Who maintains it: the platform cost nobody prices in

A hosted subscription buys you somebody else's responsibility for keeping a shop running. A self-hosted one does not, and the work does not disappear — it moves to you or to somebody you pay. That transfer is the largest variable in any platform comparison, it appears on no pricing page, and in practice it decides the choice more often than the money does. Here is what the work actually consists of, and how to price your own before you commit.

Our interest, stated up front: StoreLenz makes competitor-research tools that only work on Shopify stores, so we profit if you choose a hosted platform. We have therefore been careful to describe the work rather than to dramatise it, and to say plainly where it is genuinely small.

What is actually on the listLink to this section

On a self-hosted shop, these are yours. On a hosted platform, every one of them is included in the subscription.

Weekly-ish, small:

• Applying updates to the platform, the shop plugin, the theme and every extension.
• Checking the shop still works after those updates — particularly checkout.
• Confirming backups ran.

Monthly-ish:

• Reviewing performance, since plugin additions accumulate.
• Checking for security advisories affecting anything you run.
• Reviewing what the host is charging you for and whether it still fits.

Occasionally, and badly timed:

• A plugin update breaks something and you work out which one.
• A platform version change requires a server change your host has not made.
• Traffic spikes and the site slows, and you decide whether to spend more on hosting.
• Something is compromised, and you restore from the backup you hope you tested.

Once, substantially:

• The initial configuration: hosting, caching, security, backups, payments.
• Any custom work you want that no extension offers.

Why no honest article can tell you how many hours this isLink to this section

Because it genuinely depends on three things nobody else can know:

Your setup. A lean shop with a well-known theme and four extensions is close to zero maintenance. The same shop with twenty extensions and a heavily customised theme is a different job entirely.

Your host. Managed WordPress hosting does a meaningful share of the list — updates, backups, security monitoring. That is most of why it costs more than the bottom of WooCommerce's published "$25 – $350/month" range. Paying more for hosting is, in effect, buying back some of this work.

You. For somebody who already does this, several items take minutes and carry no stress. For somebody who does not, the same items take an afternoon and a certain amount of dread.

So any article quoting "about five hours a month" has invented it. We are not going to.

How to price yours, in fifteen minutesLink to this section

1. Decide who the person is. Write a name. "Me", or a developer, or a host's managed plan. If you cannot write a name, that is the single most useful finding available from this exercise — and the honest conclusion is that a self-hosted shop is not yet a realistic option for you.

2. If the name is yours, price your hour. Not your salary — the value of the next-best thing you would do with the time. For most small shop owners the next-best use of an hour is selling something, which is why this number is usually higher than people put down.

3. If the name is somebody else's, get the retainer figure. Ask a developer or an agency what they charge to keep a shop updated and available. That is a real number and a five-minute email away.

4. Add it to the platform bill and compare again. Now you are comparing like with like, which the side-by-side cost comparison cannot do for you because this number is yours.

5. Ask the uncomfortable question. If the shop is down on a Saturday and the person in step one is unavailable, what happens? Both models have an answer. Only one of them is "it stays down".

The part that is not about hoursLink to this section

Two costs that do not convert into time and matter anyway.

Attention. Knowing the updates are your job occupies a small amount of mental space permanently. Some people do not notice. Others find it is the thing they resent most about running a shop.

Risk, and who carries it. On a hosted platform a serious outage is the platform's problem and their reputation. Self-hosted, it is yours — including the part where you have to tell customers.

Neither belongs in a spreadsheet and both belong in the decision.

Where this is genuinely smallLink to this section

It would be dishonest to leave this out:

• If you already run WordPress sites, nearly everything above is a habit you have. The marginal work of one more

site is small, and the savings are real money.

• If you pay a developer anyway, adding store maintenance to an existing retainer is cheap.
• If you buy good managed hosting, a large share of the list is done for you, and the premium is still often less

than a hosted platform's subscription.

• If the shop is simple and stays simple, very little goes wrong. Most of the horror stories involve twenty

extensions.

Equally, this is where a hosted platform earns its money honestly: you are paying a subscription so that none of this is ever your problem. Whether that is excellent value or money you would rather keep depends entirely on who you are — which is the whole point.

What this does not tell youLink to this section

Your own figure. Only steps one to three give you that.

Whether a particular host does a good job. Ask them exactly which items on the list above they cover, and get it in writing. "Managed" means different things.

Whether you will enjoy it. Some people like owning the stack. That is a legitimate reason to choose it and it will not appear in any comparison table.

The one question underneath all of thisLink to this section

Who gets the call when the shop is down? Answer that honestly and most of the platform decision resolves itself — much faster than by comparing feature lists, and more reliably than by comparing monthly prices.

Related readingLink to this section

• Shopify vs WooCommerce on cost: the comparison nobody does honestly
• What you give up by choosing WooCommerce
• What Shopify actually costs in a year

SourcesLink to this section

• WooCommerce, Pricing — hosting "$25 – $350/month for most stores, but scales with traffic and performance needs", in US dollars — https://woocommerce.com/pricing/ — read 2026-10-02
• Shopify, Pricing — hosting, security and updates included in the subscription; plan prices as served in euros from our location — https://www.shopify.com/pricing — read 2026-10-02
• No figure is given for hours of maintenance per month or its cost, because it depends on the setup, the host and the person. The method above produces the reader's own