Commerce you own, on the stack we know best
Spree Commerce is an open-source store built on Ruby on Rails. When your pricing rules, catalog, or checkout do not fit a hosted platform, this is where we go, because it is the same Rails we work in every day.
What Spree gives you that a hosted store does not
Spree is a Rails application you run yourself. The product model, the pricing logic, the checkout, and the admin are all code in your repository, which means there is no boundary where the platform says no.
That matters in a specific set of situations. Contract pricing that differs per customer. Products that are configured rather than picked. Orders that have to clear an approval before they are real. Inventory that lives in an ERP and has to agree with the storefront in both directions.
It also means you keep the data. Customers, orders, and history live in your own database, so moving hosts or adding a reporting system is a normal engineering task rather than an export request.
When Spree is the right call, and when it is not
Good fit: B2B and wholesale rules
Customer-specific price lists, quantity breaks, net terms, purchase order numbers, and approval workflows. These are ordinary requirements that hosted platforms make expensive.
Good fit: the catalog is not really products and variants
Rentals, memberships, made-to-order configurations, service bookings, and anything where price is calculated rather than looked up.
Good fit: you already run Rails
If your team is a Rails team, Spree is code they can read. That is a meaningfully lower total cost than a platform nobody in your building can debug.
Watch out: you now own the operations
Hosting, scaling, uptime, payment integration, security patching, tax rules, and version upgrades become line items on your budget rather than someone else's. Price a retainer in from the start.
Watch out: there is no app store to fall back on
Reviews, loyalty, subscriptions, and popups are a checkbox on Shopify. On Spree each one is an integration or a build. That is fine when you needed something custom anyway and expensive when you did not.
Most stores should not use Spree
If you sell a normal catalog to normal customers at a normal checkout, Shopify will cost you less over five years and will be running while your competitor is still arguing about a deployment. We say that to people who arrive asking for a custom store.
Spree earns its cost when a hosted platform has actually blocked you, not when it has annoyed you. If you can name the specific rule that Shopify will not let you express, we have something to talk about. If you cannot, we will probably tell you to stay where you are and spend the money on the storefront instead.
Questions we get about this
- When would you recommend Spree Commerce over Shopify?
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When you can name a specific rule that a hosted platform will not let you express. Customer-specific contract pricing, quote and approval workflows, configured or made-to-order products, prices that are calculated rather than looked up, or a checkout your business genuinely depends on changing.
If you cannot name that rule, we will tell you to stay on Shopify. Owning the code means owning hosting, upgrades, security, and everything an app store would have handled, and that bill is real.
- Who hosts and maintains a Spree store?
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You do, and in practice that means us on a retainer. Spree runs as your own Ruby on Rails application, so hosting, deployment, security patching, dependency updates, and version upgrades are ongoing work rather than a subscription.
We price that in from the start instead of letting it show up as a surprise in year two. The upside is that the code and the customer data are yours, so you can move hosts or change partners without asking permission.
- Can you take over a custom application someone else built?
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Sometimes. We need read access to the codebase first. Once we've looked at what's there, we can scope what it would take to stabilize it and continue the work. Sometimes the right path is to keep going on what exists. Sometimes it's a rebuild. We'll tell you which, and why, before any work starts.
- What platforms do you support?
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All of them, in the sense that we've worked across most major and a lot of niche ones. We're most experienced with WordPress, Shopify, and custom Ruby on Rails applications. If your stack is something we haven't worked in before, we'll tell you that on the consultation, and we'll be honest about whether we're the right fit.
Not sure whether you have outgrown a hosted store?
Describe the rule your current platform will not let you express. In a free consultation we can usually tell you whether it is a Spree problem, an app problem, or a process problem that does not need new software at all.