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, ours and everyone else’s, were read on official pages on 27 September 2026. They exclude VAT or sales tax unless stated. 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

Juho Makkonen, co-founder of Sharetribe, writes in his article on the cost of starting a marketplace business (updated 18 September 2026) that building a marketplace from scratch is “typically north of $50,000”, about €43,800. For enterprise projects, French vendor Origami gives much higher figures in its article on marketplace costs of 7 August 2026 (in French): €168,200 to €700,000 in the first year for custom work, including €85,000 to €410,000 of development and €13,200 to €109,000 of maintenance.

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. Entry plans, read on 27 September 2026:

Three remarks. First, check the billing period: Sharetribe’s page now shows yearly-billed prices only: $99 a month means $1,188 paid upfront. Its pricing changelog also shows that the per-transaction fee falls with volume, down to $0.05. Second, Kreezalid’s page shows two different grids: on the cards, Scale costs €299 and Advanced €379 a month; in the table further down, the same plans cost €199 and €299, and the entry plan, Basic, €99; ask which applies. Third, limits: Kreezalid’s Basic plan allows 100 users and 100 listings, then €49 per extra block of 1,000.

WordPress and a plugin: licence, hosting, time

The other route is installing software on your own hosting. Licences, read the same day:

• Dokan (WordPress plugin): a free core, then from $149 a year (one site) to $999 a year, with launch discounts shown; the Professional plan, at $199 a year on promotion on the day we checked, adds Stripe Express and Mangopay. Hosting is not included.
• CS-Cart Multi-Vendor: from $725 to $3,599 a year, or a lifetime licence from $3,590, with the source code.
• Yo!Kart: $1,999 once for a lifetime licence, free installation, twelve months of support, no transaction fees.

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 tools show low entry prices:

• Bubble: free to build, but without going live or a custom domain; the Starter plan, web and mobile, costs $59 a month billed yearly, Growth $209.
• Lovable: free to try; paid plans run on credits, and their price could not be read on the page on the day we checked. Hosting is covered by the subscription for most apps, then drawn from credits when traffic gets heavy.
• Replit: Core at $20 a month, $18 billed yearly.

These prices buy 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. Lovable’s payments documentation describes a single active payment provider per project, Paddle (5% + $0.50 per transaction) or Stripe: enough to sell as one merchant, not to pay out several sellers. 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. Prices include your own domain, except on Marketplace Factory Launch, which runs on a .marketplacefactory.app address; with us, our share of sales comes on top of the subscription.

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: 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. Work out the percentage at your basket and volume. 1.5% on a €800 stay is €12 per booking, on top of payment fees; with us as anywhere else, do the maths before you choose.
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. To compare tools on more than price, see our comparison of Sharetribe alternatives.

What Marketplace Factory costs, plainly

Our share applies to sales paid online, excluding delivery, net of refunds, with no cap; 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.