Cheapest way to run a production ecommerce backend

What a production ecommerce backend costs per month

The cheapest production ecommerce backend depends on whether you pay in money or in engineering time. A self-hosted open-source backend such as Medusa has no license or GMV fee, so the bill is mostly servers. Hosted platforms such as Shopify bundle hosting, but add plan fees, app subscriptions, and transaction fees. The examples below use list prices from each provider's own pricing page, as of October 2026, in USD, before payment processing fees.

What self-hosting Medusa requires

Medusa's general deployment guide lists what a production Medusa application needs:

• A PostgreSQL database for the application's data.
• A Redis database for the server session and the Redis-based infrastructure modules.
• The Medusa application deployed twice: once in server mode for API requests and the admin dashboard, and once in worker mode for scheduled jobs and subscribers.
• A hosting plan with at least 2GB of RAM.

The installation guide requires Node.js v22.22.0 or later (LTS versions only). Medusa's core is open source under the MIT license, so there is no license fee. Only the Enterprise Edition features, RBAC and SSO, need a commercial license.

Medusa self-hosted: two worked examples on DigitalOcean

Example A puts everything on one virtual server. Example B separates the server, worker, and databases, which is closer to the deployment guide's layout. Prices are from DigitalOcean Droplet pricing and DigitalOcean managed database pricing.

Neither example includes storefront hosting, email delivery, file storage, or a CDN. Example A has no failover: if the server goes down, the store goes down.

Medusa Cloud: what each plan includes

Medusa Cloud is the managed hosting platform for Medusa. Every plan has a 0% GMV platform fee and unlimited orders, products, and admin users.

Usage above each plan's included compute hours, data transfer, and storage is billed at the rates on the pricing page. Develop has no custom domains, so Launch is the realistic entry point for a live store.

Shopify and WooCommerce: worked examples

A subscription store on Shopify on the Grow plan pays $72/month billed monthly ($54 billed yearly). Add Recharge Starter at $99/month plus 1.49% + 19¢ per transaction, and Judge.me Awesome reviews at $15/month. That is $186/month in fixed fees before card processing. If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus.

WooCommerce is free to download and use. WooCommerce's own pricing page puts hosting at $25 to $350/month for most stores and extensions at $29 to $299/year each. A small example: Pressable Signature 1 at $250/year plus WooCommerce Subscriptions at $279/year is about $44/month.

The hidden costs of self-hosting

The server bill is the smallest part of self-hosting. These costs are real but vary by team, so treat them as variables in your own estimate:

• Engineer time for setup, deployment pipelines, and environment configuration.
• Backups and restore testing for PostgreSQL, beyond Droplet snapshots.
• Monitoring, logging, and alerting.
• Security patches for the OS, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis.
• Medusa version upgrades and database migrations.
• On-call coverage when the store breaks during a sale.
• Scaling work when traffic grows past one server.

Medusa Cloud's Launch and Scale plans cover backups, monitoring, autoscaling, and zero-downtime deployments, which is where most of this time goes.

When a self-hosted Medusa backend is not the cheapest option

• You have no developer. Shopify Basic or WooCommerce on managed hosting costs less than paying someone to run servers.
• You sell a few products with no custom logic. A hosted plan's fixed fee is lower than the engineering time self-hosting needs.
• You can't staff on-call. A managed platform, including Medusa Cloud, moves outages to the provider.