How much an online shop costs in Bulgaria in 2026

The four ways to build a shop

Each option makes sense depending on your budget and skills. The difference is not so much the upfront price as how much you carry yourself afterwards.

What the ready-made platforms cost

The advertised monthly price is rarely the whole bill, so the table compares at the same load: a shop with roughly 5,000-10,000 email contacts. That matters, because some platforms advertise a low base price and bill email, the Conversions API or an extra language separately.

When you read a row, look at two things besides the number: whether there is a commission on sales, and what sits outside the subscription. A commission ties the bill to your turnover rather than to your plan, and the features left out show up in the month you need them.

What you pay once and what you pay monthly

Comparing quotes is hard because the numbers are not the same kind of thing. An agency gives you a one-off build price, a platform gives you a monthly subscription, and open-source looks free until you count the hosting and the time. The first useful step is to split every quote in two: what you pay once, and what you will keep paying every month for as long as the shop runs.

The one-off part is the build, migrating the catalogue and the photography. The monthly part is hosting, the domain, the certificate, maintenance, paid plugins and anything that renews. A one-off bill hurts once; a monthly one multiplies by twelve, and it is the monthly one that decides whether the shop is worth it in year two.

So compare over twelve months, not at the starting line. A low upfront price with high monthly upkeep often costs more than the reverse within the first year alone, and the difference only shows when you add both together.

The hidden costs

Hidden costs are not hidden maliciously - they simply are not in the quote, because they appear after it. On a custom or open-source shop they are the certificate, paid plugins for things you assumed were standard, and the maintenance you only think about when something stops. On a commission-based platform the hidden part is different: the bill grows exactly when the shop starts working.

The practical test is to walk the list of what your shop will actually do and ask about each item separately, whether it is included. A second language. A courier integration. Cash-on-delivery reconciliation. The Meta Conversions API. Transactional email from your own domain. Backups. Every "that is extra" in the answer is a line in the monthly bill.

The most commonly forgotten cost is not software. Your time has a price, and on a DIY shop it is the main one: the hours spent configuring, on updates that break something, and on working out why checkout is behaving oddly. If that adds up to a day of work a week, count it - it usually exceeds the difference in subscription price.

What drives the bill up

The number of products is almost never the reason. A catalogue of fifty or five hundred items costs the same on most platforms - the difference is your time uploading them, not the price. What genuinely moves the bill is the number of things the shop has to DO: a second language, a second currency, B2B pricing, subscription products, a warehouse integration.

The second reason is email. Most platforms do not include a newsletter and it is billed separately per contact, and that price grows precisely with your success - a list of ten thousand contacts costs many times what a list of one thousand does. If you intend to send a newsletter, ask for the price at the list size you expect in a year, not at today's.

The third is the percentage. A commission on sales and a per-transaction fee do not look like much at low turnover and become your largest software cost in a good month. This is also the only place where more success makes the decision more expensive - which is why it is worth calculating in advance, at the turnover you hope to reach.

Which one pays off for your business

For most small and mid-sized shops a ready-made platform pays off fastest - you launch in days, not months, and the price is predictable. An agency or freelancer makes sense for non-standard requirements a ready-made solution genuinely cannot cover. Open-source is for a team with a developer who can take on the hosting, updates and security.

The number to compare on is not the price of the shop, it is the price of an order. Divide the monthly bill by the number of orders you realistically expect. At twenty orders a month the difference between two subscriptions is pennies per order and should not decide anything; at two hundred, a commission is already your biggest cost after stock.

And remember the decision is not final. A shop that started on a ready platform can move later if the business genuinely outgrows it - the catalogue exports and the addresses redirect. The reverse, six months of development before the first order, is a decision you cannot undo, because the time does not come back.