Shopify or Custom Ecommerce? Check the Quote Before You Sign

A local IT company has quoted you a custom ecommerce site in Laravel, React, Node or PHP, and someone has told you Shopify is cheaper. Both can be true, but the two numbers are not the same kind of cost. The quote prices a build. Shopify is a monthly subscription that covers hosting and the platform. This guide lists the costs around each option, shows where custom genuinely wins, and gives you the questions that expose a weak quote before you sign.

Shopify plan prices and fees are from Shopify's India pricing page and help centre, checked on 15 October 2026. Prices and offers change, so recheck them before you sign anything.

What does a custom quote usually leave out?

A custom quote normally prices the build: design, development, testing and a launch date. It says much less about the years after launch, which is where most of the money is spent. Before you compare it with anything, ask for these lines in writing:

• Hosting and servers. Who buys them, in whose name the account sits, and who pays the bill each month.
• Security patching. Updates for the framework, the libraries and the server software, and how often they happen.
• Payment gateway integration. The code that talks to Razorpay, Cashfree or another gateway, and who fixes it when that API changes.
• PCI scope. Which parts of the system touch card data, and what the developer does to keep that area small.
• Updates after launch. Whether small changes are included in a retainer or billed each time.
• Backups and monitoring. Who takes backups, where they are stored, and who responds when the site goes down.

These are the total cost of ownership categories for a custom store. None of them is visible on the day you sign, and all of them recur every month for as long as the store runs.

What does the Shopify subscription actually include?

Shopify is a hosted platform. The subscription covers the servers, the checkout software and the platform updates, so you do not run a server or patch the core software yourself. Apps, your theme and any custom development on top are separate costs, and they vary by store, so they are not in the plan price.

Here are the plan prices from Shopify's India pricing page, in Rs a month, with the third-party gateway fee for each plan:

The page also lists a 3-day free trial, and says most plans start at Rs 20 a month for the first 3 months. Promotions change, so check the offer on the day you sign up.

The gateway fee is the line Indian founders most often miss. Shopify's help centre says that when you use a third-party provider, third-party transaction fees apply to the transactions that provider processes, based on your plan. That fee sits on top of what the gateway charges you. Shopify Payments is available only in certain countries, so check Shopify's supported-countries list before you plan around it. Most Indian stores connect a gateway such as Razorpay or Cashfree, and this fee applies to those orders.

To read the fee in practice: on Basic, every Rs 1 lakh of orders processed through a third-party gateway carries Rs 2,000 of Shopify fee on top of the gateway charge. On Grow, the same Rs 1 lakh carries Rs 1,000. Run that against your own order volume before you decide the plan is expensive, because the fee falls as the plan rises and the answer depends on your numbers.

Where does custom ecommerce genuinely win?

Custom is the right call more often than platform fans admit. These are the cases where we would seriously consider it over Shopify:

• Unusual business logic. A rental store that takes deposits, holds money for damage, and ties returns inspection to stock is a good example. An app can cover pieces of this, but the workarounds pile up fast.
• A true multi-vendor marketplace. Vendors that sign themselves up, manage their own catalogues, pass approval rules and get split payouts make up a product in their own right. Shopify can host some of this through apps, but a full marketplace is often a custom build.
• Heavy configurators. Made-to-measure furniture or engineered parts where the price, the bill of materials and the drawing all change with every choice.
• Deep integration with your own systems. When the way you run operations is the product, the storefront has to follow your process, not the other way round.

If your store needs a catalogue, a cart, COD or prepaid checkout, GST invoices and a blog, Shopify is usually the faster and cheaper path. A quick test: list your three most unusual workflows and check whether a credible app already does each one. If two of the three have no answer, custom deserves a proper look.

Who carries the security and PCI work on each?

Shopify says it is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, and that its certification covers your store, its shopping cart and web hosting. Its PCI page says that compliance extends to every store on the platform by default. For a small team, that matters, because hosting security is the part most teams never budget for.

It does not mean nothing is yours. Your team still controls staff access, the apps you install, any custom script added to checkout, and how the payment gateway is configured. A badly written checkout script is a payment security problem on any platform, so treat every addition to checkout as a change that needs review.

A custom build works the other way round. You own the server, the code and the patch cycle. If the system stores, processes or transmits card data, the PCI scope sits with you and your developers. Some custom teams send customers to a hosted gateway page so that card data never reaches their own servers. That is a sound design, but it has to be built and tested on purpose, and someone has to keep it that way through every release.

Ask the IT company which of these they would take on in writing, and what evidence they would give you each year that the work was done.

Which questions should you put to the IT company?

A good developer answers these in a few minutes. A vague answer to any of them is a line item you have not priced yet.

1. Who pays for hosting, and whose name is on the account?
2. What does the monthly retainer include? Ask for the hours, the response time, and where the line sits between a bug fix and a change request.
3. Who patches the framework and the libraries, and how often?
4. Which payment gateway is integrated, and who updates the code when its API changes?
5. What is your PCI approach? Does card data touch our server at any point?
6. Who holds the domain, the code repository, the server access and the gateway account?
7. What will you hand over at launch? Ask for a deployment guide, a list of services and accounts, and a walkthrough recording.
8. If we stop working together in year two, which parts can our own team run without you?
9. Can you show a live store you built that has been running for at least a year?

How do you avoid the code ownership trap?

This is the trap founders find too late. The site works on launch day, the developer holds all the logins, and your business depends on one person's laptop. Check these before you release the final payment:

• The code repository is in an account your business owns, with the developer added as a collaborator and not as the owner.
• The hosting, domain and DNS sit in accounts your business controls.
• Gateway and third-party API keys are issued to your business, not to the developer personally.
• The contract says who owns the source code, and what happens to any library, template or paid component bought for the build.
• A deployment process is documented and has been tested, ideally by a second developer deploying a small change.

Shopify has its own version of the same trap. The store, the apps and the customer data live on Shopify's platform, and you rent that platform. The question is not whether you own Shopify, but whether you can move away without losing your data. Ask the developer which parts of your theme and custom code you could take with you, and what a full data export would involve. Our developer handover checklist walks through the step-by-step handover, whichever platform you are on.

Should you choose Shopify or custom this week?

Use the same four checks as any platform decision. Who maintains the store each month? How much of what you need is standard? How will payments and cash on delivery run? What does the store cost each month, all in? For Shopify, that means the plan, the gateway fee, the apps and any developer time. For custom, it means hosting, retainer hours, gateway maintenance and the security patch cycle. A custom quote only becomes comparable when those recurring lines are written down.

Read the IT company's quote line by line, the way you would read a Shopify one. Our guide on how to read a Shopify quote covers what to check. If you are already on a custom build and thinking about moving, our custom website to Shopify migration guide covers what moves, what needs rebuilding and what to check before you switch.

Send us the custom quote, and we will tell you what Shopify looks like

Send us the custom quote and we will tell you, free of charge, what the same store would look like on Shopify. We will go line by line: which features are standard apps, which need custom work, what the monthly platform cost would be, and where you would still need a developer. If custom is the better call for your store, we will say so and explain why.

Email hello@exactwhy.com with the subject line "Custom quote vs Shopify review" and attach the quote or paste its main lines. We reply within 4 hours.