Medusa Pricing 2026: Medusa Cloud Plans, Fees and Self-Hosting Costs

Medusa is free to self-host: the core framework is open source under the MIT license, and Medusa charges no license fee to run it on your own servers. Medusa Cloud, the managed hosting service, costs from $29 per month (Develop), $99 per month (Launch) or $299 per month (Scale), plus usage above each plan's allowances, and Enterprise is custom-priced. Every Cloud plan has a 0% GMV platform fee, according to Medusa's pricing page as of October 2026.

What you actually spend depends on the path you choose. On Medusa Cloud you pay a plan fee plus metered usage. Self-hosted, you pay for servers, a PostgreSQL database, Redis and the engineering time to build and run the store.

Key Takeaways

• The Medusa repository is MIT-licensed, except for Enterprise Edition materials (RBAC and SSO), which need a commercial agreement.
• Medusa Cloud plans start at $29, $99 and $299 per month and bill monthly in advance. Usage above the included amounts goes on the next invoice.
• Medusa takes no percentage of sales on any Cloud plan. You still pay your payment processor, such as Stripe.
• Develop caps compute at 600 hours per month and has no autoscaling, backups or custom storefront domains, so Launch is the realistic entry point for a live store.
• Self-hosting needs a server instance, a worker instance, PostgreSQL and Redis, with at least 2 GB of RAM per Medusa's deployment guide.
• The largest costs are usually development and maintenance, not the license or hosting plan.

Is Medusa Free?

Yes, the software is free. The Medusa LICENSE file states that, except for the Enterprise Edition materials identified in ENTERPRISE-LICENSE.md, the repository is licensed under the MIT License. You can download, modify and deploy the commerce modules, API, admin dashboard and workflows without paying Medusa.

The exception is narrow but worth knowing. The Enterprise license covers role-based access control (RBAC) and single sign-on (SSO/OIDC) code. Using those features requires a commercial agreement with MedusaJS, Inc., which is part of the Enterprise plan. Versions released under MIT before that notice keep their MIT terms.

Free software is not the same as a free store. A production Medusa deployment still needs hosting, a storefront, and someone to maintain both.

Medusa Cloud Pricing (as of October 2026)

Medusa Cloud hosts your Medusa backend and storefront on managed infrastructure. The figures below come from the Medusa pricing page and the Medusa Cloud pricing docs, checked October 26, 2026. Prices are monthly; no annual pricing is listed.

Develop: from $29 per month

Develop runs on one shared app server with compute capped at 600 hours per month per environment. It has no autoscaling, no automatic backups, no custom storefront domain and no key-value store, and email is limited to 100 a day with a hard cap of 1,000 a month. It is built for development and evaluation, and it accepts card payment only.

Launch: from $99 per month

Launch adds a second shared app server with autoscaling, 1,000 compute hours, 7-day point-in-time backups, custom storefront domains, a 250 MB key-value store, three preview environments and 10,000 emails a month. It is the lowest plan with the safeguards most teams want before taking real orders. Launch and Scale can also be paid by bank transfer.

Scale: from $299 per month

Scale runs two servers plus a dedicated background worker with autoscaling, and includes 2,800 compute hours, 100 GB of data transfer, three Cloud seats, five preview environments, 14-day backups, a custom backend domain, vector search requests, advanced search analytics and priority Cloud support. Log drains are available as a $50 per month add-on.

Enterprise: custom pricing

Medusa describes Enterprise as including the Enterprise License, 24/7 support and platform SLAs. The pricing page also lists custom billing terms, an account manager, a dedicated support engineer, RBAC, SSO, audit logs, bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC), data sovereignty, SOC 2, a custom DPA and a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Pricing requires a sales conversation.

Medusa Cloud Overage and Usage Rates

Plan prices are starting points. Usage above the included amounts is billed on the next invoice at these rates, per the Medusa Cloud pricing docs as of October 2026. Add-ons are billed in advance and pro-rated from the day you add them.

For a quick sense of scale: if a Launch project ran 1,500 compute hours in a month, the extra 500 hours would add $80 at $0.16 per hour. A second long-lived environment for staging adds $60 a month on any plan.

Does Medusa Charge a GMV or Transaction Fee?

No. Medusa's pricing page says every plan has a 0% GMV platform fee, and self-hosted Medusa pays Medusa nothing at all. Your payment processor still charges its own rate. Stripe's standard US pricing is 2.9% + 30¢ per successful domestic card transaction, as of October 2026.

Self-Hosting Medusa: What It Costs

Self-hosting removes the Cloud subscription and replaces it with infrastructure you run. Medusa's deployment guide lists what a production deployment needs:

• A server instance that handles API requests and serves the Medusa Admin dashboard.
• A worker instance for scheduled jobs and subscribers, deployed from the same codebase in worker mode.
• PostgreSQL for application data.
• Redis, which Medusa recommends for caching, the event bus, the workflow engine and locking.
• At least 2 GB of RAM on the hosting plan, per the guide.
• Object storage such as S3 for files, which the guide recommends for production.

The installation docs require Node.js v22.22.0 or later (LTS versions only). Your storefront is a separate application and needs its own hosting.

Example: list prices on DigitalOcean

To show what the minimum looks like in dollars, here are DigitalOcean's published list prices as of October 2026 for one small setup that meets the guide's requirements. Other providers price differently, and this excludes storefront hosting, extra bandwidth, backups and monitoring.

Sources: DigitalOcean Droplet pricing, Managed Databases pricing and Spaces pricing. The infrastructure bill is usually the smaller part of self-hosting; patching, monitoring, upgrades and on-call time are the larger one.

Costs That Are Not on the Pricing Page

Medusa ships the commerce backend and admin. Most teams also pay for:

• Storefront development. Medusa provides a Next.js Starter Storefront, but production storefronts are usually customized or built from scratch.
• Integrations. Tax, search, email marketing, ERP and shipping connections either come from community plugins or need custom modules.
• Maintenance. Medusa ships frequent releases (v2.22.1 was published October 23, 2026), and staying current means testing and deploying upgrades.
• DevOps. Self-hosted teams own uptime, backups, security patches and scaling.

Published estimates come from agencies that sell Medusa development, so treat them as ranges rather than benchmarks. WeframeTech (updated February 2026) says global agencies typically charge $50,000 or more for a baseline Medusa store and estimates $336,000 to $500,000+ for an in-house team over a 6 to 8 month build. Tameta Tech (December 2025) puts agency support at $500 a month for small brands, about $5,000 to $10,000 a month for 100 to 200 hours, and $10,000 to $15,000+ for 300 to 400 hours.

Which Medusa Option Should You Choose?

• Evaluating or building: Develop, or self-host locally. Develop's compute cap and lack of backups make it a poor fit for live orders.
• First production store, small team: Launch. Autoscaling, backups and custom storefront domains start here, and $99 a month is usually cheaper than the engineering hours to replicate them.
• Growing traffic or several engineers: Scale, for the background worker, three Cloud seats, longer backup retention and priority support.
• Compliance, SSO or RBAC requirements: Enterprise, since RBAC and SSO are Enterprise Edition materials.
• Strong DevOps team and cost control: Self-host. The license is free, and infrastructure can start under $100 a month at list prices.

Reality Check

Medusa's pricing is low at the software layer. The 0% GMV fee holds at any revenue, and the self-serve Cloud plans are priced per month with metered usage rather than by sales volume. The trade-off is that Medusa is a framework: your team builds the storefront, chooses and maintains integrations, and owns the code. For developer-led teams that want that control, the economics work. For teams without engineers on staff, development and maintenance costs will dominate the budget.

If you are weighing Medusa against other headless platforms, see our comparison of the best Medusa alternatives.

When a Managed Commerce Backend Fits Better

Some teams want an API-first backend without operating the commerce engine themselves. Swell is a hosted, headless commerce platform: you build the frontend you want against its APIs, and Swell runs the backend. According to Swell's features page, it includes native subscription billing, unlimited product variants, B2B selling tools and a visual theme editor for non-developers. The developer docs cover the API, SDKs and app framework.

Swell's pricing works differently from Medusa Cloud. Plans are $29 (Starter), $79 (Basic), $299 (Standard) and $2,250 (Unlimited) per month billed yearly, each including trailing-12-month sales up to $50K, $250K, $1M and $5M, with an overage of 2%, 1.5%, 1% and 0.4% above that ceiling. Custom pricing applies above $10M in annual sales. See Swell pricing for details. Swell offers a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Medusa cost?

The open-source framework costs $0. Medusa Cloud costs from $29 per month (Develop), $99 per month (Launch) or $299 per month (Scale), plus usage above each plan's allowances, and Enterprise is custom-priced (as of October 2026). Total cost also includes development, storefront hosting and maintenance.

What is Medusa Cloud pricing?

Medusa Cloud has four plans: Develop from $29/month, Launch from $99/month, Scale from $299/month and custom Enterprise. Plans bill monthly in advance, and usage above included compute, data transfer, storage, build minutes, emails and other resources is billed on the next invoice.

Is Medusa free to use?

Yes. The repository is MIT-licensed, so you can self-host Medusa without paying a license fee. The exception is the Enterprise Edition code for RBAC and SSO, which requires a commercial agreement with MedusaJS, Inc.

Does Medusa take a percentage of sales?

No. Medusa's pricing page lists a 0% GMV platform fee on every Cloud plan, and self-hosted stores pay Medusa nothing. You still pay your payment processor's fees.

What happens if I go over my Medusa Cloud limits?

On Launch and Scale, extra compute is billed at $0.16 per hour, data transfer at $0.125 per GB and database storage at $0.50 per GB-month, among other rates. Develop caps compute at 600 hours and emails at 1,000 a month instead of billing overage for them.

What do I need to self-host Medusa?

A server instance, a worker instance, PostgreSQL, Redis and object storage, on hosting with at least 2 GB of RAM. Medusa requires Node.js v22.22.0 or later (LTS versions only). The storefront is hosted separately.

What does Medusa Enterprise include?

Medusa lists the Enterprise License (RBAC and SSO), 24/7 support, platform SLAs with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, a dedicated support engineer, audit logs, BYOC, SOC 2 and custom billing terms. Pricing is not published.