On paper, a custom-built website or a free engine looks like a saving: you pay for development once and use it. In reality, it is an iceberg of monthly costs that never appear in commercial proposals. Let's take the iceberg apart piece by piece.
The iceberg
Server, SSL, configuration, uptime monitoring. Cheap hosting will "go down" on Black Friday – exactly when traffic is most valuable.
The engine, libraries, PHP on the server – everything ages and accumulates vulnerabilities. Skip the updates, and sooner or later you get hacked, with redirects to casino sites and your pages dropping out of the Google index.
Every change – from a banner to a new form field – is a task for a developer paid by the hour. Small jobs of UAH 500–1,500 add up to thousands every month.
Nova Poshta updated its API, the payment provider changed its requirements, new rules came in for the software cash register (PRRO) – on a platform, the platform fixes it; on a custom build, you fix it at your own expense.
The website is down for a day while "we look for the problem". It never shows up on an invoice, yet it costs you orders, rankings and trust.
Fall out with the developer of your custom build, and you become a hostage: undocumented code, access in someone else's hands. Switching teams costs as much as half a new website.
Comparing the models
The main trap of a custom build is that its costs are permanent: the website demands money for as long as it exists. The "savings" at launch spread out into a constant ownership tax.
We'll break down your real maintenance costs for the year and show how the same task would look on a platform – with catalog migration and your SEO preserved.
📝 Calculate my cost of ownershipFree consultation. If your custom build is justified, we'll tell you so
