Cost to build a marketplace, and how to launch on a budget

Ask “what is the cost to build a marketplace?” and mostly agencies answer, with five- or six-figure budgets. Those figures are fair for custom development. If you want to launch a marketplace on a budget, they do not help. This article gives the cost of each way to build, the fees people forget, then three budgets calculated over twelve months, from testing a local idea to a platform doing €10,000 of sales a month. It is written by the Marketplace Factory team, which creates complete marketplaces from a single sentence.

Prices were read on official pages on 27 September 2026, then again on 10 October 2026: this version gives those of 10 October. They exclude VAT or sales tax unless stated; vendor by vendor, dated prices are in our comparison of marketplace software. Dollar prices are converted at the ECB reference rate of 25 September 2026 (€1 = $1.1403).

The short answer

In plain terms: a complete marketplace can open today for under $100 a month. Yet the subscription is only one line of the budget: what really drives it is what is left to build, and the fees that follow your sales.

Custom development: why $50,000 and up

Agencies and software vendors commonly put a marketplace built from scratch above $50,000, about €43,800, and enterprise projects into six figures in the first year, development and maintenance included.

Why so expensive? Because a marketplace is several pieces of software in one: a public site with search and a map, a buyer account, a seller space, a back office; roles and permissions (a seller must never see another seller’s requests); split payments with seller identity checks; dozens of emails; moderation. Then all of it has to be maintained.

Custom development makes sense once the model is proven and the need is truly unusual: complex pricing rules, integration with in-house software, high volumes. Before that, it means paying a lot for a hypothesis.

Subscription marketplace software

These are marketplaces ready to configure, hosted and updated by the vendor. On 10 October 2026, the plans that open a marketplace to the public started at about €130 to €175 a month, before usage fees; at Marketplace Factory, Launch costs €79 a month, or €790 billed yearly, online payments included, plus 2% of sales paid online (1.5% on Pro, 1% on Dedicated).

Three things to check before you compare. First, the billing period: a price “billed yearly” is paid upfront for twelve months, and the monthly price is often a third higher. Second, a test plan is not a live plan: the cheapest plans of several vendors are for building and testing, with no public marketplace. Third, limits: caps on sellers, listings or transactions, and usage beyond the allowance billed separately. Prices in this category change often: check each page on the day you choose. With Marketplace Factory, there is no transaction cap and no usage meter: the share applies only to sales paid online.

A CMS and a plugin: licence, hosting, time

The other route is installing software on your own hosting. On 10 October 2026, the licences ran from:

• a multi-vendor plugin for a CMS: a free core, then from about $150 a year for one site, more for split payments or several sites; hosting is not included;
• self-hosted marketplace software: from about $700 to $3,600 a year, or a one-off licence of a few thousand dollars, with the source code.

The licence is only the beginning. You need hosting, security updates, plugins that work together, and someone to look after it all. The real cost of this route is time: yours, or a contractor’s.

No-code and AI app builders: the low price and what it leaves out

General-purpose no-code tools and AI app builders are free to try, then sold by subscription, plus credits when traffic or prompts add up.

That price buys a tool to build with, not a marketplace. Everything that makes one is still to do: seller accounts and permissions, listing submission, moderation, the back office, and above all split payments. Collecting for several sellers, verifying them and paying them out is a separate integration, to build and then test. Each piece gets built prompt by prompt, in credits and hours. We break those pieces down in no-code marketplace builders and AI.

The costs people forget

The subscription is easy to compare. The rest, much less so. Here are the lines to add, with orders of magnitude for a platform whose Stripe account is in the euro area:

Payment fees do not depend on your software: they are Stripe’s, based on where your platform’s account is and the account model you use. In the budgets below we count them separately, identical for everyone.

Three twelve-month budgets, calculated

Budget A: test a local idea, no online payments

Assumptions: one city, one trade, around fifty requests a month, confirmed by sellers and paid offline. An address provided by the software is enough.

Budget B: launch with payments, €5,000 of sales a month

Assumptions: 100 transactions a month with a €50 average, so €5,000 of monthly sales, 20 active sellers paid weekly, a 15% commission, so €750 of gross commission a month. Marketplace Factory Launch runs on a .marketplacefactory.app address, Pro on your own domain; the subscription includes online payments, hosting and updates, and our share of sales comes on top.

Budget C: grow, €10,000 of sales a month

Same assumptions, with 200 transactions and 30 active sellers, so €10,000 of sales and €1,500 of gross commission a month.

At Marketplace Factory, the share applies only to sales paid online: while you sell little, you pay little, and nothing is due on requests or on what is settled offline. As sales grow, the rate falls with the plan: Pro becomes cheaper than Launch above €24,000 of online sales a month, and the Dedicated rate is renegotiated for large volumes. What the subscription includes: six finished proposals from one sentence, the complete marketplace for your trade with its real flow, online payments from the Launch plan, and not a line of code to write or maintain. The Stripe figures assume standard European cards; premium or foreign cards raise them.

The same €10,000 month from a US or UK Stripe account

Payment fees change more between countries than software prices do. Here is the Stripe line of Budget C at €10,000 a month, same volumes, same 120 weekly payouts, in each account’s own currency:

If you build in the US, your commission has to cover fees that are roughly 1.7 points higher than in Europe, before any software cost.

Building a marketplace on a budget: seven rules

1. Start in request mode. The seller confirms, the customer pays in person. No payment fees, no identity checks to organise, no payouts to manage.
2. One city, one trade. Ten active sellers in one neighbourhood beat a hundred idle ones across a country.
3. No mobile app at first. A site that works well on a phone is enough to prove the market.
4. No custom build before proof. The first months teach you what customers really want; ready-made software is easier to change than development paid in advance.
5. Pay monthly while you test, yearly once it works. You keep the freedom to stop, then save once you are sure.
6. Compare at your real volume. A share of sales costs little while you sell little, whereas a fixed plan costs the same in a quiet month: compare twelve months at the volume you expect, payment fees included.
7. Keep your data. Before choosing, check that you can export users, listings and transactions, and that the Stripe account is in your name.

To place these choices in the whole project, our guide on how to build a marketplace puts them in order, and our turnkey marketplace checklist says what a price must include before you compare it. To compare tools on more than price, see our comparison of marketplace software.

What Marketplace Factory costs, plainly

Our share applies to sales paid online, excluding delivery, net of refunds; nothing on requests or on what you collect offline. It is invoiced monthly, separately from the subscription. Billed yearly, Launch and Pro come with two months free; Dedicated has no discount. Not included: Stripe’s fees, charged to your account; buying the domain name; AI credits beyond those included; legal advice. Admins, volumes and add-ons are detailed on the pricing page; custom work is reserved for customers committed for a year, on yearly Pro or Dedicated.

During the beta, you try everything without paying a thing: payments run in test mode. The source code is sold separately, for a single marketplace, at the price of thirty-six months of Dedicated paid upfront.

What Marketplace Factory changes to your budget: the complete marketplace for your trade, with no development to pay for or maintain, for €79 a month excluding VAT and a share that only grows with your online sales.