Hidden costs to watch on each platform?
Both have surprise costs that don’t show up in the initial sales pitch.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud hidden costs:
- Revenue-share creep. SFCC pricing scales with GMV, every successful year increases license cost. Renewals at $1B GMV often surprise CFOs.
- Sandbox limits. SFCC sandboxes are quota-limited (development sandbox, staging, etc). Hitting limits means buying more environments at premium rates.
- Tier-1 SI lock-in. The certified-SI ecosystem is a small club; rate negotiations are limited. Switching SIs is expensive (knowledge transfer + certification).
- Cartridge upgrades. Salesforce platform upgrades sometimes break cartridge integrations; tier-1 SI fixes are billable.
- Einstein AI seat fees. Salesforce charges per-seat for Einstein features that started "free" in evaluations.
Adobe Commerce hidden costs:
- Hosting overruns at peak. Adobe Commerce Cloud auto-scales but the bill follows. Black Friday spikes can 2-3× a quarterly hosting bill.
- Extension dependency hell. Mid-market AC stores accumulate 30-60 third-party extensions. Upgrades become regression-test marathons. Budget $20k, $80k/yr for extension maintenance.
- Security patch lag. Adobe ships security patches monthly; if you don’t apply within 30 days, breach risk rises sharply. Patch-application is real ops work, $5k, $20k/patch with regression.
- Hyvä theme licensing. Hyvä is paid (~€1k/yr/store-view + per-developer fees). Often missed in initial budgets.
Both platforms cost more in year 2 than year 1, plan for it.