From Tenant to Owner: Stop Building Your eCommerce on Rented Land
Lift and shift your storefront from a SaaS to a proprietary eCommerce backend API with Spree Commerce 5 open-source.
For the past decade, we’ve all been tenants. We rented our eCommerce infrastructure from SaaS platforms, our B2B pricing app from one provider, our marketplace vendor onboarding app from another. It made sense at the time — the “buy” side of the Build vs. Buy equation was overwhelmingly cheaper, faster, and less risky than building anything yourself. Not anymore.
That math has fundamentally changed. And if you’re still paying rent, you’re falling behind.
The Build vs. Buy Equation Has Flipped
AI-powered development tools have collapsed the cost and timeline of customizing open-source software by an order of magnitude. What used to take a team of engineers weeks now takes hours. What used to require deep programming expertise now requires clarity of thought and a well-articulated business requirement.
This isn’t a marginal improvement — it’s a structural shift. The calculus that made SaaS subscriptions a no-brainer for a decade is reversing. Customizing open-source software eliminates recurring subscriptions, and total ownership costs typically fall below SaaS after 18–24 months for large-scale businesses — all while building valuable intellectual property that belongs to you, not your app provider.
For eCommerce brands specifically, this shift is seismic. The backend powering your store — product catalog, pricing engine, checkout flow, order management — is no longer something you need to rent. It’s something you can own, customize, and turn into a competitive advantage.
The SaaS App Ecosystem Trap
If you’re running a mid- or large SaaS-based eCommerce operation today, you’re probably familiar with this scenario: your store depends on 10 to 20 third-party apps to cover the gaps your platform doesn’t fill out of the box. A B2B selling app here, a customer segmentation program there, a subscription management tool, a custom pricing extension, an advanced search widget, a multi-currency converter, an upsell engine, a pop-up builder.
Each of those apps comes with its own monthly fee. But the costs go far beyond the subscription line items. Here’s what’s actually happening under the hood:
Performance death by a thousand scripts. Every app injects its own JavaScript, stylesheets, and DOM elements into your storefront. Platform audits have shown that stores with more than ten apps can nearly double their Time to Interactive — the metric that determines whether a visitor stays or bounces. Worse, most apps never fully uninstall. They leave orphaned scripts that continue to execute on every page load, silently degrading your site speed.
App conflicts that break the customer journey. Your upsell widget’s JavaScript overrides your currency converter’s functions. Your live chat popup covers your add-to-cart button on mobile. Your reviews app conflicts with your theme’s layout. These aren’t edge cases — they’re the daily reality of running a store stitched together from a dozen independent vendors who never tested their code alongside each other.
Customization ceilings that stifle differentiation. Template-based themes feel liberating at first and suffocating at scale. The moment you need a checkout flow that matches your actual business logic, a product configuration experience that reflects how your customers actually buy, or a pricing model more sophisticated than what the platform allows — you hit a wall. Getting beyond basic color and font changes requires either a steep learning curve or a significant development budget, and even then you’re fighting the platform’s constraints rather than building freely.
Integration nightmares with enterprise systems. Connecting your ERP, PIM, or WMS to a SaaS platform means mapping your complex, hierarchical business data onto a flat, opinionated data model. Information gets lost. Processes break. And every platform update risks destabilizing the fragile integrations you’ve spent months building.
Platform lock-in and data asymmetry. Your SaaS vendor gains comprehensive insights into customer behavior across their entire ecosystem. You see only your own store data. They build marketplace features that serve their strategic interests, which may not align with strengthening your direct customer relationships. You’re building their empire while paying for the privilege.
Rising costs with no equity. As your business grows, so does your bill — higher-tier plans, transaction fees for using third-party payment processors, premium app subscriptions. You’re building on rented land, and the landlord keeps raising the rent. None of that spending builds an asset. The moment you stop paying, you have nothing.
What Actually Matters in eCommerce
Strip away the noise, and eCommerce success comes down to two things built on top of a solid backend foundation:
First, the customizations that are essential to your specific business — the pricing rules, the workflow automations, the inventory logic, the checkout experiences that reflect how your customers actually buy. These are the things you’re currently paying for through a patchwork of third-party apps that don’t play well together. They should be native capabilities of your backend, built exactly to your specifications.
Second, the storefront and customer experience that differentiates your brand from the competition. This is your moat. The look, feel, speed, and interactivity of your customer-facing experience is what turns browsers into buyers and buyers into repeat customers. This is where you should be investing your creative and engineering energy — not wrestling with platform limitations.
The backend is the foundation. Get it right, and everything you build on top of it is yours — every customization, every integration, every unique feature becomes proprietary IP that increases your company’s valuation and defensibility.
Spree Commerce: Own Your Foundation
This is exactly the landscape shift that Spree Commerce 5 was built for.
Spree 5 is an API-first, headless eCommerce backend that gives you full control over your commerce infrastructure while providing enterprise-grade features out of the box. It’s not a theme you customize within someone else’s guardrails — it’s a foundation you own and build upon.
What this means in practice:
Replace your app pricing or subscriptions with native capabilities. Spree 5 ships with a flexible pricing engine supporting regional, B2B, and wholesale pricing natively. Customer groups, gift cards, promotions, metafields for custom data, digital products, webhooks, event bus architecture — the features you’re currently renting from five different app vendors are built into the core. And because you own the codebase, you can extend any of them to match your exact business logic.
Build the customer experience that sets you apart. Spree’s headless architecture means your storefront is completely decoupled from the backend. Build with Next.js, React, Vue, or any framework your team prefers. You’re not limited to a theme marketplace — you have total creative and technical freedom to create the exact experience your customers deserve.
Control your total cost of ownership. No per-transaction fees. No escalating tier pricing. No app subscription creep. You host it on your own infrastructure, scale it on your own terms, and the money you invest goes into building an asset — not paying rent.
Increase your valuation and funding potential. For VC-backed companies, proprietary technology is a tangible asset on the balance sheet. Owning your eCommerce backend — with custom business logic, unique integrations, and differentiated customer experiences built on top — demonstrates technical depth and defensibility that SaaS dependency simply cannot.
Enterprise-ready from day one. Multi-vendor, multi-tenant, multi-store, multi-currency, multi-language — Spree handles the complexity of modern commerce without forcing you into a single-vendor’s opinionated architecture.
Lift and Shift: You Don’t Have to Start from Scratch
Here’s the part that changes everything: you don’t need to rebuild your storefront to make this transition.
If you’ve already invested in a decoupled frontend — a Next.js storefront, a custom React application, a headless setup powered by another backend — you can lift and shift that existing customer experience onto a Spree 5 backend customized to your needs and business case.
This isn’t a theoretical possibility. It’s a documented, production-tested migration path:
Migrating your backend while keeping your decoupled frontend. If you’re already running a headless architecture, you can migrate your commerce backend to Spree 5 without touching your frontend. Your existing customer experience stays intact while you gain full ownership and customization of the engine powering it. Spree’s comprehensive Storefront API and Platform API mean your frontend simply points to a new, more capable backend.
Lifting and shifting your Next.js storefront to Spree 5. If you’re running Next.js — and increasingly, ambitious eCommerce teams are — there’s a direct path to connecting your existing storefront to a Spree 5 backend. You keep the frontend your customers know, while gaining the flexibility, ownership, and extensibility of a backend you fully control.
The lift-and-shift approach means the transition doesn’t require a “big bang” relaunch. You can migrate incrementally, validate at each step, and go live with confidence.
From Tenant to Owner
The SaaS era taught us something valuable: speed to market matters, and you shouldn’t build what you can buy. But the AI era is teaching us something equally important: when the cost of building drops dramatically, owning your core infrastructure becomes the smarter investment.
Every month you spend on SaaS subscriptions is a month you’re building equity in someone else’s platform. Every app you install to work around platform limitations is a band-aid over a structural problem. Every customization you wish you could make but can’t is a competitive advantage you’re leaving on the table.
Spree Commerce lets you stop renting and start owning. Keep the storefront your customers love. Replace the backend with one you control. Build the customizations your business actually needs. And turn your eCommerce infrastructure from a monthly expense into a proprietary asset.
The math has changed. It’s time to become an owner.
