YOUR STORE. YOUR SERVER. NO MONTHLY TAX.
A custom storefront built for your catalogue — the same shopfront your customers expect, without the platform fee, the app subscriptions, or anyone else holding your data. Open the demo and compare it to your current store.
Paid Shopify theme $200–$400This store: $0
demo.rivetcommerce.com — a real, working storefront, and the one you can have free. Run it through PageSpeed and compare it with your own.
See the admin side too
The storefront is only half of it. Leave your name and email and the login for the demo's admin panel — products, orders, content, the lot — lands in your inbox. Change whatever you like; it's a sandbox.
A theme on the Shopify store costs $200–$400 and gets you a look. This is a whole store, admin included — and it's yours free.
THIS STORE IS FREE. SOURCE CODE AND SETUP INCLUDED.
The store in the frame above, the admin behind it, and the time to set it up on your server. No licence fee, no subscription, no invoice.
Free
- The full source code of the demo store — storefront, checkout and admin
- Setup on your server, with your domain pointed at it
- Your name, logo and colours in place of the demo's
- A walkthrough of the admin so you can run it yourself
Still yours to pay
- Your own server and domain — the store's only running costs
- Changes beyond the demo (new features, a custom design, a migration) are quoted separately
| Paid Shopify theme | This store | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $200–$400, one-off | Free |
| What you get | A design for a store you still rent | The store itself — storefront, checkout, admin |
| Also required | A Shopify plan, from $29–$39 / month | A server and a domain |
| Setup | Yours to do, or a developer's hourly rate | Done for you, free |
| Source code | Liquid files, licensed for one store, run only on Shopify | All of it, yours to keep and change |
| Where it runs | Shopify's servers only | Any server you choose |
Why free?
This site is new, and I'd rather have real stores running on this than a price tag on it. If it works for you, a review or a link back helps me more than a fee would — appreciated, never required.
WE DIDN'T CHOOSE PLATFORMS BECAUSE THEY WERE BETTER
We chose them because custom was expensive. That was the right call at the time. It stopped being true, and almost nobody has updated the conclusion.
Custom was always the better build
Nobody argued otherwise. A store written for your business beat a template on speed, on flexibility, and on everything you could do next. It just cost more than most businesses could justify.
Platforms solved a real problem
They made a shop affordable and put it in reach of people who don't write code. That was genuine progress — I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The trade was control and speed in exchange for cost and accessibility.
The thing we traded for got cheap
AI changed what one developer can produce in a week. The work that made custom expensive — the scaffolding, the plumbing, the repetitive parts — is the work AI is genuinely good at. The cost argument that sent everyone to platforms has largely dissolved.
So the conclusion should change
If custom was always better and is no longer expensive, continuing to rent a platform is a habit rather than a decision. This isn't going back to the old way — the old way had no AI in it. It's the first version of this that was never possible before.
AI on its own doesn't build a store worth having — it produces plausible code with nobody accountable for it. A developer on their own is slow and expensive. The combination is what's new, and it's why I can hand you something custom for what a template used to cost.
WHAT YOU GET BY OWNING IT
Every one of these follows from the same fact: it’s your code on your server, not a tenancy on someone else’s.
Fast because nothing is bolted on
A typical hosted store loads a dozen third-party app scripts before its own code runs. Yours has none, because every feature is built into the store itself. That is where the speed score comes from — not from tuning, but from absence.
Your server, your data
The database, the orders and the customer records sit on infrastructure you own. No platform reads your sales figures, ranks you against other merchants, or changes the terms of access later.
No feature you can't have
On a hosted platform, whether something is possible depends on the plan you're on and whether an app exists. Here the answer is always yes — it's your codebase. Subscriptions, bundles, custom checkout logic, an internal tool: all buildable.
The running cost is a server bill
No plan tiers, no per-transaction cut, no app subscriptions stacking up month after month. You pay for hosting, and hosting for a store of this size is a small, flat, predictable number.
SEO you actually control
Server-rendered pages, real structured data, URLs you choose, and no theme fighting you over markup. Nothing is hidden behind a template you can't edit.
Start free, pay only for what's custom
The demo store and its setup cost nothing. Anything built beyond it is quoted like any store build — and either way, you stop paying rent on it afterwards.
EVERYTHING A STORE NEEDS. NONE OF IT RENTED.
The usual reason to stay on a platform is the fear of losing features. Here is what comes built in — no app subscriptions, no plan tier gating any of it.
Storefront
- Product & collection pages
- Search and filtering
- Cart & mini-cart
- Variants, options & swatches
- Related products
- Wishlist / saved items
Checkout & payments
- Stripe / PayPal checkout
- Express wallets
- Guest checkout
- Discount codes
- Tax & shipping rules
- Abandoned-cart recovery
Admin
- Product & inventory management
- Order management & fulfilment
- Customer records
- Content editing
- File & image library
- Role-based access
Growth
- Server-rendered SEO
- Structured data
- Sitemap & robots
- Analytics & funnels
- Email / Klaviyo integration
- Blog & landing pages
Anything not on this list is still buildable — that is the point of owning the code. On a platform, the same question ends at whether an app exists and what tier you are on.
SIDE BY SIDE
Compared on how each one works rather than on this month’s prices.
| Hosted platform | Your own store | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly platform fee | Plan tier, rises as you grow | None — you pay for hosting |
| Cut of each sale | Transaction fee unless you use their payments | None |
| Apps for missing features | Subscription each, stacking monthly | Built in, no recurring cost |
| Third-party scripts on every page | One per installed app | None |
| Who holds your data | The platform | You do |
| Features you can add | Whatever the plan and app store allow | Anything — it's your codebase |
| Time to launch | Days, from a template | Weeks, built for your catalogue |
| Who maintains it | The platform, included | You, or me on a retainer |
Platform pricing varies by region and billing period and changes over time, so the figures above are dated and linked to the source. What doesn't change is the shape: a platform charges a recurring fee plus a share of what you sell, and a server charges for the server.
WHAT IT COSTS TO KEEP RUNNING
Not what it costs to build — what it costs every month afterwards, for as long as the store exists.
On a platform
Shopify list prices, September 2026 ↗| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Extra per sale* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $39 | $29 | 2% |
| Grow | $105 | $79 | 1% |
| Advanced | $399 | $299 | 0.6% |
| Plus | from $2,300 | — | 0.2% |
*On top of normal card processing, charged when you don’t use their payments.
Also on the bill
- Your domain$15–20 / yearSame bill either way — it's here so both lists are complete.
- A theme$200–400 oncePaid themes on the theme store. Free ones exist; most stores that care how they look don't use them.
- Reviews app$15–50 / monthProduct reviews aren't built in.
- Email marketing$20–150+ / monthKlaviyo or similar, priced by list size — it grows with you.
- Upsells, bundles, subscriptions$20–100 / month eachEach is its own app with its own subscription.
- SEO / speed / redirects$20–30 / monthFixes for things a theme can't change.
- Changing anything the theme doesn't allow$50–150 / hourA Liquid developer, every time.
A typical Grow store with a reviews app, email, one upsell app and SEO: roughly $250–450 a month before card fees. Every month, for as long as the store exists.
On your own
- VPS / serverRuns the store, the database and the admin
- Your domainYearly, the same as you pay now
That's the whole list. No plan tier, no per-sale platform cut, no app subscriptions. You still pay your payment processor — everyone does, on any platform — but nobody takes a second cut on top for hosting the shop.
When a hosted platform is still the right answer
If you need to be selling next week, if nobody on your side will ever touch code, or if your business depends on a specific app ecosystem, a hosted platform is genuinely the better call and I'll say so. A custom build earns its keep when you're paying real money every month for things you don't use, or when the platform keeps telling you no.
THE QUESTIONS EVERYONE ASKS
Is the demo store really free? What's the catch?
Really free — the source code and the setup. The only costs are the ones you'd have anyway: your own server and domain. The reason is simple: this site is new and I want real stores running on this. If you're happy with it, a review or a link back helps; neither is a condition.
How is this different from a paid Shopify theme?
A paid theme costs $200–$400 and changes how a Shopify store looks — you still need a Shopify plan every month to have a store at all. This is the store itself: storefront, checkout and admin, running on a server you control, with the source code yours to keep.
Is this harder to run than Shopify?
Day to day, no — you get an admin panel for products, orders and content, the same as you'd expect. The difference is underneath: updates, backups and the server are your responsibility rather than a platform's. Most clients keep me on a small retainer for exactly that, which is still a fraction of a higher-tier plan.
What happens if I want to leave, or you disappear?
You have the code and the database. It's a standard stack any competent developer can pick up — that's deliberate. You are not locked to me any more than you'd want to be locked to a platform.
Can I still use Stripe, PayPal, Klaviyo, my ERP?
Yes. Those are integrations over documented APIs, not platform apps, and they work the same way. What you avoid is paying a monthly subscription to a middleman app that just forwards data between two services you already pay for.
Is it actually faster, or is that just marketing?
It's structural. A hosted store loads a third-party script for every installed app before its own code runs; a custom build has none to load. Open the demo and run it through PageSpeed yourself — that's a more useful answer than anything I could claim here.
What if I need more than the demo does?
The demo store and its setup stay free. Anything beyond it — a custom design, new features, moving your catalogue over from another platform — is quoted like any store build, after a conversation rather than off a price list.
Curious what yours would cost to stop renting?
Tell me what you sell and what you’re paying now. I’ll tell you honestly whether a custom build is worth it for you — including when it isn’t.
Start with the free store, or ask whether a custom build is worth it — a straight answer either way.