Kamila Thompson Plenty of stores open on a SaaS website platform, because you get a working shop, a checkout and payments on day one without hiring anybody. Outgrowing one has nothing to do with how big you get. It happens when costs and limits start appearing on your bill. Checking these four signs gives you the figure and the list you need to decide whether staying is worth it.
Four signs you’ve outgrown your SaaS website platform
The four signs you’ve outgrown your SaaS website platform each show up in a different part of the business: your fees, your app bill, your other systems, and your customer records.
- Transaction fees. The platform takes a percentage of every order, which was a small amount at launch volume and is a larger one now, so the figure to look at is what it came to across last year.
- Apps doing the platform’s job. You pay monthly for add-ons handling bundles, trade pricing, subscriptions or stock, and together they cost more than the plan they sit on.
- Systems that will not talk to each other. Your accounting or stock system needs order data, the platform limits how much you can pull and how often, and somebody exports a spreadsheet every week instead.
- Customer records you can’t access. You can see customers in the dashboard, but getting a full list with order history into your email tool takes a support ticket or another paid app.
What your platform costs, and what to compare it to
Working out what your platform costs takes about 20 minutes with your billing records. Add up last year’s subscription, the transaction fees on every order, and every app you pay for to make the store do its job, then divide that total by your revenue for the same year. The percentage you get is what your store costs to run before stock, wages, or marketing.
Do the same calculation for the year you launched. If the percentage has climbed while the platform stayed the same, it’s taking a larger share from your larger business.
On owned software the shape of the cost is different. Hosting and plugins are fixed monthly and annual amounts, so they stay the same through a strong quarter and a slow one, and the percentage drops as revenue grows. Payment processing still takes its cut, because that is your card processor and not your platform.
Short-term fixes, and what they leave in place
Short-term fixes lower what you’re paying without changing the thing that produced the bill.
- Go through your app billing. Most stores are paying for add-ons nobody has opened in a year.
- Check whether a higher plan tier lowers your transaction rate. At enough volume the saving on fees covers the price difference. You’ll still pay a percentage, just a smaller one.
- Write down everything connected to your store. Accounting, stock, shipping, email. That list is what decides how much work a migration would be, so it is useful whether you go or stay.
Frequently asked questions
Where this leaves you
Work out your platform cost as a percentage of revenue for last year and for your launch year, and write down everything connected to your store. Those two things together tell you what the platform is costing you and what it would take to leave.
Nexcess runs managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting, where the store software is open source and yours. Nobody takes a percentage of your orders, nobody caps how often you can pull your own data, and moving elsewhere later stays your decision rather than ours.
We build open source too. LearnDash, Kadence, Give and The Events Calendar are ours, released under the same license as WordPress, so the people running your hosting maintain it, too.