Shopify or your own checkout: where it actually flips

For digital products, the fees never favour a hosted store. On Shopify's current Netherlands pricing, Basic costs €21 a month billed yearly plus 1.9% + €0.25 per sale, against roughly €1 a month and 1.5% + €0.25 on your own checkout. The gap runs from about €21 a month at ten sales to about €40 at 250 — and it never closes.

Which is the useful finding, because it means fees are the wrong thing to decide this on.

Shopify is an affiliate link on this site. The conclusion below is partly in its favour, so the numbers are shown in full rather than summarised. Both pricing pages were checked on 3 October 2026.

What does each side actually cost?

The last two rows are the whole article. The rest is noise at the volume most people are actually at.

Where does the arithmetic flip?

It does not. That is the point.

Monthly cost of selling a €20 digital product, Shopify Basic billed yearly against your own checkout on standard European cards:

There is no crossover point, because the subscription is fixed and the card rate is also higher. Shopify starts €20 a month behind before a single sale, and falls further behind as you grow.

This is the opposite of the usual "platforms are cheap until you get big" story, and it is specific to digital products. The reason is that a hosted store's subscription buys you inventory management, shipping rates, tax tables and a warehouse of apps — none of which a file download uses.

So why would anyone pay it?

Because €24 a month is not the number that matters.

Call it fifteen hours to build a checkout, a protected file store and a delivery email, and then a few hours a year when something breaks or a dependency changes. At a €24 monthly gap, those fifteen hours pay back in roughly fifteen months — and only if nothing ever goes wrong.

Value your time at anything realistic and the payback is longer than most products survive.

What you actually buy with a subscription is: the thing works on the morning you launch, somebody else is on call when a payment fails at 2am, and you did not spend your first three evenings on plumbing instead of on the product. For a first product, that is usually worth more than €21 a month.

What you give up is the customer relationship being yours by default, and a dependency you cannot price three years ahead.

What is the trap on the Shopify side?

Using your own payment provider inside Shopify.

On a €20 sale, that 2% is €0.40 — on top of whatever your provider already charges. It more than doubles the cost of the payment itself, and it exists to make leaving the built-in payments expensive.

So "Shopify, but with my own Stripe account" is the worst of both: you pay the subscription, the surcharge, and your provider's rate. If you are on a hosted store, use its payments. If you want your own provider, do not be on a hosted store.

What about the VAT?

This is the part that changes the answer more than the fees do.

On your own checkout, EU VAT is yours: VAT-inclusive prices, the buyer's country rate once cross-border sales pass the €10,000 annual threshold, and filing through OSS. On a platform that acts as the seller of record, that paperwork is theirs.

Shopify is a store platform rather than a seller of record, so it gives you tools for this rather than taking the job off you. That is worth knowing before you pick it specifically to avoid tax admin — it is not what it does. What taking your first payment online actually costs goes through where the money in a single sale actually goes, and how to sell a digital product without a platform covers the paperwork you take on when nobody is doing it for you.

When is a hosted store clearly right?

When any of these is true:

• You sell physical things. Inventory, variants, shipping zones and returns are an enormous amount of software, and the subscription is cheap against building any of it.
• You want it live this week. The honest comparison is not €21 against €1; it is €21 against three evenings you have not got.
• You would rather not own a codebase. A checkout you built is a checkout you maintain. Some people find that fine and some find it a background worry that never quite goes away. Know which you are.
• You are testing whether anyone wants the thing at all. Build the cheap version of the shop and the expensive version of the product, not the other way round.

When is your own checkout clearly right?

• You sell files, and only files. The whole inventory and shipping half of a store platform is dead weight.
• You will sell the same person a second thing. Owning the email address is the entire argument, and it is worth more than the €24.
• You already have the pieces. If you run a site on static hosting with a working build, the checkout is a day, not a project.

For what it is worth: the shop on this site is the second kind, because nine products to the same audience makes the mailing list the asset. That is a reason specific to this situation, not a general verdict.

Where these numbers came from

Shopify's Netherlands pricing page and Stripe's Netherlands pricing page, both checked 3 October 2026. The €20 figure is the price of the playbooks on this site. Monthly totals use Shopify Basic billed yearly at €21 and standard European cards on both sides, which is the most favourable realistic comparison for Shopify.

Plan prices change. The structure does not: a fixed subscription plus a slightly higher card rate, against near-zero fixed cost plus work you do yourself.

If you are deciding what to sell rather than where to sell it, The Digital Products Playbook is the one that covers this end.