How much does a Magento 2 website cost? (Now Adobe Commerce)

When you’re looking at how much a Magento 2 website (now Adobe Commerce) costs, you need to factor in several things, including:

• Strategy: Determining the best approach for your Adobe Commerce site. This includes conversations with your marketing and operations teams. You want your store to be an asset to your customers, not to create bottlenecks with your operations and customer support team, and to support your digital marketing strategies.
• Design: After coming up with your overall strategy, you can now start designing your site. This involves wireframing, which means providing low-fidelity layouts that help you and your team identify/rearrange elements (headers, menus, landing pages, product pages), content, and the page’s functionality. From then, you’ll move on to prototyping your design and creating a visual design overview that covers color schemes, typography, images, and all the other finer details of your new site.
• Feature development: Actually building your site. You will need to figure out which parts of your site can be built natively or which parts need extensions. Often, this can lead to iterative steps, where you will adapt your vision based on development, sending you and your team back to strategy and design. You will also want a thorough review of the extensions you use, as subpar extensions can often lead to site performance issues down the line.
• Quality assurance: Does your finished Magento 2 site perform as expected? This means for both your team working on the back end of the site and your customers who are using your site and its features. Typically, you want to do, at a minimum, cross-browser and cross-device testing, performance testing (looking at load times and serve response times), and usability testing (testing to see where, if anywhere, your users get stuck or confused when navigating your site). 
• Data migration:  Has all essential and relevant data been migrated from your current site and into your new Magneto 2/Adobe Commerce site?

Some agencies do this first, but we tend to recommend doing data migration as the last step because:

• Your Magento 2 site can be developed and tested as a blank slate without potentially adversely being affected by data migration issues. Doing data migration last lets you focus on your design and development.
• It gives you more flexibility. Data migration can be adjusted to your new site, giving you more freedom when creating and designing your site. 
• You can streamline your data migration. You may not need all that data on your existing platform. By doing data migration at the end, you can better identify which data points need to be migrated.

At SwiftOtter, we help all types of businesses set up and maintain functional Magento 2 websites designed to meet their specified business goals.  

This post contains information based on our 10+ years of experience helping clients build and maintain Magento 2 websites. If you want to learn more about working with us at SwiftOtter, contact us today.

Magento Pricing: The Total Cost of Running a Magento 2 Website

The presiding guideline among agencies in the Magento development community is not to share Magento pricing or pricing tiers on their websites. 

The reason for this is two-fold: 

1. Every installation and project is unique. There are no two identical projects. This is the classic scenario of the "it depends" answer. The price of your project will go up based on the scope of your data migration, how many SKUs you have, what type of interactive/dynamic landing pages you want to create, and much more.
2. How agencies operate (thus charge) is also unique. One agency might utilize offshore developers, while another might be based in Los Angeles. Another agency might be a Magento Gold Partner, only working with Magento, while yet another agency might offer Magento as one of many services and platforms. All of these factor into the price they charge. 

But we know it’s frustrating to think about starting to work with an agency for a major project, such as building/optimizing your Magento 2 site, without knowing what you’re going to be paying and what you’re going to get. 

So, after looking over our list of clients in the past few years, we can break down what our customers can get based on different pricings tiers (see below).

Again, please keep in mind that this listed pricing is for working with SwiftOtter, other agencies may charge more or charge less because they provide less deliverables. Before working with any agency, you want to make sure you get a clear and well-defined statement of work, that includes a list of specific deliverables, along with a transparent timeline.

Building a Magento 2 Site for $20,000 - $50,000

Time: usually 1 month or less

In our experience, many larger agencies have an entry point of $100,000 to $200,000 (or more). Offshore might save you 50-75% of the project cost. Freelance developers will likely reduce project costs compared to a large agency but might not bring the same speed of completion. Further, offshoring does have its risks, as you lose a sort of streamlined experience. 

But let’s take a look at what SwiftOtter can offer within this price range.

$20k-50k is considered the entry point for a Magento website. At this price, there is very little added to Magento in the form of additional functionality. This price point primarily focuses on the basics and default settings/adjustments.

Keep in mind that Adobe Commerce works very well as an ecommerce platform. You will have to accept Magento’s way for almost everything. For some customers, this is much easier to do than it is for others.

At this price point, you can expect

• A basic design, very similar to the default Magento Luma theme.
• The use of a modern styling system (SASS)
• A modern deployment system
• Assistance with the migration process.
• (possible) Migration of data from an existing system.

Additional Options:

• Custom-written integrations with external CRM (such as SalesForce) or ERP can add $ 10K-20K or more. Off-the-shelf solutions greatly reduce the price.
• We often charge the price of an extension for installation. This might sound like a lot, so please read the module installation section.
• Using Commerce (formerly Enterprise Edition) could add $0 (nothing) to the price of the project (above the yearly fees paid to Magento)

Building a Magento 2 Website for $50,000 - $100,00

Time: usually 1-2 months of development (yet launch time will often be longer due to data entry).

This is the entry point for most builds. While sacrificing some features could lower the price, it is important to understand you might not be happy with the result. Much development goes into making Adobe Commerce exactly right for your store.

At this price point, you can expect:

• A somewhat custom look and feel (as compared to the default Magento Luma theme)
• 3-5 off-the-shelf modules to extend existing functionality. Here are some examples:
• Help with the migration process.
• The use of a modern styling system (SASS)
• A modern deployment system
• You will be responsible for necessary data entry.

Larger Agencies/Offshoring:

Larger agencies will typically be 10%-50%+ and possibly longer lead time with the benefit being their breadth of experience. They might also not accept a project starting in this price range. Offshoring might save 50%, but it is expected to spend significantly more time specifying project details, and the project time could be 2- 4 times slower (see the section in detail below). Freelancers should be able to handle projects of this size as long as they are not undertaking too many other clients.

Building a Magento 2 Website for $100,000 - $250,000

Time: usually 2-4 months of development time

This is the mid-tier of Magento website builds and brings more flexibility and creative liberty to ensure that the website is finely tuned to customer needs.

For this price point, you can expect:

• More-detailed discovery phase to ascertain the requested features and their scope.
• A very custom look and feel to the website.
• User testing to ensure that the new look and feel of your website resonates with your customers (pseudo-insurance).
• Significant custom features developed. These will likely facilitate your unique business processes or extend/streamline the customer-facing capabilities.
• ERP integration
• Additional SEO monitoring and advice through the migration process.

Larger Agencies/Offshoring:

This project tier seems to be a good entry point for Larger Agencies. Projects of this size should exercise caution with Offshoring. While the savings are enticing due to the larger project size, that same larger project size (i.e. increased complexity) will make the overall project harder to manage. When working with a Freelancer on a project of this size, your team may need to do additional work or the Freelancer may need to hire some help.

Building a Magento 2 Website for $250,000+

Time: 4+ months of development time

At this price, most of the website is likely to be custom. Here are a few things that you might be considering:

• Super, lightning-fast frontend built on a modern JavaScript framework. This boosts your customers' experience as they browse your site, making them want to return. grove.com is an excellent example of such a user interface.
• A custom product designer (t-shirts, custom sizing or measurements)
• Extensive search-engine optimization planning and unique considerations

A project of this size is a complicated undertaking requiring competent project management and efficient development processes.

The Benefits of Working with an Agency to Build Your Magento 2 Website

As we saw above, building a Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce site is a process that involves a lot of different stakeholders and moving parts. 

Because of this, there are significant benefits to using an agency that can help streamline your vision.

Agencies can also:

• Provide expertise and experience. By working with other eCommerce fronts launching Magento 2 sites, agencies have gained valuable experience along the way. This hands-on experience makes it easy for agencies to share and operate based on best practices. Plus, by knowing the ins and out of Magento 2, they can better steer your team away from costly and ineffective ideas and towards more sustainable and cost-effective strategies. 
• Dedicated project management. It’s often difficult for businesses of all sizes to dedicate team members to building out their Magento 2 site, and working together with a makeshift team of freelancers can bring a lot of talent into the room, but not a lot of management and leadership. That kind of oversight can derail projects and lead to costly, over-budget project fees. By working with an agency, you get dedicated project management. You get assigned agents working on your project, who are the point person for a) any questions you have and b) keeping the project on track and under budget.
• Ongoing support and maintenance. Magento 2 constantly updates its platform, which can affect your site performance and load times. Further, changes you make to your company need to be reflected in your site structure. An agency generally offers ongoing support and maintenance to keep your site performing as it ought to over the years. 

What is a discovery phase?

This is a mini-project in which the upcoming project is researched. It might account for 10% of the overall project cost. It is most often billed as it can make or break a project. Requirements are gathered, the scope is defined and negotiated, and a process is implemented.

It might seem like an additional piece of the project that can be done away with to reduce project costs, but it is often essential. This gets the plan or roadmap in place for the project.

How much does a Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration cost?

Unfortunately, there is not one-click Magento 1 to Magento 2 upgrade. There is a significant financial investment to transition from Magento 1 to Magento 2. How much is that investment? More code that can be directly copied from M1 to M2 means more savings.

Our experience is that migrating Magento from version 1 to version 2 costs 50-75% of a new Magento build.

Here is what can be copied from Magento 1 to Magento 2

• The database: Magento’s database migration tool works ok. There can be some issues throughout the process. Please note that migration will result in some downtime during the website launch while orders and customers are copied from the M1 site into the M2 database format..

Here is what can be partially copied from Magento 1 to Magento 2

• Custom code that you have built. We can copy the idea and much of the structure. There are many differences to M2’s core code, so this has also to be taken into account..

Here is what can NOT be copied from Magento 1 to Magento 2

• Custom modules. These are usually very different from M1 to M2. These will need to be repurchased. At this time, the marketplace is still catching up to the changes in M2, and not all modules will be available. These modules will need to be custom-built.
• The theme. Magento 2’s base theme is a complete rewrite. This is where most of the work is involved in a migration. We also take this as a time to upgrade your Magento build to the latest web technology standards, yielding a codebase that is as future-proof as possible.

These migrations are treated with the same level of concern as a new website build. In most every way, it is the same process.

Can items be removed from the minimum entry point to reduce cost?

This is a tricky question. Agencies want to see their clients happy. Clients want to be happy. Clients also want to reduce their costs in every way possible. Agencies know this and often bend over backwards to reduce costs.

What’s more, is that every client is different and has their own picture of the perfect website that they want.

Example: an easy one that clients might want removed is some of the support hours. Maybe the client is technical, or maybe they are on a shoestring budget. Either way, the support hours are removed and the project commences. How would it work if near the end of the project, the client needs extra support? It puts the agency in a difficult position as they are either going to lose money on the project or make the client unhappy. Neither is a winning position.

That said, history is the biggest thing we have found to reduce the entry point cost. As an agency gets to know its client better, they know what the client truly expects and what they are ok with foregoing. For us, we have had some Magento 2 builds that our entry point was significantly less than listed above, and that worked well, for others, the price was $50k or more and we maxed it out.

Offshore saving? Benefits?

Choosing a partner to build your website is difficult. Comparing partners to build your website is even harder. How do you compare agencies?

We regularly hear that using offshore labor to complete a task can involve 50-75% savings. You could likely be quoted $15,000 - $25,000 for the same rough requirements. For some companies, the savings benefits are exactly what they need to get a website delivered.

There are many success stories and, sadly, disaster stories with using offshore labor. We believe some companies can afford that risk while others can’t.

What is the risk? We believe the risk lies in these areas:

• The ability for communication
• The skill and qualifications of the developers
• Your ability to draft an ultra-comprehensive detailed description of the work to be performed

Communication

This one is the greatest risk. In America and many Western countries, we natively speak English. Offshores developers do speak English: some well and some not so well. Effectively communicating your project requirements and the continued discussions through the project are very important to keep the project running smoothly.

Developer Skill

How skilled is the developer? This applies for any developer. Anyone can hang out a “Magento Developer” shingle and not know the unique areas of the system. This goes back to your research of the developer and their development practices: are the developers certified? Are there peer code reviews? What type of QA mechanism do they have? What about the release process?

Another thing to consider relates to communication. English is pretty much the de facto programming language. The consideration here is how well does the developer speak English? The ability to communicate through code and comments is very important.

How much does Commerce (formerly Enterprise Edition / EE) add to a project’s price?

You can install Commerce for just the yearly fee paid to Magento (see next section for info). There is no additional development required to release a site running Commerce.

Many customers who wish to deploy a Magento Commerce site need extra features. This is because their business process dictates integrations, unique customer experiences and more. This is likely why other websites state that Commerce builds start around 50% more then an Open Source (formerly Community Edition) build.

Commerce brings a host of useful features (see here). You should read through this list to see how Commerce can benefit your site.

How much does the annual Adobe Commerce licensing fee cost?

The yearly licensing fee paid to Magento for Commerce was previously a flat fee per server instance. Magento 2 changed the licensing fee structure to a fee tied to annual website sales volume. This makes Commerce an affordable option for websites with low volume, while still remaining competitively priced for larger eCommerce sites. Price quotes and demos for Adobe Commerce are easy to get – just send us a message.

How much does it cost to install modules?

Besides introducing security vulnerabilities, the Magento Extension Downloader has given a false sense of ease for installing extensions. You would be surprised with the number of extensions that have extremely poor-quality code, potential security vulnerabilities and/or send requests back to the developers servers.

With the release of Magento 2, Magento introduced the Magento Marketplace for Extensions (replacing version 1's Magento Connect). The process for submitting an extension was also overhauled to increase the quality of extensions/modules (4 things Developers must know to sell Magento 2 extensions via the Marketplace).

How much do modules cost?

Module pricing has steeply increased with Magento 2. The quality of modules varies widely and this should be taken into account as well. That said, many modules range from $200-$400 per Magento instance.

Here’s what our process involves:

• Purchase the module.
• Download and install it on a developer’s local environment (a close replica of what your site looks like on the server).
• Review line-by-line the code of every file. We are looking for security vulnerabilities, sending data back to the developer’s website, creating unauthorized “back-doors” into your site for others to access information and more. This would also include patching those problems.
• Review that the basic advertised functionality exists.
• Upload to the staging site.
• Ensure that the module is installed and is working as expected.

Additionally, many clients want customizations to how the module behaves. This is charged on top of the module install fees.

What might be the lowest possible cost to install a vanilla Magento build?

$1,000 - $2,000. This is literally to begin renting a server at a host of your choosing (our recommendation is MageMojo), download Magento onto the server and install it.

There are some serious limitations to this approach:

• No code versioning: there are no code backups of this approach so you can go back in time and see what modifications were made, when and by whom. We use GitHub for this.
• Updating the site will likely result in minutes of downtime.
• If you do actual development on this machine, you will likely have more errors and downtime. This wouldn't be considered an option in a production environment.

The next step up is to setup a staging server. This allows you to test your code and then copy it to the production server. But how do you do that?

• Version control: there still will be quite a bit of downtime with Magento 2 as you pull down code updates and build it.
• Copy (scp): very error-prone, takes a lot of time to complete, likely downtime with the synchronization process.

At this point, the price goes up initially, but saves much money in the long-term. The solution we use is something we built in-house: automated code delivery to your server(s). This allows great reliability and speed when getting code to your website.

As such, we do not recommend this approach unless it is for a minimal, short-lived proof of concept.

Ongoing maintenance costs?

This is an area that is difficult to estimate. One might think that with a good developer, the monthly costs of maintenance will be $0. We have found that a good developer reduces maintenance, often by many times, but there will always be continued needs.

For example:

• Site patches: Magento is regularly coming out with patches and bug fixes (Magento 1 averaged 2-3 a year, while Magento 2 is often 1 a month). When installing the patch, the site needs to be tested to ensure that nothing has broken. Figure on an average of $100-150 a month.
• Ongoing education and training.
• Feature enhancements: many store owners like things customized to their preferences and usage. It could be small enhancements, or installing a module.
• Bug fixes: no matter how good a developer or how good the QA, there will always be bug fixes that are required.

There is no “average” with our customers. Some need little assistance with their site, and we primarily handle patches with their annual cost running about $1,000 or so. Others are continually innovating and tuning their website to higher revenue producing levels and pay $50,000+ a year.

How much should it cost to patch a Magento website?

Installing Magento patches can vary from a very quick update to a multiple-hour ordeal. Here are some complicating or mitigating factors:

• Do you have SSH access?
• Have there been core hacks made?
• Have there been local overrides made?
• Are you on an automated build system?
• What version of Magento are you running?

For reference, we charge $200-400 to apply most patches. This can go up in cases like SUPEE-9767 and SUPEE-8788 which were patches that required more work to apply.

What goes into applying the patch?

• Review: search for the patch on Mage StackExchange to see what problems others are having with applying the patch. Review the updates in the patch. Be careful as Magento, Inc. has had a bad track record with Magento 1 patches lately: they have released numerous “version 2” patches, doubling the time for updates.
• Database backup: unless the patch is extremely basic, we always backup the database.
• File backup: ensure that there are daily backups being run. This is a favor to clients as a server outage could result in major loss otherwise.
• Applying the patch: actually apply the patch and resolve any problems that come up along the way.
• Test the website: run through the checkout process (add to cart to the “thank you for your order page”). Ensure that customers can register, that you can reset a forgotten password and that your contact forms still work.
• Please note: the above steps should be first completed on your staging / development website and THEN on your production website.

Why not just use an “off-the-shelf” theme for $100?

As you are aware, Magento is not WordPress. WordPress has “taken the cake” across the industry for a platform that is very modular. WordPress is a very different product targeted for a very different use. WordPress has thousands of themes available—whether they are quality or not would depend on the developer creating them.

Magento 2 also has quite a few themes available. It isn’t as many as WordPress. I can’t speak for all of their quality, but in general, themes for Magento tend to be very low quality. They often introduce bloat, which makes your website slower for your customers (read this article). They often don’t use correct coding standards. Many of them might not be compatible with the devices that your customers use. It often is difficult to extend and build on top of their CSS (the style sheets that make your website look nice).

That said, theme implementation accounts for the large share of building a website. There might be some developers who might be fine with installing a theme and calling it a day.

If you find a theme you like:

• Talk about it with your developer to get their thoughts.
• Ask them to do a code review on the theme to give you in-depth and informed feedback about the quality of the theme that you chose.
• Be prepared that it might not save you much in the long run. As your website grows, you likely will want to customize it and make it your own. Starting with a pre-built theme might not be the long-term best option.

How much does hosting cost?

Doing a search for “cheap Magento hosting” yields about 120,000 results. Searching instead for “expensive Magento hosting” yields 589,000 results. If there really are 700,000 options (which there are not), how do you know who to go with and how much it will cost?

If your website is slow, you will drive customers from your website. As you speed up your website (to a certain point), you should see your conversion rate go up and your bounce rate go down.

We have tried the $5/mo hosting plans an experiment. They barely worked without anyone visiting the website, let alone people actually visiting the site. Don’t go with this option.

MageMojo.com is our recommended hosting resource:

• They primarily host Magento, so they are very familiar with supporting this platform with its intricacies.
• They are lightning fast with website speed and support.
• Dedicated instances: you aren’t sharing with other websites that will slow down your website.
• Their support staff is knowledgable and friendly.
• Their servers are finely tuned to running Magento.
• Their admin panel is exactly what developers need.
• For free, they will migrate over your Magento store from another host onto their servers.

Their hosting plans start at $59 a month which is a bargain considering what that price level brings (this website is using Magento 2 and is hosted on the MageMojo Advanced plan (https://magemojo.com/magento/dedicated-hosting).

If you would like some other options, here are a few:

• Nexcess: they have some great Magento plans, but they are not “Magento-only”. Our experience is limited, but we haven’t had any problems.
• (Europe) Byte.nl: I have heard very good things about them. They host the famous website, MageReport.com, which has been a huge service to many people, giving information about whether or not their Magento website needs to be patched.

It is important to talk to the hosting company and make yourself comfortable with their people and their support agreements. After all, where your website is hosted is key in keeping your revenue coming in the door.

Summary:

• There is no “one-size-fits-all” price for Magento work.
• Every project is different.
• Comparing two agencies can be extremely difficult.
• See anything we missed? Have questions? Send us an email and we will answer your questions.