Cost transparency

Build a store for less than a burger, fries, and a milkshake.

The starter is free and open source. The only required spend is $20/month for Claude Pro — Codespaces’ free tier covers normal learning use.

Typical month while you’re building

$20/mo

flat — Claude Pro, with Codespaces on its free tier

What you’ll pay to get started

Required to actually run a store.

Magento® Open Source

Adobe / community

The Magento software itself is free and open source. You only pay for what you run it on.

Daffodil storefront

Graycore

Angular-based headless storefront. Free and open source. Pick this or Hyvä when you create your store. See daff.io.

Hyvä theme

Hyvä Themes

A modern Magento theme. The license is free but requires registration at hyva.io before you can use it. Pick this or Daffodil when you create your store.

GitHub account

GitHub

A free GitHub account is enough to own your store repo.

GitHub Codespaces

GitHub

With the 4-core machine the starter uses, GitHub’s free tier (120 core-hours/month) gives you about 30 hours/month free — roughly an hour a day. Codespaces only bills while the machine is running and auto-stops when you walk away. Any usage beyond the free tier is billed by GitHub — see github.com/features/codespaces for current rates.

Claude Pro

Anthropic

$20

Flat $20/month — enough to learn the stack and run short prototyping sessions. Pro caps daily usage on a rolling 5-hour window, which you can reach after editing a handful of files in a real build. See claude.com/pricing for current limits.

Claude Max

Anthropic

$100 – $200

Recommended once you’re building daily or want longer uninterrupted sessions. Up to 20× more usage per session than Pro — same Claude, more room to run. See claude.com/pricing for current tiers and limits.

Only when you go live

Doesn’t apply while you’re developing in Codespaces. Add these when you’re ready to point a real domain at a real store.

Production hosting

Your choice (DigitalOcean, AWS, etc.)

$20 – $200+

Only when you’re ready to go live. A small Magento store typically needs ~4GB RAM minimum. Out of scope for the starter — you keep building in Codespaces until you’re ready.

Domain name

Any registrar

~$1 / month

$10–$15/year. Only needed when you go live.

Common questions

The things people ask before they sign up for anything.

Mostly. The starter, GitHub, and your chosen platform (Magento or Mage-OS) are all free. Codespaces gives you about 30 hours/month free on the 4-core machine the starter uses (GitHub’s free tier is 120 core-hours/month) — enough for roughly an hour a day of building. The one thing that isn’t free is Claude — that’s where the “$20” floor comes from. If you only use Claude’s free tier, you’ll hit message limits when actually building a store.

Codespaces machines automatically stop when you stop using them, and billing is per-minute. Claude on Pro or Max is a flat monthly subscription, so that line stays predictable too. The Claude API is the one usage-based option — heavy builders sometimes pick it over a subscription, but bigger bills are possible there. That switch is under your control.

You can’t get locked in. Your store lives in your own GitHub repo. You can clone it, host it anywhere, or just leave it sitting in GitHub forever. We don’t hold anything you need.

Worth $20 to find out?

Spin up a store, kick the tires, decide.