WooCommerce costs nothing to install, and the bill still arrives. Some of it is hosting. Most of it is the evening you spend testing an update on a staging copy before you dare run it on the shop that takes money. Here is twelve months on both sides, and the parts that follow you across.
Start with the honest part. WooCommerce is free and it means it. Their own pricing page says no monthly subscription and no revenue share, and both of those are true. Nobody bills you for the right to keep selling.
The money arrives sideways. Hosting is the first line, and their pricing page puts it at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, which is somewhere between $300 and $4,200 across a year. Then the marketplace. Extensions run $29 to $299 a year each by their own published range, and their recurring orders extension on its own is $279 for twelve months. Add two or three of those and you are paying platform money for software that was advertised as costing nothing.
The larger line never appears on an invoice at all. Their update documentation is unusually clear about what an update night involves: back up the wp-content folder and the database, restore that copy onto a staging site that matches production, test the whole set of updates together there, put the live shop into coming soon mode so nobody can check out halfway through, run the database update, then place a test order to confirm the checkout still works. Every step of that is good advice. It is also a Tuesday evening, and it comes back every time a plugin ships a release.
WooCommerce is cheap to buy and expensive to keep. Whether that trade still works comes down to how many evenings you have left to give it.
Where those hours actually go when one person runs a shop is counted in where the hour really goes for a small business.
MaShop removes the plugin tree and leaves you one application to deploy.
A comparison that lists only savings is an advertisement, so here is the other column. Hosting is yours on both sides. You still choose a provider, you still pay them every month, and when the site falls over at nine on a Friday it is still your phone that rings.
Your processor rate does not move either. Whatever percentage you hand over on an order today, you hand over the same percentage the day after you switch, because that is an agreement between you and them and no builder sits in the middle of it.
The migration itself is real work. A catalog has to come across, and old URLs have to redirect to the new ones or the search traffic you spent three years earning goes quiet inside a fortnight. Somebody also has to sit down and confirm that the tax and delivery rules match what you actually charge people, which is duller than it sounds and matters more. MaShop generates the shop from a description. It does not generate the decision about which of your nine hundred products still deserve to exist.
Describe what you sell and who you sell it to.
Get it built by AI from front to back.
Your shop goes live ready to take its first order today.
If WordPress is already working for you, nothing on this page is an argument to leave. A shop running quietly on a stack you understand, updated on a schedule somebody genuinely keeps, is a good position, and trading it for a rewrite buys you very little.
The marketplace is the strongest reason to stay, and it is not close. Whatever oddity your business has, wholesale tiers for trade customers or a delivery rule that applies to one island and nowhere else, somebody has probably already written it and put it on their marketplace somewhere inside that $29 to $299 band. MaShop generates commerce logic from a description, which covers a great deal of ground, and it is not going to out-cover fifteen years of a marketplace on sheer breadth of the strange.
And if your team writes PHP, moving to a JavaScript codebase is a cost. Count it honestly before you file it under savings.
Plenty of people land here from the opposite direction, weighing a hosted platform rather than a self hosted one. That version of the arithmetic, with plan tiers and per order fees in it, sits on what a hosted platform costs across a year.
If you are earlier than that and still working out what one of these tools is supposed to hand you at the end, what an ecommerce website builder actually generates is the better place to start.
The credit model behind our own figures, including what a single build tends to consume, is broken down on how the credits are counted.
Built around what AI costs not what your shop earns.
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Includes:
For people running a commerce app full-time.
Includes:
Built for agencies and high-volume teams.
Includes:
The software is, and there is no catch in that sentence. Their pricing page states no monthly subscription and no revenue share. What costs money is everything around it: hosting, which their own pricing puts at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, and marketplace extensions at $29 to $299 a year each.
Renewals and update nights. You describe the shop and the commerce logic is generated with it, so recurring orders or a booking calendar are part of the application rather than a licence you renew every twelve months. Hosting is not a saving. That line stays roughly where it was.
No. A MaShop shop is a JavaScript application rather than a WordPress install, so nothing from the plugin directory carries over. What each plugin was doing has to be described instead of installed. That is the trade, and it is much better to know it now than three days into a migration.
Yes. The generated shop deploys to your hosting account and reads your own database, and both of those bills are yours. That is deliberate, and it is also why the hosting row in the table above is the one line that does not move when you switch.
Their documentation asks for a backup of the wp-content folder and the database, a staging copy that matches your production setup, a test of the full set of updates together on it, coming soon mode on the live site during the update, and a backup in place before you run the database update. Those steps come from their own update documentation, read on 3 August 2026.
You bring your product data or describe the catalog, and the shop is built around it. Expect the same tidying any migration needs: images, descriptions and the redirects from your old URLs. The products come with you, the platform underneath them changes.
One prompt, and MaShop builds the catalog, the checkout, the orders and the back office around what you sell.