Adobe Commerce pricing: how much does it cost to create and run an Adobe Commerce (Magento) website?

It’s a challenge to accurately estimate the total cost of development and ownership of Adobe Commerce/Magento website as it depends on the features that you want to include, your hosting options, and the level of support that you want to have after deployment. Even your monthly revenue plays a role in Adobe Commerce pricing.

Even if you opt for Magento Open Source, the free version of the Adobe Commerce/Magento content management system, you will still have to pay. You might still hire an Adobe Commerce development partner or purchase Magento extensions to enhance your store’s functionality and appearance, deploy, and maintain your store. And if you opt for a paid edition of Adobe Commerce, you might be put off by the high Adobe licensing fees or the costs of enhancing your own infrastructure – even if it helps you save money in the long run.

To help you choose what suits you best and avoid overpaying for eCommerce website features that you will not use, we decipher Adobe Commerce pricing. This article explains what each Magento/Adobe Commerce edition includes, and gives an overview of the key factors contributing to the final costs.

To answer what Adobe Commerce is, let’s first go back to Magento, which is an open-source eCommerce platform released back in 2008. Later, this platform was upgraded to Magento 2.0. And in 2018, Adobe Inc. acquired Magento, officially renaming it to Adobe Commerce three years later. You can find more information on the benefits of Adobe Commerce on our blog.

Adobe Commerce/Magento offers three editions that you can choose from. Each one has a unique set of functionality and support system. The open-source (community) edition is free to use, while the other two require licensing fees.

Let’s find out what each edition has to offer and how much it will cost.

This edition is free to download and install. If you have a solid technical background, you could probably set up your store by yourself. But most likely you will need to hire a Magento development team to configure and maintain your website.

For user interface options, you can either explore pre-built themes, look into community theme options, such as ThemeForest, or hire a designer and front-end developers for a customized user experience.

Additionally, you will need to select your hosting option like GoDaddy or Bluehost and pay anything between $2.95 and $730 in monthly fees, depending on how much traffic your website gets.. Also, you will likely purchase extensions and third-party integrations, which will further increase the total costs. And don’t forget about security. For instance, the open-source Magento edition is not compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). To protect your customers’ credit card data, you will need to enhance website security at additional expenses.

We will explain the factors affecting the total costs in more detail in the next section.

Magento Open Source only allows you to work on a B2C basis. Here are some of the core features that your web store will get with this edition:

This edition enjoys strong community support. You can use freely available forums if you face technical difficulties during the development process. However, this approach can be too slow to resolve urgent matters. So, keep in mind whether you can afford to disable a particular feature or take your entire store down while you are looking for a solution to a technical problem.

Best suited for:

Small and mid-size B2C business owners.

This Adobe edition requires you to pay license fees depending on your annual gross merchandise value (GMV). Adobe Commerce is suitable for both B2C and B2B merchants. It’s a powerful platform that gives you access to more advanced features than Magento Open Source, such as:

In addition to the exclusive functionality, this edition makes you eligible for Adobe technical support and offers a more robust and secure environment than the Magento Open Source version.

Similarly to the open-source edition, Adobe Commerce is also self-hosted, so you’ll have to take care of the hosting yourself. If you have a server infrastructure, you can decide to host on premises. Otherwise, you can opt for hosting in the cloud.

Even though this is not a free version, you might still need to hire professional developers to further customize, enhance, and optimize your store for better performance.

Best suited for:

Medium-size and large businesses with more advanced needs and complex operations.

The main benefit of Adobe Commerce Cloud is that you don’t need to worry about hosting, as your store will be hosted on the provider’s cloud (either AWS or Microsoft Azure). The cloud vendor will back up your data and will restore it in the case of hard drive damage or anything like that. In return, you will pay higher licensing fees than for Adobe Commerce.

This edition offers all the advanced features of Adobe Commerce, in addition to some exclusive functionality that will enhance your web store’s appeal and performance, such as:

Best suited for:

Large retail businesses handling enormous amounts of sales who are looking to outsource hosting, security, maintenance, and performance monitoring.

As was mentioned earlier, Magento Open Source is free to use, while the other two editions are available for a license fee, which you pay once a year, and your expenditure will depend on the business’s gross merchandise value. You can find license costs approximation in the table below. Please note that these prices can change over time. For a more accurate estimation, refer to the official Adobe Commerce website.

Among the three Magento editions, only Adobe Commerce Cloud includes hosting. For the other two options, the store owner can either host the software on premises or find a suitable cloud vendor. If the business owner decides to host the eCommerce website on premises, they will need to acquire the hardware infrastructure and will be responsible for security and maintenance. A quality server can cost between $5,000 and $15,000. A reliable backup system will add around $2,000 to the total costs. You will also need to factor in software licensing expenses. If you are using Microsoft products, this will amount to approximately $1,500 per server.

If you choose the in-house hosting option, your hosting expenses will vary largely depending on infrastructure costs, technical experts who will set up and maintain software and hardware, and security-related certifications.

With a cloud vendor, you will not need to invest a large sum upfront, like it is the case with on-premises hosting. You will simply pay a monthly fee depending on the functionality, data storage requirements, and the selected provider. The cloud gives you the freedom to scale your operations when needed without having to upgrade your hardware or purchase additional servers.

To give an estimate, cloud hosting can cost you anywhere from $130 to $2,000 per month, depending on the number of products in stock and the overall site load.

Regardless of which Adobe/Magento version you decide to use, you will still need to acquire a domain name (the web address) for your store. You can either purchase a brand-new domain name for around $10 – $20 per year or renew an expired one for up to $60 per year. Premium domains can cost up to $400 – $500 annually.

Domain price will depend on additional factors, such as the last segment of your domain name and any other services, like long-term registration and certifications.

If you decide to renew an existing domain name, then you will already have a base to build upon. There might be existing backlinks to that domain that will enhance your visibility on Google search, and your store will be indexed faster than if you would’ve started to build your rankings from zero with the new domain.

SSL is a certificate that verifies your website’s identity and encrypts the data being transferred between the user and your website. SSL is crucial for your store’s security. It helps protect customers’ private data, such as login details and credit card information. Without this certificate, your visitors will get the dreaded “this site might not be secure” message when accessing your web store. And they are unlikely to come back after that.

Adobe Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud include this certificate in their offering by default. If you select the Magento community version, you will need to take care of this yourself. And should you opt for a cloud hosting vendor, you might also get SSL certification covered in your hosting package.

An SSL certificate can cost you anywhere between $50–$600 in annual payment on average. Some premium options can cost as much as $1,000 per year.

When considering your web store design, there are several options to choose from:

To explore the last option in more detail, it will cost you at least $5,000 to design a custom Magento theme. The final price will depend on the UI/UX requirements, whether it needs to be mobile-friendly, and other parameters.

While setting up your store, you will incur development costs on various aspects, such as:

You can either maintain an in-house team of developers, or you can hire a dedicated development team to implement your store and offer maintenance and support in the future. One in-house developer will cost you $60,000-$120,000 in annual expenses depending on their experience and skill level.

If you opt for a dedicated team of Magento developers, you can expect to pay an hourly rate of $50-$80 for Europe, and around $100 or higher in the US, depending on the developer’s skills. One advantage of choosing this option is flexibility. You can start with a smaller number of billable hours and increase them with a heavier workload, and you don’t have to bear recruitment costs.

While calculating the total Magento pricing, you need to consider the sum you will pay for different extensions and integrations that will enhance your store’s functionality. For example, you might want to add advanced store search, better customer support options, or social media integration, especially if you are using Magento Open Source. The other two Adobe editions offer a better variety of built-in features, and you won’t need to rely on add-ons that much.

You can find some ready-made extensions and integrations on the Magento marketplace, and they will cost you from $0 to $10,000 with a few pricier exceptions. Another option is to get third-party extensions that will probably be available for a subscription fee. Or you can benefit from custom eCommerce development for more intricate extensions. And this will cost you at least $6,000 per one custom add-on.

Regardless of which Adobe edition you selected, you will still need to cover transaction fees if you want your customers to be able to pay online on your web store. Typically, these fees vary between 2% and 4% of the transaction’s original value. This amount covers credit card processing fees and payment platform fees.

Some popular eCommerce payment solutions, such as PayPal and Stripe, are easy to integrate and they don’t charge any setup costs, but their transaction processing fees start at 2.9%.

All three Magento editions include search engine optimization functionality and support marketing campaigns to some degree. Magento Open Source only includes the basic features while the other two editions offer more advanced capabilities.

You will still need to hire a marketing professional for a comprehensive SEO audit and website optimization consultation. This will take around 20-40 working hours, depending on the store’s complexity. During this time, the expert will identify existing issues and propose an optimization strategy. A SEO expert’s hourly rate is around $15-$35.

And if you are using Adobe Open Source, you might want to acquire advanced SEO add-ons to execute the strategies that the marketing professional put forward to enhance your store’s searchability and performance on Google.

Adobe Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud offer advanced business intelligence dashboards and AI capabilities. One such offering is Adobe Sensei, a powerful AI tool that can equip your store with useful functionality, such as:

You can find some inspiring examples of how AI and ML can benefit eCommerce on our blog.

Research shows that customers will spend 40% more time shopping on your website if their experience is personalized, which is a strong incentive to invest in AI. Even if you opt for one of the two Adobe Commerce editions, you will still need to pay for AI-related development and configuration costs.

If you decide to go with Magento Open Source, which doesn’t include any AI capabilities, you might want to still consider hiring AI developers to implement this functionality. Keep in mind that this is a pricey endeavor. Building an intelligent recommendation engine can easily cost you $20,000-$35,000. For more information, check out our article on the factors associated with AI costs.

Another factor affecting Adobe Commerce pricing is ongoing store maintenance, which includes routine code audits to discover and eliminate any bugs, performance optimization, certification and licensing renewal, new feature implementation, migration between platforms, and addressing security vulnerabilities.

The total price of maintenance will vary depending on the type of support and your Magento edition. Both Adobe Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud have technical support included in the license costs, while Adobe Commerce Cloud also offers server-side maintenance, updates, and security patches. However, you still might need to pay for some maintenance-related aspects, like if you want to resolve technical issues promptly, add and configure new extensions, and develop custom functionality.

If you are using Magento Open Source, it is best to either keep a dedicated developer on the payroll or outsource IT support and maintenance to a Magento development company. The community edition will cost you the most in maintenance, averaging $7,500 per month purely to keep your store up and running.

An online marketplace owner enables users to pay for products and services in installments to improve their credit scores. The company relied on Magento 1.9 and experienced performance issues after Magento had terminated its official support for this version. Not to mention that the client used an outdated MySQL database to serve six million users.

The client wanted ITRex to help find a cost-effective solution for their struggling platform while preserving the existing business logic and customizations and take care of the migration to the new platform. Here is what we did:

The total costs of the migration and the supporting activities were estimated at around $100,000.

A US-based electric supplies wholesaler relied on a legacy eCommerce website that performed poorly and was expensive to maintain. This firm hired ITRex to recreate their legacy website on Adobe Commerce while maintaining the look and feel of the original store and seamlessly migrating all the original assets. Here is how we approached the challenge:

The total cost of this project was estimated around $150,000-$200,000.

To summarize, Magento pricing depends on the selected Magento/Adobe edition, hosting options, the degree of customization, the level of post-deployment support, and more. If you opt for Magento Open Source, you will not pay license fees, but you still need to factor in all the other expenses. The table below summarizes which expenses you need to consider while calculating the total Adobe Commerce pricing.

There is no one general answer to how much an eCommerce website costs.

Setting up a basic store using Magento Open Source, a few extensions, and a built-in theme will cost you $1,500-$5,000, assuming that you could set up the store by yourself. These numbers will go up if you hire a developer.

However, a large web store based on Adobe Commerce Cloud with a custom theme and ongoing support will cost around $200,000-$250,000 to set up. You will still have to make a monthly payment to cover licensing, subscriptions, etc. This can be a couple of thousands or tens of thousands, depending on your Adobe licensing plan and store features.

Drop us a line if you want to receive an accurate cost estimation for your eCommerce project.