherwise means budgeting €7,200 a year you do not legally owe.

Hosting: the smallest bill in the whole project

Hosting has a reputation as a major cost block. The live prices say otherwise. We did not copy them from a marketing page but read them from cloud_data.json — the file Hetzner’s own website draws its prices from:

Source: hetzner.com/_resources/app/data/bench/cloud_data.json, Nuremberg location (NBG1), EUR, excluding VAT, retrieved 17 Aug 2026. Add €0.50/month per IPv4 address.

A small to mid-size Shopware shop runs on a CPX32 for €35.49/month. For comparison: the plugin basket in the next section costs nearly three times that.

A note on diligence with this exact source: the same file contains a field IP with the value 0.50. That is the monthly IPv4 charge, not a server price — but it sits immediately next to the server data and is easily mistaken for a tariff when read quickly. A number from the right source can still be the wrong number if you do not check what it means.

Important for choosing a model: with Rise, Evolve and Beyond as SaaS this line item disappears entirely, because Shopware runs the infrastructure. We broke down the cloud-versus-self-hosting question separately in Shopware Cloud.

Plugins: 720 extensions analysed — and nearly all are rentals

This is the line item most often mis-budgeted, because it intuitively feels like a one-time purchase.

We paginated the official Shopware Store bestseller list across 30 pages and captured 720 extensions with their price fields. We read not the rendered price graphic but the data-product-information data attribute, which contains name, manufacturer and price in machine-readable form.

The first result is a structure worth knowing:

The further down the popularity list you go, the less likely an extension is free. That is good news for small shops: the most-used extensions — including PayPal, the security plugin, the migration assistant and the language pack from Shopware itself — cost nothing.

The decisive point, though, is the billing model. We individually verified twelve paid extensions on their product pages to establish what the price field actually means. Result: in 12 out of 12 cases it is a monthly price, not a purchase price. The “Blog Module”, for instance, shows €39.00 /month, with annual payment at €359.00/year. So a €49 plugin is not a piece of furniture you buy once — it is €588 a year, permanently.

A realistic basket for a small German B2C shop, assembled by function rather than popularity, using real bestseller prices:

That is €1,186.56 a year and €3,559.68 over three years — for four extensions found in almost every shop. Larger shops pay considerably more: taking every paid extension from the top 50 adds up to €345.05/month, or €4,140.60 a year.

The honest counter-check: for consent management there are also free alternatives within the top 50 (ranks 25 and 31). Anyone willing to accept fewer features and configure more themselves can cut this line item substantially. The rental is not a law of nature but a convenience decision — but it has to be in the budget.

The one-off build: the biggest number nobody knows exactly

The build is the largest single amount in almost every project — and this is precisely where we cannot offer a measurement, only market experience. We say that plainly rather than invent a range that looks precise.

Realistic orders of magnitude for the German market:

What drives this sum is rarely the technology. It is four items that tend to vanish under “miscellaneous” in quotes:

Data migration. Product data from a legacy system is almost never clean. Categories overlap, variants are inconsistently maintained, images are missing for part of the range. The import itself takes hours; the cleanup takes weeks.

Product data and photography. A shop with 500 items needs 500 descriptions, attribute sets and image sets. Buy photography and you pay per item; do it yourself and you pay in working hours. This line item appears in no licence comparison and is regularly the second largest after development in first-time projects.

Integrations. ERP, inventory management, shipping providers, accounting. Every integration is its own small project with its own debugging — especially when the target system is older than the idea of the interface.

Legal texts and processes. Right of withdrawal, terms, privacy policy, consent configuration, returns process. Cheap compared to development, but blocking: without them the shop cannot go live.

Ongoing operations: the line item that never stops

A shop is not a purchase, it is a subscription to attention. What accrues monthly, whether or not anyone is actively working on it:

Updates. Shopware ships security and feature updates regularly. With SaaS the vendor handles this. When self-hosting, every update is a small operation with a testing phase — particularly with custom templates, because template changes touch exactly the areas that shift between versions.

Backups and monitoring. A backup that has never been restored is a claim, not a safeguard. Anyone self-hosting must have practised the restore at least once — otherwise, in an emergency, all they know is that files exist, not that they work.

Security. A shop is a permanent target because payment flows and customer data meet there. We experienced how quickly that becomes real and documented it: Five days hijacked. For the typical entry points, see IT security vulnerabilities.

Content maintenance. New products, campaigns, seasonal adjustments. Not an IT task, but it lands in the same budget.

Realistic figures are €200/month for a small shop with lean operations, €800/month for a mid-size shop with active maintenance, and €2,500/month upwards for a platform with an ongoing roadmap. These too are experience values, not measurements.

Three scenarios calculated in full

Now all line items together. Payment fees come from the blended rate above, plugin rentals from the store data, hosting from the live prices. Build and operations are experience values.

Scenario 1: Small shop, Community Edition, self-hosted

€10,000 monthly revenue, €45 basket.

Year 1 including €12,000 build: €18,598. Over three years: €31,795.

Notable: the licence is zero, and the shop still costs €6,598 a year. By far the largest recurring item is the payment fee.

Scenario 2: Mid-size shop, Rise as SaaS

€50,000 monthly revenue, €80 basket.

Year 1 including €45,000 build: €75,467. Over three years: €136,400.

The licence accounts for 23.6% of recurring costs. Payment fees, at €12,480/year, are 1.7× the licence cost of €7,200/year.

Scenario 3: Large shop, Evolve as SaaS

€200,000 monthly revenue, €150 basket.

Year 1 including €120,000 build: €229,501. Over three years: €448,502.

Here too the licence remains a quarter of recurring costs at 26.3% — and payment fees exceed it by €17,760 a year.

What these numbers mean for choosing a platform

If the licence is only a quarter of recurring costs, the most popular yardstick loses its meaning. A shop system that is €200/month cheaper but costs 0.3 percentage points more per order in payment fees is more expensive at €200,000 monthly revenue — the difference is €600 a month.

So when comparing systems, this is the order worth using:

1. Payment fees — percentage-based, grows with success, biggest lever
2. Build and migration — one-off, but the largest single sum
3. Operations and maintenance — permanent, frequently underestimated
4. Plugin rentals — permanent, feels like a one-time purchase
5. Licence — the item that gets discussed most

If you are weighing up systems, the head-to-head is in Shopify vs Shopware and the broader overview in Best shop system. Coming from Magento, see Magento alternatives. And if you want to know whether the shop is even fast enough to collect those payments, check it with our Core Web Vitals test.

What we did not measure

So it is clear where the evidence ends and experience begins:

Measured and substantiated: plugin prices and billing model (720 extensions, 12 individually verified), hosting prices (Hetzner live data), provider payment fees (PayPal, Stripe, Mollie, verbatim), payment-mix shares (EHI study), licence prices and licence text (Shopware pricing page, MIT licence file).

Not measured, experience values instead: build costs, maintenance costs, agency hourly rates. We did not systematically collect quotes. These figures are orders of magnitude for budget planning, not evidence — an estimated number looks identical to a measured one in a table, which is why the difference is stated explicitly here.

Deliberately left open: the price of Shopware Beyond. Shopware does not publish it, so we do not quote it.

Known limitation of the payment model: the EHI shares are market averages across all sectors. A furniture shop with high baskets and heavy invoice usage has a different mix from a consumables retailer. To calculate precisely, take your own payment mix from the Shopware order overview and apply the same formula.

Conclusion: what does a Shopware store really cost?

A small shop costs roughly €550 a month plus €5,000–15,000 to build. A mid-size shop sits at ~€2,539 a month plus €30,000–60,000. A large shop at ~€9,125 a month plus €80,000–200,000.

The three findings that change a calculation:

Payment fees beat the licence. In all three scenarios they are the largest or second-largest recurring item — at €200,000 monthly revenue, €46,560/year is 1.6× the Evolve licence. They are nonetheless almost never included in platform comparisons, because they do not appear on the shop system’s pricing page.

Plugins are rentals, not purchases. In 12 of 12 verified cases the store price is a monthly price. Four common extensions cost €3,559.68 over three years.

Two widespread claims do not survive checking. According to the MIT licence text, Community Edition has no revenue cap, and Beyond has no published price any more. Both are presented differently in guides — and both can be checked at the primary source in two minutes.

For a detailed comparison of the editions, see What does Shopware 6 cost?; the cloud-versus-self-hosting decision is covered in Shopware Cloud.

FAQ: Common questions about Shopware store costs

What does a Shopware store cost per month?

A small shop on Community Edition costs around €550 a month (hosting, plugin rentals, payment fees, operations), a mid-size shop on Rise about €2,539, and a large shop on Evolve about €9,125. The licence accounts for at most a quarter of that; as revenue grows, the largest recurring item is payment fees.

Is Shopware really free?

Community Edition is free and released under an unmodified MIT licence with no revenue restriction. But only the software is free, not the shop: hosting, plugin rentals, payment fees and maintenance still apply — €6,598 a year in our small scenario, with zero licence cost.

Does Community Edition have a €1 million revenue limit?

Not according to the licence text. The Shopware core licence file is a standard MIT licence that explicitly permits use “without restriction”; terms such as revenue, GMV or million do not appear in it. The official pricing page likewise states no revenue cap for Community Edition. Commercial plans bring support, SaaS operation and extra features — but not a licensing obligation above a revenue threshold.

What does Shopware Beyond cost?

Shopware no longer publishes a price for Beyond; the pricing page says “Individual”. The frequently quoted figure of €6,500/month comes from third parties and no longer appears on the vendor’s page. Anyone budgeting Beyond has to request a quote.

How high are payment fees in a German online shop?

Based on our calculation using the real German payment mix, they run between 1.94% and 2.31% of revenue, depending on basket size. At a €45 basket it is 2.31%; at €150 only 1.94%, because per-transaction fixed fees weigh less in percentage terms.

Are Shopware plugins one-time purchases or subscriptions?

Overwhelmingly subscriptions. We checked twelve paid bestsellers individually: in all twelve cases the displayed price is a monthly price, usually with a cheaper annual option. So a €49 plugin costs €588 a year, permanently.

How many Shopware extensions are free?

Of the 720 best-selling extensions, 20.4% are free. In the top 50, however, it is 64% — the most popular extensions are predominantly free, including PayPal, the security plugin and the migration assistant from Shopware itself.

What does hosting for a Shopware store cost?

For a small to mid-size shop, a server at €19.49 to €35.49 a month is sufficient, plus €0.50 for the IPv4 address. That makes hosting the smallest item in the calculation. With the Rise, Evolve and Beyond SaaS plans it disappears entirely, because Shopware runs the infrastructure.

What does building a Shopware store cost as a one-off?

Realistically €5,000–15,000 for a standard project with little customisation, €30,000–60,000 for a project with custom design and ERP integration, and €80,000–200,000 for complex B2B platforms. These ranges are market experience, not our own survey — the biggest drivers are data migration, product data and photography, and integrations.

How can I reduce my shop’s running costs?

The biggest lever is payment fees, because they scale with revenue: one percentage point less means €24,000 a year at €200,000 monthly revenue. A higher average basket lowers the effective rate automatically. The second lever is plugin rentals — for many functions, such as consent management, free alternatives exist within the top 50.