Shopify is brilliant for the merchant who needs a shop next Tuesday and has a thousand SKUs already in a spreadsheet. For everyone else (the maker with twelve products, the studio with a tight visual identity, the trader who hates paying platform rent) a Stripe-Checkout-plus-bespoke-storefront build is faster to live, cheaper to run, and infinitely more flexible after launch.
The numbers usually work like this. A Shopify Basic plan runs £25 a month plus 2% transaction fees plus app subscriptions that quietly add another £30-£60 a month for anything serious. A Stripe storefront costs the build, then Stripe's flat 1.5%+20p per transaction, and hosting is a tenner on Vercel. Over five years, the platform-tax difference funds two redesigns.
The catch is that Shopify owns the operational surface (orders, fulfilment hooks, customer accounts, abandoned-cart emails) and a bespoke build needs to either replicate that or skip it. For 80% of my clients, 'orders to a Postgres table, fulfilment to Shipstation, customer accounts not needed' is a fine answer. For the other 20%, Shopify is still right.
If you're sizing up the choice for your own shop: count your SKUs, count your monthly orders, and add up your year-one platform tax. If the bespoke build pays itself back within 24 months, take the bespoke. If not, Shopify is the right grown-up answer.