When a custom Shopify app is cheaper than the one you're renting
Three apps at £400 a month is £14,400 a year, every year. Here is the break-even maths on building versus subscribing, and the cases where renting is still the right call.
Written by Alex Price
App subscriptions are the easiest cost in ecommerce to stop noticing. Each one is small, each one solved a real problem on the day you installed it, and none of them ever come up in a budget review. Then you add them up.
The maths, honestly
A focused custom app — one job, done properly — is usually somewhere between £4,000 and £12,000 to build, plus a small amount each year to keep it patched. Against a £400/month subscription, that's a payback of roughly ten months to two and a half years.
Which means the honest answer depends on three things:
- What you pay now, per month, for the thing you would replace.
- How long you expect to still be running this store in roughly this shape.
- Whether the app is close to what you need, or you have built a pile of workarounds around it.
When building genuinely wins
- You pay for tiers you do not use. Usage-based pricing that scales with orders means your app bill grows precisely when margin matters most.
- You are paying three apps to do one job. This is the most common one we see, and the total is usually a surprise.
- The workflow is actually yours. If your process is a genuine differentiator, renting someone else's version of it caps how good it can get.
- It touches the checkout. Plus checkout extensions and Functions are frequently cheaper to build than to rent, because the off-the-shelf versions are priced for enterprise.
When renting is obviously right
Plenty of the time, to be clear. Reviews, search, loyalty, helpdesk — these are deep products with teams behind them, and £29 a month for something that does 95% of what you need is a bargain. Nobody should build their own review platform.
Build the thing that is specifically yours. Rent the thing that everybody needs.
The cost people forget
Custom code is not free after launch. APIs change, Shopify deprecates things, and somebody has to care when it breaks at 3am. Budget for that — a small monthly for monitoring and maintenance — or you will have swapped a predictable subscription for an unpredictable emergency.
If you want a straight answer for your own stack, send us your app list and what you pay. We will tell you which ones are worth replacing and which ones to leave well alone, and there is no pitch attached to it.
