How to Compare Hyvä Accelerator Packages: 8 Questions Before You Sign

Accelerator packages read alike from the outside. A Hyvä theme, a set of modules, hosting, support, a price and a launch window measured in weeks. The differences that decide whether you are still happy in year two are not on the landing page. They are in the contract, and in the answers you get when you ask directly. We have covered what a Hyvä accelerator package is and who it suits. This is the shopping list: eight questions, what a good answer sounds like, and what a vague one usually means.

One thing to get out of the way first

Hyvä does not run an accelerator programme and there is no badge to hold. Hyvä lists partner packages on its own site, and its partner tiers run from Bronze to Platinum. LIQUIDLAB is a Hyvä Bronze partner, and Liquid Framework is our Hyvä accelerator. So if a provider calls itself an official, certified or approved Hyvä Accelerator, it is describing something that does not exist. That is a useful first signal, and it costs nothing to check.

They also come in two commercial shapes, and which one you are being sold is the first thing to establish. Some are subscriptions: you pay monthly, and the package, the infrastructure and the support continue for as long as you do. Others are a single fee: you pay once, the prebuilt store is handed over, and it is yours from that day. Hyvä's own write-up of these packages states plainly that pricing is monthly or one off, so both are ordinary. Neither shape is better in the abstract. But nearly every question below has a different right answer depending on which one is in front of you, so ask that before you ask anything else. Liquid Framework is the subscription shape, and where this article quotes our own numbers, that is what they describe.

1. What is included, and what gets quoted separately?

Start here, because every other number depends on it. A package price only means something next to a list of what the package does not do.

Ours, so you have something concrete to compare against: Liquid Framework starts at 799 EUR per month plus VAT billed yearly, or 899 EUR per month plus VAT billed monthly, and it carries the theme, the 70+ modules we maintain, the infrastructure, the updates and the support. Outside it: migrations, large or unusual catalogs, custom features, and integrations such as Algolia, Connectif or an ERP. Those are quoted separately because they are separate.

A bad answer to this question is “everything you need”. Everything is not a scope. Ask for the exclusions in writing, and notice how long it takes to arrive.

2. Who owns the code, and what leaves with you?

On a one off package this should be a short, simple answer, and if it is not, you have learned something. On a subscription it decides whether you are buying a service or a lock. Either way, ask three things concretely. Who owns the custom work written for your store. What you physically receive if you leave: a repository, a database, both, and in what state. And whether the accelerator's own code stays with the provider.

There are legitimate answers in both directions here. A package built on a framework the provider keeps is a real product with a real reason to exist, and plenty of merchants are perfectly happy on one. The problem is never the answer, it is learning the answer after signing instead of before. Ask us this one directly and we will put it in writing, because the honest version has conditions and conditions do not survive a bullet point.

3. What is the minimum term, and how do you leave?

Related to the last one, but not the same question, and it changes shape depending on which kind of package you are buying. On a subscription: a monthly price with a twelve month minimum is a yearly contract paid in instalments, which is fine as long as you know that is what you signed. Ask for the shortest commitment, the notice period, and what happens to the store on the day after.

On a one off package there is no term to leave, but there is a cliff instead, and it is easy to miss while you are looking at a single attractive number. Ask how long updates to the accelerator are included, what they cost once that period ends, and whether declining to renew affects anything beyond updates. A package that quietly stops receiving security fixes is an exit too. It is just a slower one, and you are the one who discovers it.

That last part is the one people forget to ask. A store on a subscription is running on somebody's infrastructure, so leaving is an operational event and not only a billing one. Somebody has to move it, and the question of who, and at whose cost, is much easier to settle at the start. This is another one to ask us directly rather than read off a page.

4. Is the performance number a guarantee or a screenshot?

Everybody shows a 100. The question is whether the number is in the contract, and what happens if it is missed.

Ours is written in, at PageSpeed 95 to 100. It is also worth knowing that Hyvä on its own does not produce that. The HTTP Archive median Lighthouse score across Hyvä stores is about 47.5. A fast Hyvä store is the result of what gets removed and what gets tuned, not of the theme having been installed. Any provider who implies the theme does the work has told you how they will handle the first slow page.

Then ask for field data rather than lab scores, because lab scores are taken in a quiet room. On Vitacom, largest contentful paint on phones went from 3.08 s to 1.35 s and on desktop from 2.34 s to 0.67 s, at the CrUX 75th percentile between December 2025 and September 2026. On Equitana, the share of good pages on phones went from 0.2% to 100%, on a catalog of 14,500+ products. Those come from real traffic, which is the only kind that pays you.

5. What does the SLA actually promise?

An email address is not an SLA. A real one names severities, gives a response time and a resolution time for each, and says which hours it applies in.

Ours, in working hours: critical, meaning the store is down or payments are broken, 2 hours to respond and 1 day to resolve. Major, meaning checkout or search is broken, 4 hours and 2 days. Minor, 1 day and 5 days.

The column to probe is resolution. Plenty of agreements promise a fast response and say nothing at all about when the problem goes away, which is a promise to reply quickly rather than a promise to fix anything. Ask what happens when a resolution time is missed, and whether anyone has ever had to answer that question.

6. Who installs Magento patches and upgrades, and at whose cost?

Magento security patches arrive on Adobe's schedule rather than anybody else's. Somebody has to apply them, and if that somebody turns out to be you, the subscription is smaller than it looked. Ask whether patching is included, how soon after release it happens, and whether a major Magento version upgrade counts as included work or as a separate project.

On a subscription this should be included and largely invisible to you. On a one off package, ask explicitly, because patching is the most common thing to fall outside a single fee. On a store you built from scratch it is a line in your own budget, which is one of the genuine differences between renting a store, buying one outright, and building one.

7. How many Hyvä projects has this team actually shipped?

This predicts your timeline better than anything else you can ask. Hyvä publishes the pattern itself: most agencies report that their first Hyvä project takes about as long as a Luma project would have, and that from the second onwards they cut development time by up to 50%. One merchant in Hyvä's own write-up spent 7 months on the first project and 1 month on the second. We went through those figures in how long a Hyvä project takes.

So ask for the number, and then ask to see them. Live URLs, not a portfolio page: ours are public for exactly that reason. Then ask who does the work. The people on the call, or a subcontractor you will never meet and cannot escalate to.

8. What happens on Black Friday?

Normal traffic is the easy case and every package handles it. Ask what the infrastructure does when traffic goes up five times in an hour, whether that capacity is included or billed afterwards, and whether a human is watching while it happens. Then ask the local version of the question: are Romanian payments and couriers already integrated and tested, or on a roadmap? euPlatesc, Mollie, Cargus and Innoship each behave differently under load and under dispute, and “we can integrate that” is a very different sentence from “it runs in production today”.

The pattern hiding in the answers

Across all eight, the real signal is not the content of the answer. It is whether the answer is specific, written down, and offered before you have to chase it. A provider who hands you the exclusions, the SLA table and the exit terms unprompted is telling you something about the next two years that no feature list can. One who gets vague on question two or three has also told you something, and you have learned it for the price of an email.

A practical way to run this: send the same eight questions to everyone on your shortlist, in the same email, and ask for written answers. Then read them side by side in one sitting rather than one at a time across three weeks. Providers sound alike in sequence and stop sounding alike in parallel, and the differences you are paying to discover tend to show up in the gaps rather than in the answers themselves.

The next step

Take these eight to whoever you are considering, us included. If you would rather go through them with someone than over email, book 30 minutes and we will answer all eight about Liquid Framework, in order, including the ones that are contract questions rather than marketing ones.