Seventy percent of PrestaShop stores in Poland need regular technical support. The question is not whether you will need help, but when and how much you will pay for it. When the payment system stops working on a Friday night, and the weekend accounts for 30% of your weekly turnover, the cost of each hour of failure literally increases before your eyes.
Why will support be more expensive than you think in 2026?
The content of a store averages 5-10% of its annual turnover, and this amount is growing. Developer support rates have been increasing by 15-20% per year since 2023. Partly because the IT market in Poland is adapting to the Western level, but also because of a lot of new legal requirements: PSD3, GDPR 2.0, PCI DSS 4.0. Each change requires developer time, and it costs money.
The difference between urgent repairs (200-300 PLN / hr) and constant maintenance is huge, not only in terms of price. In this article, you will see specific bid forks, billing models, and cost scenarios for small, medium, and large stores. To know what to expect before something stops working.
What does PrestaShop Developer Support include (and what is a separate service)
PrestaShop support is, in short, all that makes the store efficient on an ongoing basis. In 2026, we are working mainly on PrestaShop 8. x (some are moving only from 1.7), so the amount of work includes both routine maintenance and more complex development.
Maintenance vs Development – two shelves of tasks
The main work is the daily bread of the developer: updates to the CMS core, modules and themes, database backup, security monitoring (someone is not trying to hack), error correction after updates. This is all that keeps the store in good condition, but it doesn’t change its functions.
Advanced challenges start when you need more. Creation of custom modules for specific needs, integration with external systems (ERP, payment gateways, couriers), performance optimization (every second of loading is important here) and technical SEO. Migration between versions is also here, especially since the environment has changed: now PHP 8.2+, MySQL 8 are required, and Symfony 6+ is running under it, so it’s not always an easy transition.
SLA, tools and technical requirements
In support agreements, you will see the standard: contact channel (usually ticket system or Slack), division of requests into priorities and response time. Premium SLA packages often take 1-4 hours to resolve critical issues. The developer uses tools like Git, Composer, Docker (Local development), so if your infrastructure is unusual, sometimes it requires extra work.
Okay, but how much does it all cost? More on that in a minute.
Settlement models and rates in Poland-Current forks (2026)
Hourly rates 2026: junior, middle, senior, Expert
Before I show you the specific amounts, a quick explanation. The calculation model directly follows from the predictability of work. Constant, routine support? The monthly package will be cheaper. Separate requests from time to time? You pay per hour. Below are the clean plugs for all popular models in Poland in 2026.
| Calculation model | Price range (net) | When does it pay off |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly rate | 150-550 PLN / hr | Random orders, small stores |
| Monthly Package | 800-12, 000 PLN | Constant contact, predictable needs |
| Annual Retainer | 9,000-120,000 PLN | Long-term cooperation, large stores |
| Initial audit | 1 500-8 000 PLN (at one time) | Start of cooperation, diagnostics |
| Projekty (fixed price) | 2,000-40,000 PLN. | Migrations, redesigns, and major deployments |
Hourly rates vary greatly depending on your experience. Junior with a basic knowledge of PrestaShop? Zl zl zl / h. a mid-level developer who covers modules and optimization is already 250-380 zl / h. a senior with many years of experience and a comprehensive approach to e-commerce: 400-550 zl/h. an expert or elite partner of PrestaShop can charge even more, sometimes even 600-700 zl / h, but this is already a narrow group of specialists.
Monthly packages: how many hours and for which store
Most agencies offer hourly packages paid for each month. Here, forks depend on the store’s scale and actual needs.
| Store Size | Hours in the package | Monthly (net)cost |
|---|---|---|
| Small (up to 100 orders/month) | 2-5 hours | 800-2, 000 PLN |
| Average (100-1000 orders) | 6-15 hours | 2 500-6 000 PLN. |
| Large (>1000 orders) | 16-40 hours | 7,000-12,000 PLN |
An additional 23% VAT is added to all amounts, so the real gross value will always be higher than this rate. Interestingly, with commitments of more than 6 months, you can negotiate a discount. Usually agencies give 10-15%, and annual retainers sometimes even 20%. The next section explains why two offers for’ the same ‘ support may differ by several thousand per month.
Why are the two estimates so different-price factors and hidden costs
You’ve seen PLN / hr and 450 PLN / hr for ‘support PrestaShop’ and are wondering what’s going on here? Let’s take a look at what actually shapes these numbers.
Factors that increase your score most quickly
From experience, I can see that these things make the most sense:
- Technical condition and technological debt -code store 5 years ago, without updates, with own fixes ‘quickly’ – this is my problem and a higher risk rate.
- Module quality -50 plugins from free repos versus 15 certified ones-a huge difference in diagnostic time.
- Integrations -connections to ERP, courier systems (InPost / DPD), payments (PayU, Transfer24), and possibly WMS. Each integration is another layer that can fall apart.
- Performance Requirements -If you want PageSpeed 90+ and Core Web Vitals in green (for SEO), it’s not a matter of ‘throwing cachea’.
- The level of SLA -reaction in 15 minutes versus 24 hours-is a completely different category of accessibility and cost of people.
- Środowisko i procesy – Docker, CI/CD, Git flow, staging environment. Or cowboy coding to production via FTP.
Elite Agency will charge 450 PLN / hr because it has processes, certification and legal responsibility. A freelancer does the job for 200 PLN, but without guarantees and SLAs. DIY is an option, only you have the time and knowledge? Regionally, Warsaw and Krakow take + 20% of the national average. For customers with De / UK Polish support, this is a 30-40% savings, so nearshoring is growing.
Hidden costs: downtime, security, and compliance
An hour of downtime in a store that makes 300 thousand PLN / month is a loss of 400-600 PLN. A day of failure? 1-5 thousand PLN disappeared.
Now add some negligence: outdated SSL certificate (loss of trust in Google), lack of copies of GDPR, vulnerability of the payment module. Punishments? From 5 to 50 thousand PLN, depending on the scale. It comes out cheap, but it doesn’t come out at all.
Practical scenarios-how much you will pay monthly and annually (TCO)
When you look at individual bids, it’s hard to put it all together. So what actually happens on a month-and-year scale? A typical store in Poland in 2026 spends 3 000-8 000 PLN per month on hosting and ongoing support. Per year of PLN.30,000-150,000 PLN TCO (including hosting costs about 1,000-5,000 PLN / year). Broad forks, because it all depends on whether you have a stable store or whether you are constantly improving something.
There is a rule of thumb: the cost of maintenance is 5-10% of the store’s annual turnover. If you make a million a year, you can count on 50 000-100 000 PLN for all maintenance. This isn’t an ironclad rule, but it helps you evaluate your budget and avoid being caught off guard.
Three scenarios: small store, medium store, migration
Pol. small store (turnover up to 500k per year): audit of 3 000 PLN at the start, then a package of 3 000 PLN / month. About 39,000 PLN is released annually. Most often, this is hosting plus a minimum of support hours, without additional features.
Average store (turnover 1-3 million): implementation from scratch costs 50 000 PLN, later support at the level of 5 000 PLN / month. 110,000 PLN is issued annually, sometimes more if custom integrations are added.
Store that requires migration from 1.6 or 1.7: the migration itself is 10 000-30 000 PLN, and remember that 40% of stores on version 8. X require such a transfer. after migration, support can jump to 4 000-6 000 PLN / month, because you need to treat yourself to a new environment. This gives easily 80,000 PLN+per year.
In practice, the more automation and order you have at launch, the less you pay later.
The Price of Peace of Mind in e-commerce
The truth is that you don’t invest in development hours, but in the continuity of your business. All these price forks, package differences, and billing models come down to one simple question: how much does a day of downtime cost you? Because when it rains in the store on Friday at 22:00 and the weekend is just starting, the difference between support for 300 PLN per month and support for 1500 PLN suddenly becomes very clear. This is not a maintenance cost. This is the cost of predictability.
Good PrestaShop support is just a restful dream. And like any peace of mind, it has a price that you know in advance, instead of paying for it with nerves and lost orders when something collapses.
