Stop renting
your store.
Custom ecommerce on Next.js and Stripe. Migrate off Shopify or BigCommerce, keep your rankings, kill the monthly bill. The same architecture we built for Angels Link and Paper Lake.
You are building
someone else’s business.
Every month you pay the platform fee. Every quarter the app stack gets heavier. A $299 bundle app, a $99 reviews app, a $149 subscriptions app, a $79 upsell app. A reasonable-sounding bill that never stops growing. And on the day you finally want to change your checkout flow, the answer is no, that lives inside Shopify and you cannot touch it.
You are not running a store. You are renting one. On someone else’s rails, at someone else’s price.
“Apps on this site used to be reasonable. You could justify $5 to $10 a month for a feature that Shopify should have provided for free. Last week I looked at an app that would just add a few options to sort collections and it was $299 a month.”
Shopify merchant, Shopify Community forums, June 2025
The average Shopify store spends around $120 a month on apps alone. Established stores run $200 to $500. Stores doing over a million a year report combined monthly platform, app, and transaction bills of $5,000 to $8,000. Source: Shopify App Store statistics, merchant community data, 2026.
Your platform fee is the most expensive line item nobody questions.
Five-year platform cost, AUD
Sources: Shopify Australia pricing page (April 2026), BigCommerce pricing plans 2026, BigCommerce Enterprise FAQ, converted to AUD at a flat 1.54 USD/AUD rate. Studio Slate figure is the $9,997 one-off custom build with no ongoing maintenance subscription. App stack and transaction fees not included in platform totals.
Platform fees compound like rent. Your build is a one-off.
A Shopify Plus store running five years pays more than two hundred grand just for the right to keep logging in. The same store, built once on Next.js and Stripe, costs less than five percent of that and is yours forever. No platform fee. No maintenance subscription. You pay $9,997 once, then the monthly bill stops.
The app stack is the second bill. Nobody talks about it.
A typical store running on Shopify pays $120 a month on apps on top of the platform fee. Established stores run $200 to $500. Every feature you added by subscription becomes a line in the rebuild, replaced with code you own, and disappears from the monthly invoice forever. Source: Shopify App Store statistics, 2026.
Transaction fees are the third bill.
If you are on Shopify and you use any processor that is not Shopify Payments, they take 0.5% to 2% of every sale on top of the card processing fee. On a store doing $500,000 a year, that is another $2,500 to $10,000 gone. Off-platform, Stripe charges Stripe’s fee and nothing else.
Stores we have already shipped off the rails.
Migration without ranking loss
Every product URL preserved. 301 redirects for anything that changes. Schema rebuilt, sitemap resubmitted on go-live day.
You own the database
Your Postgres, your GitHub, your Stripe, your domain. Standard open stack. No licensing, no lock-in, no surprise renewals.
Stripe checkout, no middleman
Direct to Stripe. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay, Zip. No platform skim on top of card processing fees.
One invoice. Then the monthly bill stops.
Less than three months of Shopify Plus. Less than two years of Shopify Advanced. Once. Then nothing. Every store includes the full migration, zero downtime switch, and 30 days post-launch support.
One-off. Delivered in 3 to 5 weeks. No monthly bill, ever.
- Full product, customer, and order migration
- Custom Next.js front-end, Stripe checkout
- 301 redirect map and SEO preservation
- Replace your paid Shopify or BigCommerce apps as native code
- Subscriptions, bundles, loyalty, multi-currency built in
- Xero or MYOB, 3PL, CRM integrations as needed
- Full code ownership, Vercel deploy, GitHub on day one
- Zero downtime switch and 30 days post-launch support
Need it sooner?
50% upfront, 50% on delivery. No required maintenance subscription. Express delivery starts the build the next business morning and ships in half the standard timeline.
A small studio. A short list. We do not take every migration.
Four steps.
Zero downtime.
Built Angels Link, an NDIS healthcare platform on a dual Next.js and Shopify architecture, and Paper Lake, an AI children’s books ecommerce store with full custom checkout. Knows the migration playbook and what breaks when you do it wrong.
Audit your current store
We log into your Shopify or BigCommerce admin with read access and map everything. Products, variants, customers, order history, every installed app, every custom checkout script, every theme hack, every metafield. You get a written migration plan before a single line of code is written.
Build alongside, not on top
The new store gets built on a staging domain while your current store keeps taking orders. You review real pages with real products in the first week. No Figma mockups that do not match the live site. Feedback in plain English, revisions by the end of the day.
Migrate your data
Full dry-run first. Products, customers, and order history exported through the platform API and loaded into your new Postgres database. Images mirrored to your S3 bucket. Subscriptions reconciled. 301 redirects generated for every changed URL. Nothing touches the live store until you sign off on the staging result.
Switch over, one DNS record
On launch day we re-run the data sync for the last 24 hours of orders, flip the DNS record, and the new store answers the next request. Zero downtime. Zero maintenance page. You cancel the old platform subscription the next morning and the bill stops for good.
The migration
anxiety list.
The store you actually own.
15 minutes. No pitch deck. Send us your current store URL and your last Shopify or BigCommerce invoice. We will tell you what the migration would look like and how fast the numbers start working in your favour.