Free is the most misunderstood word in online selling. Bagisto the software is genuinely free — no licence, no commission, no monthly platform fee. This page separates that truth from the running costs every shop pays, so you start with open eyes instead of a surprise bill.
When a platform says free, it usually means one layer is free. Bagisto is honest open source: the code is free under the MIT licence and stays free. But a shop is more than code — it needs an address, a machine that never sleeps, and a way to accept money. Those three layers cost money on every platform on earth, including the ones that advertise themselves as free. Here is the full split, layer by layer.
Example figures for one small Indian store, shown to give the shape of the costs. Your actual prices depend on the provider you choose, so confirm them before you budget.
The Bagisto download includes the complete store system: catalog, cart, checkout, orders, invoices, customers, coupons, tax settings and the admin panel, with multiple currencies and languages built in. There is no locked premium tier of the core and no percentage taken from your sales. You can also read and modify the code, because it is a Laravel application released under the MIT licence. That part of the word free is fully real, and it is the part that hosted platforms charge you a monthly rent for, forever.
Between free core and paid services sits the Bagisto marketplace. Many extensions are free, but some are one-time paid products — the well-known example is turning a single store into a multi-vendor marketplace where other sellers list products. Treat extensions like shop fittings: the shop works without them, you buy one only when a real need appears, and you check its price and Bagisto version support before paying. Never budget assuming a paid extension is free, and never pirate one — nulled extensions are a classic way stores get hacked.
The saving is real and it compounds. A hosted platform charges a monthly subscription plus often a transaction fee on top of the gateway's cut, every month, for as long as the shop lives. With Bagisto your recurring platform charge is zero: hosting and domain are the fixed costs, and both are yours to move between providers if prices rise. For a small shop, that difference is commonly the margin between a hobby that pays for itself and one that quietly bleeds. The price of that freedom is responsibility: updates, backups and security are yours to run, and the last page of this series shows how.
Watch the video to see the store itself being built at zero software cost.
Watch Full VideoNo. Bagisto is self-hosted open-source software, so it has no way to take a cut of your orders. The only percentage in the chain is your payment gateway's transaction fee, which you pay to the gateway on any platform.
You can build and learn the whole store on your own computer at zero cost. The spending starts when the store goes public: a domain and hosting are the minimum, and gateway charges apply only when orders are actually paid online.
Yes, new Bagisto versions are released as open source like the original. Updating is your job on a self-hosted store, and the safe method is to back up first and test the update on a copy, as the security page in this series explains.