Why this site isn't on Shopify

Business Bulk runs on Shopify and will keep running on Shopify. It sells physical products with inventory, shipping, and sales tax. Shopify handles all of that, plus fraud screening and order management, for about $39 a month. That’s a good deal.

This site sells nothing. It has no cart, no inventory, and no checkout. Putting it on Shopify would have meant a second subscription (another ~$470 a year) to serve a few pages of HTML.

What we used instead

Astro builds the pages and Cloudflare Pages hosts them. Hosting is free at our traffic, and the only recurring cost is the domain.

The part that actually mattered wasn’t the money, though. It was that our own apps live here. On a Shopify theme, embedding something you built means uploading loose JavaScript into theme assets and working around the platform’s constraints. Here it’s just a folder.

The rule we landed on

Shopify where there’s a cart. Static site where there isn’t.

It’s not a judgment about Shopify. It’s about paying for a commerce engine only when you need commerce.