What actually drives the cost of a webshop, template or custom

We recently had a client ask why one quote for a webshop was three times another, for what looked like the same list of features. The honest answer is that most people compare the wrong numbers. Here are the assumptions that trip people up most often.

Myth: a template is the cheap option and custom is the expensive one

People see a theme for 50 to 300 euros and compare that to a bespoke quote that's ten times higher, and the decision looks obvious. But that licence fee is a small fraction of what a template shop actually costs over time.

The real spend is in the apps and plugins you add to make the template do what your business needs: stock syncing, a proper B2B pricing tier, a translation add-on, a workaround because the checkout can't handle your delivery rules. Add up those monthly subscriptions and the developer hours spent bending a template to fit, over two or three years, and it often lands close to or above what a bespoke build would have cost, while you're still boxed in by what the template allows.

Myth: custom means building everything from scratch

This is the one that scares people off bespoke builds. They picture a team reinventing the checkout, the payment flow, the cart logic and the admin panel from zero, and assume that's why it costs more.

That's not how a good bespoke build works. We use proven, tested building blocks for the common parts: Stripe or Mollie for payments, established libraries for cart and inventory logic, a solid backend for the admin side. What's actually custom is the small number of things that matter specifically to your business: a configurator, wholesale pricing rules, a connection to your ERP, a checkout flow that matches how your customers actually order. That's what you're paying for, not a shop built twice.

Myth: a bigger budget means more customers

It's tempting to assume price and result move together, that spending more automatically means selling more. Cost tracks complexity and scope, not sales.

A shop with forty products in one language doesn't need the same investment as one selling to twelve countries with wholesale pricing and stock spread across three warehouses. Building for a size you don't have yet wastes money. Building too small for growth that's already happening costs you sales through slow pages and a clunky checkout. The right price is the one that fits your business as it actually is, with some room to grow, not whatever number sounds impressively thorough.

Myth: you can start on a template and switch to custom later for free

The plan sounds sensible: start cheap, prove the concept, upgrade once you're bigger. But migrating an established shop has real costs of its own.

You have to export product data, rebuild the URL structure without tanking your search rankings, reconnect payment and logistics integrations, and often redesign around a completely different system. If you already know that in a year or two you'll need multiple warehouses, a B2B portal or pricing logic a template can't handle, it's usually cheaper overall to build the right foundation now, even a smaller version of it, than to pay for the same shop twice.