In every storefront selection process, a steering committee eventually asks the question: "What does this really cost us?" That is where opinions diverge. Custom frontend vendors often quote license and initial implementation only. Frontend as a Service vendors often quote subscription only. Both views are incomplete. This post lays out what an honest five year TCO comparison looks like, and which line items in practice make the biggest difference.

Why classic ROI tables mislead

The ROI calculations we see in pitches usually make two mistakes. First, they underestimate operational costs in years two through five. Second, they ignore the opportunity cost that arises when the frontend cannot keep up with the speed of the business roadmap.

A realistic TCO comparison needs six categories. Initial implementation. Hosting and infrastructure. Ongoing maintenance and support. Feature velocity. Compliance and security. Opportunity cost from lost conversion. Once all six are accounted for, the numbers look very different from the typical pitch slide.

Initial implementation

Custom frontend. An enterprise storefront in the SAP CC context typically costs six hundred to twelve hundred person days. At realistic European day rates that is one to two million euro. On top, discovery, architecture, design tokens and QA setup. As a rule of thumb, expect 1.5 to 2.5 million euro for year one.

Frontend as a Service. The initial implementation is significantly more compact because many topics already exist as a platform. UI components, hosting, CI CD, observability. Typical initial cost is one hundred fifty to four hundred person days, or three hundred to eight hundred thousand euro for integration. The subscription sits on top of that.

In year one, custom is often visibly more expensive, sometimes by a factor of two or three.

Hosting and infrastructure

Custom frontend. Hosting, scaling, CDN, observability, monitoring, edge caching. Each of these has to be built, maintained and tested for Black Friday scenarios. Annual cost lands between one hundred fifty thousand and four hundred thousand euro depending on traffic and setup.

Frontend as a Service. These topics are part of the platform. You pay for them via the subscription, but you pay for them once and without your own team. Realistic cost per storefront is eighty thousand to two hundred thousand euro per year.

Over five years, the gap quickly adds up to seven figure differences.

Ongoing maintenance and support

Custom frontend. Every frontend stack ages. Frameworks need major upgrades, security holes need patching, browsers change standards. Maintenance typically requires two to four full time engineers depending on complexity. That is two hundred thousand to six hundred thousand euro per year, without creating any new features.

Frontend as a Service. Maintenance is part of the service. Updates, security patches, browser compatibility and platform upgrades run continuously in the background. Your team focuses on customization that genuinely differentiates.

This category is often the strongest argument for FaaS. Over five years it saves the equivalent of an entire engineering team.

Feature velocity

Custom frontend. Every new feature needs engineering capacity. If the team maintains and builds new things at the same time, effective velocity drops sharply. In practice, ship times for medium sized features sit between six and fourteen weeks.

Frontend as a Service. Components exist, the visual builder accelerates marketing initiatives, new sections can ship without an engineering sprint. Ship times for medium sized features typically land between three and six weeks.

Over five years, a FaaS platform delivers roughly twice as many features in the same window.

Compliance and security

Custom frontend. PCI DSS, GDPR, accessibility per WCAG, secure authentication flows. All of that has to be assessed, documented and continuously maintained. External audits are required regularly.

Frontend as a Service. The platform ships its frameworks already aligned with compliance needs. Templates, audit trails and reporting come along. Your team verifies customer logic, not the entire platform.

In regulated industries like pharma, fintech or health, this saves six figures per year without much effort.

Opportunity cost

This is the biggest hidden line item. If the custom frontend never reaches modern mobile Core Web Vitals, you lose conversion. If new funnel tests take weeks instead of days, you lose optimization upside. If multibrand extensions become their own project, you lose time to market.

You can model these costs roughly per storefront. For a merchant with fifty million euro online revenue, just two percent of lost conversion over two years already exceeds the entire initial cost difference of a custom project.

The five year total

If you account for all six categories properly, a typical enterprise storefront with ten to fifty million euro revenue lands at the following ranges.

Custom frontend path. Eight to fourteen million euro over five years.

Frontend as a Service path. Four to seven million euro over five years.

The difference is not small. It is big enough to fund the strategy of the next phase.

Where custom still makes sense

In honest advisory, we do not default to FaaS. Custom build can be the right call when three conditions hold at the same time. First, the frontend is core to brand DNA with high differentiation. Second, the team has ten or more dedicated frontend engineers. Third, the executive sponsor accepts a platform investment as a long term asset. If even one condition is missing, the TCO comparison most often tilts toward FaaS.

Bottom line

The honest TCO comparison shows that Frontend as a Service over five years tends to be the more economical choice. That holds true not only for smaller setups, but especially for enterprise merchants with multibrand structures and high innovation pressure. To run the comparison for your own situation, work through all six categories rather than the typical three line pitch slide.

We regularly help enterprise merchants build a credible TCO case for their storefront. If you need an honest view for your setup, reach out.

More from the Laioutr Platform

• Composable Digital Experience Platform
• Agentic Frontend Management Platform
• Personalization
• Composable Visual Page Builder

Related: Headless frontend for SAP Commerce Cloud.

Related reading: Composable Frontend TCO: The Five-Year View That Is Missing from Most Business Cases and Frontend as a Service for Salesforce Commerce Cloud Explained.