What a Magento store actually costs to run
Nobody hands you the full bill in one place. Licence, hosting, extensions, integrations and the maintenance nobody budgets for, and which of them is usually the biggest.
"What does a Magento store cost to run?" is the question I get asked most often, and the honest first answer is that nobody will hand you the full bill in one place. The pieces sit with different suppliers, get invoiced on different cycles, and several of them are not invoiced at all.
Here is the whole list, roughly in the order people underestimate it.
The licence, if you are on Commerce
Open Source has none. Adobe Commerce does, it is banded on revenue, it is per installation, and it is negotiated. Anybody quoting you a single figure is describing one band of one contract. Get your own number.
It is also the line people fixate on while the others quietly cost more.
Hosting, and the part of it that is not hosting
The server bill is easy to find. What sits next to it is less visible: the search cluster, the cache layer, the queue workers, the CDN, the staging environments, the backups you hope you never restore.
Magento is not a cheap application to run well. An underprovisioned stack does not fail loudly, it just gets slower under load, which is the most expensive way for infrastructure to be wrong.
Extensions, plus the tax they charge later
A licence per extension per year is the visible cost. The real one arrives at upgrade time. Every third-party module is a thing that might not be compatible with the next platform version, and the more of them you have, the more of your upgrade budget goes on waiting for other people to release a patch.
Count them. Then ask which ones you would genuinely miss.
Integrations, which nobody budgets as a running cost
The ERP link, the PIM sync, the payment provider, the carrier, the accounting export. Each was a project once and each is now a permanent maintenance commitment, because the other side changes on its own schedule and does not ask you first.
This is where a lot of unplanned developer time goes, and it almost never appears in anyone's cost model.
Maintenance, which is not optional
Security patches arrive on a schedule. Platform upgrades arrive whether you want them or not. Somebody has to apply them, test them, and deal with what breaks.
Skipping this does not save money, it defers it. A shop that has not been upgraded in three years is not cheaper to run. It is carrying a large bill with no date on it yet, and the bill grows.
How to get a real number
Add up twelve months of every line above, including the developer days spent on integrations and patching, then divide by orders. That figure is usually a surprise, and it is usually not the licence that caused it.
It is also the only version of this number that is worth comparing against anything.