Free site check Shopify is a subscription. This is a shop you own. Temper. sells chocolate from it — 15 products, a cart, checkout, and an editor for the prices — on Cloudflare's free plan.
The shop is a working demo, not a client. The code, the editor, and the hosting are the same ones a client store gets. Only the payments are in test mode.
A small shop should be able to change a price without asking anyone. Most hosted platforms let it, until it needs something the theme does not do. Then the answer is an app, a developer, or waiting for the next release.
The subscription is the easy part to see. The harder part is what happens over a year: the product page needs a field the template cannot show, the cart needs a rule the plugin does not have, and the owner starts working around the software instead of running the shop. By the time the bill is the main complaint, the site no longer matches the business.
01
The front page sells this week's batch: a photograph of the chocolate, the next drop, and the shop's own words. Products, collections, and the free-shipping threshold are all content, so the front page changes when the shop does. There is no page builder to learn and no theme settings screen to get lost in.
02
Orders, payments, stock, and refunds sit in one dashboard. Each order shows what was paid, what still needs packing, and what failed. Stock is reserved in the database while someone checks out, so the last box cannot be sold twice.
03
This is the screen behind every price in the shop. Price in cents, stock on hand, variants when a product has them. Type 795, press publish, and the product page shows 7.95. The shop owner never opens a code editor, and does not wait for me to be awake.
Everything sits in accounts you own: the domain, the Cloudflare account, the Sanity project, and the database that holds the orders. The code is in a repository you control. If we stop working together the shop keeps taking orders, and another developer can pick it up without a migration.
The shop is yours from day one. If you want someone on call for the rest of it, the care plan is $40 a month for up to 30 minutes of changes or help.
Thinking about selling online? Send me your site and I will tell you what it would take.