Store implementation is a one-time cost. Maintenance is an ongoing cost – and one of the most frequently overlooked in e-commerce budget planning. Business owners who focus exclusively on implementation cost are often surprised by what appears on invoices in subsequent years.
What makes up the annual maintenance budget
Hosting: for a Magento 2 store with tens of thousands of products and several thousand sessions per day, a dedicated server or VPS with at least 8 GB RAM, SSD and adequate CPU is needed. Cost: 500-2,000 PLN per month depending on provider and specification.
Third-party module licences: many modules have a subscription model or require annual renewal. This can be 5-20 modules at 50-300 USD per year each. Magento and module updates: several times a year security updates appear that require deployment and testing – 4-16 hours of developer time each.
Monitoring and backups: daily database and file backups, availability monitoring, performance monitoring. Some of this can be automated, but someone has to configure and oversee it.
Typical annual costs
Small store (up to 5,000 products, a few hundred orders per month): 20,000 – 40,000 PLN per year including hosting. Medium store (10,000-50,000 products, a few thousand orders): 40,000 – 100,000 PLN. Large store with integrations and its own team: 150,000 PLN and above.
Where it is not worth cutting costs
Hosting – cheap hosting means a slow store and higher downtime risk. Security updates – every skipped update is growing risk. Backups – no backup is not a saving, it is roulette.
If any of the signals described sound familiar, it is worth analysing before the problem grows. I offer a free initial consultation – write to biuro@tews.pl or visit tews.pl.
