Guides - Hyvä

How Much Does Magento Development Actually Cost in 2026?

June 15, 2026 - Alexandru-Manuel Carabus

Magento development in 2026 comes in three shapes: a 999 EUR audit at one end, a full B2B replatform at the other, and a takeover retainer in between. This is the budget conversation LIQUIDLAB has on every discovery call, written down in one place. Real hours, honest scoping.

Three geometric objects standing side by side on a pale off-white surface in ascending size from left to right, all in restrained deep navy: a small cube on the left, a medium rectangular block in the middle, a large rectangular tower on the right. A small muted orange dot sits at the base of the middle object.

Most Romanian merchants who ask us about Magento development open with the same sentence. "I don't want to waste your time, but I have no idea if this is a 10,000 EUR project or a 100,000 EUR project." Fair. The public price lists are vague, agency pitches lean on 'starting from' numbers that never stop climbing, and the last quote you got was probably from someone who didn't tell you what was included.

This article is the budget conversation LIQUIDLAB has on every discovery call, written down in one place. Three project shapes, real hours, real timelines. The rate is confirmed in writing after discovery.

The three project shapes we actually see

Nearly every Magento development request we get in 2026 fits one of three shapes.

  1. Takeover of a store someone else built. The site exists, it works, sort of, and something is wrong. Speed, checkout, the previous agency, or all of the above. The budget question is: how much to make it healthy.
  2. New Hyva build on Liquid Framework. You want a new storefront, fast, and you don't want to reinvent the theme layer. The budget question is: monthly subscription plus a fixed launch cost.
  3. Full Magento build from scratch. Custom catalogue logic, B2B pricing rules, ERP integration that will occupy six months of a team's calendar. The budget question is: total project envelope.

Each has its own price shape. Confusing them is where merchants overspend or, more often, underestimate and stall halfway.

Project type 1: Takeover of an existing store

This is the most common request we receive and, ironically, the one merchants understand least when they walk in.

The entry point is our Deep Code and Server Analysis at 999 EUR, one-time. That is not a 'starting from' number. It buys you a full audit: what the previous agency actually built, which modules are dragging performance down, where the hosting is misconfigured, which parts of the codebase are salvageable and which need to be thrown out. It includes 30 days of support after delivery, so you can act on the findings without paying by the hour every time a question comes up.

After the audit, one of two things happens.

Either the store is fixable at the module and configuration level, in which case you move to our Support and Development retainer, billed hourly under a contractual SLA. A typical takeover rescue after a clean audit runs 40 to 120 hours of work over the first two months. The exact envelope depends on the state of the codebase, which is why we quote it after the audit rather than before.

Or the store is architecturally broken. The previous team stitched together 40 third-party modules to fake a feature Magento already supports natively, or the theme layer is a Luma fork with 15 layers of override files. In that case, 'rescue' is a rebuild in disguise, and the honest answer is project type 2 or 3.

The 999 EUR audit is the one part of a Magento budget every merchant should be willing to spend before committing to anything larger. It replaces the guessing.

Project type 2: Liquid Framework, new build or rescue

Liquid Framework is our productised Hyva theme. You get a storefront that is already optimised, already clean on Google Core Web Vitals, already tested on the browsers and devices your customers actually use. Instead of paying an agency to rebuild the theme layer from zero, you subscribe to ours and focus your budget on the parts of the store that are genuinely specific to your business.

Liquid Framework covers two very different starting points.

New build. If you are migrating from Magento 1, WooCommerce, Shopify, or another eCommerce platform, this is the launch path. You skip the theme setup and infrastructure setup phase entirely and go straight to configuring your business logic.

Rescue. If you are already on Magento, on Hyva or Luma, and struggling with security patches, a slow storefront, or a backend that keeps breaking under load, Liquid Framework replaces the fragile theme layer with our productised one, in parallel with a full backend cleanup. The audit at the top of this article is the diagnostic that scopes the rescue path.

Pricing starts from 799 EUR per month on yearly billing:

Monthly billing costs more: 899, 1,099, or 5,999 EUR per month depending on tier. The difference reaches 1,000 EUR per month at the top tier, so committing for a year matters. Full breakdown lives on the Liquid Framework page.

On top of the subscription there is a one-time launch project. That covers migrating your existing catalogue and content, configuring the payment and shipping methods you actually use in Romania, connecting your ERP or POS, and running the QA rounds before go-live. Realistic launch window: 8 to 16 weeks depending on how much custom logic your business needs.

This is the lowest total cost of ownership we can offer for a new Hyva storefront, and it is the option we recommend to nearly every merchant with under 5 million EUR in annual revenue.

Project type 3: Full Magento build from scratch

Sometimes a subscription theme is not the right answer. B2B stores with custom pricing engines. Marketplaces with 20+ vendor logic. Retailers with a bespoke checkout flow their brand depends on. Custom builds are where Magento actually shines, and they are also where budgets balloon if the scope is not disciplined.

Full builds are quoted per project on hourly Hyva storefront development, plus DevOps at 799 EUR per month for the server infrastructure. Total envelope depends entirely on scope. A well-scoped B2B build with ERP integration is typically a 400 to 900 hour project across storefront, backend integration and QA, plus infrastructure, plus a launch runway of 20 to 32 weeks.

The scope sounds large. It is. It is also what a store designed to handle 8-figure GMV in a stable way actually costs. The right question is not whether it is cheap. The right question is whether the store you are building will earn back the investment inside 18 months.

Where the money actually goes

One misconception worth clearing up. In most Magento projects, the theme layer is roughly 15 percent of the budget. Catalogue and content migration is another 15 percent. Integrations (ERP, POS, shipping providers, payment gateways) account for 25 to 35 percent. DevOps, hosting configuration, and pre-launch load testing are 10 to 15 percent. QA and bug fixing before go-live is another 10 to 15 percent. Everything else is project management and discovery.

Storefront speed, the thing merchants notice first, is not fixed by throwing money at the theme. It is fixed by the DevOps and integration layer being built correctly. Which is why our 999 EUR audit inspects all of that, not just the frontend.

What a takeover actually looks like: Vitacom

Before you commit to any of the three project types, look at what a takeover with LIQUIDLAB has delivered. Vitacom came in with a store scoring PageSpeed 12 and a TTFB of 15,814 milliseconds. Twelve. Fifteen thousand milliseconds is fifteen seconds to first byte. After the rebuild: PageSpeed 100. TTFB 12 milliseconds. That is a 99.92 percent reduction, roughly 1,300 times faster.

The infrastructure story is quieter but matters more for the budget conversation. We reduced their production stack from 64 cores and 256 GB of RAM down to 8 cores and 32 GB. Eight times less hardware, running eight times better. Roughly 180 unnecessary modules were removed in the process. Full story is in the Vitacom case study.

The point for your budget: a takeover done right is not a linear improvement. It is a step change. Underspending on the audit and rescue is what kept Vitacom stuck for years. Spending correctly on it took months, not years.

What to do this week

Three concrete steps, whichever project type sounds closest to yours.

  1. If your store already exists: order the 999 EUR Deep Code and Server Analysis. It gives you numbers, not opinions. Do this before you invite any agency to quote you.
  2. If you are starting from zero: look at the Liquid Framework tiers and pick the tier that matches your traffic. Choose yearly billing if you can absorb it. The annual saving is real.
  3. If you are stuck deciding: book a free strategy call with our team. Bring your Google Analytics screenshot, your current hosting bill, and your best guess at monthly orders. In 30 minutes we can tell you which project shape actually fits.

The one thing not to do is keep waiting for a clearer answer to appear on its own. Magento is a specialised platform. It rewards merchants who spend correctly on the diagnosis and it punishes those who do not. The audit is the cheapest number in this article. Start there.

Ready to size your Magento project properly? Book a free strategy call with LIQUIDLAB and we will tell you honestly which of the three project shapes fits your store, and what it will cost.