Your own online store or a platform? The fee maths for Indian brands

If you sell online in India, you have three places to do it: a marketplace, a store platform where you rent a shop front by the month, or a store of your own. Each one charges you differently, and the differences only show up once you add them over a year. So let’s add them over a year.

One disclosure before the sums: we build stores of our own, called Tidehouse. The maths below is the same maths we show on that page, with the figures labelled so you can check them yourself.

The fees a store platform charges

A platform usually charges you in three ways:

1. A monthly plan. The rent for the shop front, the hosting and the checkout.
2. Apps. The plan rarely covers everything an Indian store needs. WhatsApp order messages, GST invoices, better reviews or shipping labels often come as separate apps, each with its own monthly fee.
3. A cut of each sale. Some platforms take a percentage of every order on top of the plan, especially when you use your own payment gateway rather than theirs.

The typical figures we use are about ₹2,000 a month for the plan, about ₹2,500 a month in apps, and 2% of sales through your own gateway. These are as of October 2026. Platforms change their prices, so check the current ones before you decide anything.

The fee everyone pays

Your payment gateway (Razorpay, Cashfree and the like) charges a fee on each payment, whichever option you choose. It isn’t a reason to pick one store over another, so leave it out of the comparison. Just don’t let anyone leave it out of the total.

A worked example: ₹1 lakh a month

Say your store sells ₹1,00,000 a month.

On a platform, a year costs ₹54,000 in plan and apps, plus ₹24,000 as the 2% cut. That’s ₹78,000 a year, and it grows as your sales grow, because the cut does.

With your own store on Tidehouse Harbour, the build is ₹44,999 once, then ₹14,999 a year for the platform, hosting and updates. The yearly fee stays the same whether you sell ₹10,000 or ₹10 lakh, and we take 0% of sales.

	Year one	Year two	Year three
Platform, at ₹1,00,000 a month	₹78,000	₹78,000	₹78,000
Tidehouse Harbour	₹59,998	₹14,999	₹14,999

Move the slider to try your own sales:

Marketplaces are a different trade

Selling on a large marketplace is a different deal altogether. You pay a commission and fees on each order, which vary by category, and in return the marketplace brings the customers. That’s a real thing to pay for when nobody knows your name yet.

The trade-off is that the customer belongs to the marketplace. You can’t follow up with them, their next search shows them your competitors, and your brand appears as a line in someone else’s list. Plenty of brands do both: the marketplace for discovery, and their own store for the customers who come back.

When a platform is the right call

We’d tell a friend to use a platform when:

• you’re testing an idea and don’t yet know if anyone will buy;
• sales are small and irregular, so a percentage cut is smaller than any fixed yearly fee;
• you enjoy setting things up yourself and have the evenings for it.

When your own store pays for itself

• Sales are steady. Once the cut and the apps add up to more than a fixed yearly fee, every extra sale makes the gap wider.
• Your products are the brand. Jewellery, fashion, anything people buy partly for how it looks, deserves a store that doesn’t look like the platform’s other stores.
• You need things platforms do awkwardly. Harbour includes book-a-visit, so customers can see a piece in your shop before they buy it. Fleet adds live metal rates, HUID and weight-based pricing, and one stock shared between the counter and the store.

The short version

Add up a full year, including the apps and the cut, at the sales you expect next year rather than this month. If the platform still comes out cheaper, use the platform; it’s a perfectly good tool. If it doesn’t, the difference is yours to keep.

The three Tidehouse plans, Harbour, Port and Fleet, with everything they include, are on the Tidehouse page.