Models what the JudyBees software stack costs per month next to what the marketplace actually makes — vendor membership dues plus commission on sales, straight from JudyBees's own Business Model & Growth Strategy. Toggle platforms, set ad spend, and slide the revenue drivers to see where it breaks even.
Pricing reflects each platform's published rates as of September 2026, plus n3tworth's direct account rates where noted. Toggle any platform on or off, adjust the ad spend field, or move the sliders below to model different scenarios.
Figures above cover software/platform fees and your own ad spend input, not developer maintenance hours or vendor payment-processing pass-throughs.
| Platform | Use Case | Price | In Use | Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Flat Rate | Runs the live JudyBees storefront and checkout once the custom Shopify 2.0 theme is built and deployed — plus inventory, orders, and the 1,300+ Printify POD catalog. | $105.00/mo Grow plan — required to run the Live Rate Calculator add-on, which is what lets each vendor set their own shipping zones and rates. | Required | Hybrid |
| Shopify Live Rate Calculator Add-On | Enables third-party calculated shipping rates on the Grow plan — the piece that lets every vendor define their own shipping zones and rates instead of inheriting one storewide table. Paramount for a multi-vendor marketplace. | $20.00/mo Flat add-on charge on monthly billing; waived on annual Shopify plans. | Required | Hybrid |
| Community Forum & Help Center Built Into Shopify | Runs inside the Shopify store (blog plus store records); sign-in uses Shopify customer accounts. Posting and replies run on n3tworth's hosting, covered under the n3tworth agreement. Replaces the Webflow and Memberstack setup. Vendor dues are collected through ShipTurtle, and shopper-to-maker messaging runs through ShipTurtle too. | $0 extra Included with Shopify, so it's excluded from the totals below. | Required by default, not a toggle | Hybrid |
| Xano Planned | Moves the Community Forum to a dedicated database once usage outgrows Shopify (tracked on the launch checklist). The free tier is for development only (10 requests every 20 seconds), so it isn't counted here. | $99.00/mo Essential plan, billed monthly. |
|
Developer-Required |
| Anthropic API Usage-Based | Powers the store's AI work: reviewing new vendor applications, periodic compliance checks on live listings, and AI chat support for shoppers and vendors. Billed only for what's used, at Anthropic's current rates. Applications and chat run on Claude Sonnet 5.5 ($2 in / $10 out per million tokens); listing checks run on Claude Haiku 5.5 ($0.10 / $0.50). | ~$55.00/mo Estimate at the 150-vendor mix: ~25 applications ($1.50), ~3,000 listing checks ($1.35), ~2,000 chats ($52). Scales with chat volume. | Required | Developer-Required |
| Shopify Collabs Not Counted | Sources and discovers creator/affiliate talent through Shopify's built-in creator marketplace — signup, tracking, and payouts happen in GoAffPro instead. | Free to install 2.9% fee applies only to commission payouts actually processed — there's no subscription tier to toggle, so it's excluded from the totals below. | Required by default, not a toggle | Client-Friendly |
| GoAffPro Free Tier | Handles actual signup, affiliate tracking, and commission payouts for talent sourced through Shopify Collabs — the working half of JudyBees's affiliate program. Free Hobby plan covers unlimited affiliates; only upgrade if multi-level networks or custom branding become necessary. | Usage-Based FREE Hobby plan, unlimited affiliates. Premium (multi-level, branding) runs ~$49–89/mo; Business starts at $99/mo. |
Free · In Use
Paid (~$69) · In Use
None
|
Client-Friendly |
| ActiveCampaign Tiered | Email & lifecycle marketing for shoppers and vendors alike — welcome flows, abandoned cart, vendor onboarding sequences, and newsletters. | $61.80/mo | Required | Hybrid |
| Resend Free Tier, Then Paid | Transactional email the store sends itself: Hive Leader application confirmations, waitlist, approval, and decline letters. Required before launch. Separate from ActiveCampaign, which handles marketing and lifecycle email. Switch to Pro when daily volume nears 100 or monthly volume nears 3,000. | Usage-Based FREE plan: 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day, and 3 sending domains. Pro is $20/mo for 50,000 emails a month, no daily limit, and 10 domains; extra emails run $0.90 per 1,000. |
Free · In Use
Pro ($20) · In Use
None
|
Developer-Required |
| Dashcubes Flat Rate | Internal staff back-office and helpdesk ticketing system for managing JudyBees operations and support requests. | $123.60/mo | Required | Client-Friendly |
| AgencyAnalytics Per Client | Automated marketing/SEO reporting for JudyBees as a single client account — dashboards and scheduled reports instead of manual pulls. | $82.40/mo | Required | Client-Friendly |
| Loomly Flat Rate | Schedules and approves JudyBees's social content — vendor spotlights, Artisan Weekly, and campaign posts across channels. | $51.50/mo | Required | Client-Friendly |
| Make Usage-Based | Automates custom Shopify workflow features — vendor onboarding, order routing, and cross-tool syncing behind the scenes. | $12.00/mo Core plan, ~10,000 credits/mo, monthly billing. | Required | Developer-Required |
| Stripe Not Counted | Processes vendor membership dues, which ShipTurtle bills to each vendor through JudyBees' own Stripe account. Shopper order payments run through Shopify checkout and pass through to vendors unchanged, so they aren't JudyBees revenue or cost. | No monthly fee Standard 2.9% + $0.30 online rate. Not a subscription, so it's excluded from the totals below. | Required by default, not a toggle | Client-Friendly |
| ShipTurtle Tiered | The multi-vendor marketplace engine — vendor dashboards, order splitting, commission payouts, and shipping across every onboarded vendor. | $49.00/mo Basic plan. Higher vendor volume will need Peak ($109/mo) or Enterprise ($179/mo) as the vendor base grows. | Required | Hybrid |
| n3tworth (MSA) Optional | Ongoing development, design, marketing, and tech support for the JudyBees build under a master service agreement, rather than a flat retainer. Also includes 20% equity shares — not reflected in the dollar totals below, since equity isn't a monthly cash cost. | $1,000.00/mo + up to 38.46% of JudyBees's take-home revenue Live estimate at current slider positions: $0.00/mo. (38.46% = the equivalent of 2.5% of gross Worker-tier sales, expressed as a share of JudyBees's 6.5% commission.) |
|
Developer-Required |
| Advertising Spend You Set This | Monthly paid ad budget across Meta, Google, TikTok, etc. for customer acquisition — separate from the commission-funded Affiliate, Influencer, and Hive Leader growth loops. | Editable Type your planned monthly spend. Defaults to $0. |
$
|
Client-Friendly |
Every vendor starts free on Worker (6.5% commission, no monthly fee) and can upgrade to Forager or Queen Bee for a lower per-sale cut plus a flat monthly due. Each tier below has its own sales/mo slider — commission is calculated at that tier's own rate, and Forager/Queen Bee each add their fixed monthly due on top. AOV is shared across all three. Compared against the stack's "In Use Now" total plus your ad spend above.
Defaults above are calibrated to JudyBees's own 6-month vendor mix (150 vendors: ~128 Worker / 20 Forager / 3 Queen Bee) and GMV split. Payment processing (3%+$0.25/order) and international conversion (1.5%) pass through to vendors and aren't part of this revenue figure.
This build is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), architected on low-code/no-code platforms (Shopify, Make, Loomly, ActiveCampaign, Resend, ShipTurtle, GoAffPro, AgencyAnalytics, Dashcubes) specifically to keep startup costs low while JudyBees proves out its vendor and revenue model.
The Webflow → Liquiflow → Shopify conversion pipeline has been retired. The Shopify theme is written directly in code with Claude Code, and the Community Forum and Help Center run inside Shopify itself, with members signing in through their Shopify customer accounts. There's no conversion step to bottleneck, and JudyBees edits its own pages and content without a developer.
Community Forum. The forum launches inside Shopify at no extra cost. Once usage outgrows it (around 800 members, very long threads, or sustained heavy posting), it moves to a dedicated Xano database ($99/mo). Every thread, reply, member profile, badge, and RSVP is stored in Shopify in a form that exports directly, so the move carries all of it across. Nothing is locked in.
Recommended migration threshold: once JudyBees crosses roughly 4,000 active vendors and ~$3.2M in monthly GMV — the 3-year horizon in JudyBees's own growth strategy — it's time to plan the move to a fully native, custom-coded build. Past that point, ShipTurtle's per-vendor app architecture and Shopify's checkout customization ceiling start to constrain the platform.
Below that threshold, these platforms are the right call — low fixed cost, fast iteration, and margin that improves as the vendor base scales, per JudyBees's own cost structure notes. One caveat on the current numbers: Claude Code is tier-switchable in the table above — Max ($200/mo) while the build is in flight, Pro ($20/mo) once it's live — so check which tier is selected before quoting a total. Several rows above are still marked Developer-Required or Hybrid; ongoing development support (whether under the n3tworth MSA or another arrangement) is what keeps the stack running and evolving until that migration point.