Where’s the data from?
Three sources, in descending order of weight:
- ~200 store engagements I’ve done since 2017, mostly Magento, but ~60 of those involved evaluating Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, SFCC, or WooCommerce as alternatives. The license / app / dev / hosting numbers come from invoices clients have shared during discovery, anonymised and median-aggregated by GMV bracket.
- Public pricing pages + published case studies, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce Enterprise, Adobe Commerce, and SFCC all publish bracket-level pricing or have it leaked across enough vendor blogs to triangulate. The calculator’s license-tier brackets reflect those.
- SI partner rate sheets, both my own ($22, $75/hr) and the Tier-1 SI rates I’ve seen quoted to clients (Magento OS: $50, $200/hr; Adobe Commerce: $150, $300/hr; SFCC: $250, $400/hr). These set the dev-cost upper bound.
What’s NOT in the data:
- Internal Adobe / Shopify / Salesforce pricing decks (I don’t have these and wouldn’t use them, vendor-supplied numbers are biased).
- Industry-report averages (Forrester / Gartner), they bury variance and serve their sponsors.
- List prices for SFCC, SFCC pricing is opaque; I use the median of what clients have actually paid (~$200k/yr starter, scaling fast).
If you have invoice data and want to calibrate the model against your actual numbers, send it via the form, I’ll re-run.