Creator and commerce decision
Shopify
Keep paying — Shopify's marketplace exposure and large app ecosystem are durable advantages that a small team cannot realistically reproduce.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Shopify alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- A minimal replacement must let a merchant list products, show a storefront, accept payments, create orders, and manage inventory from an admin UI.
What it still won’t have
- Access to Shopify's Shop marketplace exposure (250M+ shoppers)
- Shopify App Store ecosystem and thousands of prebuilt apps
- Built-in Sidekick AI and other proprietary AI features
- Hosted PCI/compliance, fraud protection, and built-in payments
- Managed POS hardware, warranty, and tight in-person integrations
What remains hard
- Marketplace liquidity
Sell to 250M+ shoppers with Shop
- Integration maintenance
The Shopify App Store has 21,000+ commerce apps for whatever specialized features your business might need.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal hosted ecommerce product using Next.js (React) for the storefront and admin, PostgreSQL for data, and Stripe for payments. In scope: product CRUD, product listing pages, cart, checkout that creates orders in Postgres, inventory decrement on order, simple admin UI to view orders and update inventory, email receipts via SendGrid, deploy to Vercel (frontend) and a small Heroku/DigitalOcean app for the API. Out of scope: multi-currency markets, POS hardware integration, marketplace listing, app-store extensibility, advanced tax/fraud automation. Include error handling, input validation, and automated unit/integration tests for API endpoints and checkout flow.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Pay verdict base20
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score32
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productShopify: The All-in-One Commerce Platform for Businesses
- official pricingShopify Pricing
- official docsPoint of Sale Features
- open sourcebagisto/bagisto
- open sourcespree/spree
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
