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Comment by sova | Hacker News Reader

Shopify is so expensive and for a small-time shop hosting and paying the shop fee eat up your first 2-10 sales easily, where is the free platform that only charges per sale?

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Wordpress + WooCommerce

You can say all you want about bad the platform is, but the fact of the matter is that you can setup and start selling on a proven platform for almost nothing.

I would say not. You have hosting and you have to deal with maintenance, security and backups. Your Shopify fees cover that and the payment processing fees are comparable.

Unless there is some feature that WooCommerce can throw in for free that would require paying a Shopify developer an ongoing fee (wishlist functionality is probably one) your monthly fees are going to be similar.

Square's online store is probably the best for being able to sell without paying a platform fee for most features. But it is much less feature rich than Shopify.

Take a look at Reaction Commerce[0]. They are pitching themselves as an open-source Shopify competitor which you can host on your servers.

[0]https://www.reactioncommerce.com/

From their docs “Reaction is built with JavaScript (ES6), Meteor, Node.js and works nicely with Docker.”

Is Meteor still being actively developed?

Yes, it appears so:

https://github.com/meteor/meteor

looks like they're a monorepo now:

https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/devel/packages

but its slow going, from the looks of it perhaps.

I think the meteor community is a shell of what it used to be, though.

I wonder how Smile Software is handling it, they were 'all in' on meteor when they announced their subscription pricing model.

Will your business be viable if you can't even afford Shopify?

Have you heard of economies of scale?

Have you heard of homeless people?

Yes, there are many Rough Sleepers 'round these parts.

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