I got the Adobe Commerce licence number wrong
I put a number on Adobe Commerce licensing in public. Two people who deal with those contracts weekly told me it was too high. Here is the better answer, and why the range is so wide.
In August I wrote that Adobe Commerce licensing runs to something like ten thousand euros a month, and used it to argue that a lot of merchants should look at Open Source instead.
It was the most read thing I have published. It was also, on the number itself, wrong. Two people who work with these contracts far more often than I do said so publicly, in the comments, with their names on it.
What they said
Ryan Hoerr of ParadoxLabs, one of the founders of Mage-OS, put it in the region of two to three thousand a month, scaling with revenue rather than sitting at a flat number.
Kostas Tsiapalis gave a different shape for the same thing: roughly twelve to twenty two thousand a year, per installation.
Zach Stein, an engineering manager on the merchant side, described renewing after negotiating, which is the detail that makes both of the above make sense.
I am paraphrasing all three from memory of the thread rather than quoting them. The correction stands either way, and it is theirs, not mine.
Why the range is so wide
Three things make a single figure close to meaningless.
The licence is banded on revenue. A merchant doing two million and one doing forty million are not being quoted the same thing, so any single number is only true for one band.
It is per installation. If you run several storefronts as separate installations, you are having a different conversation than somebody running several store views on one.
It is negotiated. The number on the first quote is not the number people end up paying, particularly at renewal, and particularly if leaving is visibly on the table.
So when I quoted one figure as though it were the price, I was describing the top of a range as the middle of it. That is the kind of mistake that makes an argument feel stronger than it is.
The argument I actually wanted to make
Here is the part I still stand behind, stated properly.
The licence is rarely the interesting cost. The interesting question is whether you are using the thing you are paying for. Adobe Commerce earns its money on B2B contract pricing, company accounts, shared catalogs, advanced staging and the rest. Merchants who lean on those are usually getting value. Merchants who bought it because it was the safe choice, and who then run a fairly ordinary B2C catalog on it, are paying a real premium for features nobody in the building has opened.
That is a question you can answer without knowing anyone else's licence figure. Look at what your team actually touches in the admin. If the answer is products, orders and CMS pages, the platform is not the reason your shop works and you are free to price the alternative honestly.
What to do before your renewal
Get your own number. Not a benchmark, not a figure from a blog post, including this one. Your quote is the only figure that describes your situation.
List the Commerce-only features you genuinely use, and be strict. "We might use it next year" is not use.
Price the alternative properly, including the migration, the extensions you would replace, and the year of instability that follows any replatform. A migration that saves licence fees and costs you a peak season has not saved anything.
Then negotiate. Everyone who has been through it says the first number moves.
Why I am writing this down
The post did well precisely because people disagreed with it in public, which is worth more than a post nobody argues with. Quietly reusing a number after two credible people have corrected it is how you lose the benefit of that.
So: two to three thousand a month scaling with revenue, or twelve to twenty two thousand a year per installation, from people who see more of these contracts than I do. Not ten thousand a month. If your own quote says something different again, I would genuinely like to hear it.