A self-hosted store lives on a VPS you rent, not on a shared SaaS tenant. NitroCart is that product: orders, media, and admin sit on your IP. The license has no percentage of turnover. Start covers 1 IP, Pro up to 5, Enterprise up to 15.
You take a server and a deploy path — a Telegram Mini App in three clicks. You gain data on your disk, payments by URL or API, and the option to lock admin by IP or VPN. You do not get a fully managed platform that hides the machine: OS updates, disk backups, and VPS uptime monitoring stay the responsibility of whoever rents the server, not the engine's. If that trade is a problem, the engine is the wrong tool — we say so plainly in When NitroCart is not a fit.
Three recurring jobs shape this category: a dropshipping store where the owner does not want to hand a cut of turnover to a marketplace; a reseller running several price lists on separate IPs under one license; and an agency that needs to stand up a client pilot fast without a monthly subscription to someone else's platform. Each has its own decision criterion — total cost of ownership over a year, how fast a theme changes without a developer, and whether the admin panel can be closed off from bot scanners.
Read what a self-hosted store engine is, then Shopify vs NitroCart for paid traffic, Dropshipping on your own VPS: no Shopify apps tax, or a reseller catalog on your storefront. Pricing is on the homepage.
Migrating off an existing platform is its own topic in this category. A store already running on Shopify and hitting transaction-fee ceilings or app-store limits benefits from moving from Shopify to self-hosted — a real payback calculation for a yearly license against a monthly subscription plus per-order fees, with no invented one-click catalog import (there isn't one). Teams comparing platforms head-on will find NitroCart against the better-known store engines with a total-cost-of-ownership table, a CMS-angle comparison for anyone choosing by content-management convenience, and a direct answer on open source — NitroCart is self-hosted, not open source; the license is proprietary and that is stated up front.
Agencies and freelancers who rebuild a client's store from scratch on every relaunch should read what each relaunch actually costs first — it compares billable rebuild hours against one license reused across projects. Anyone still deciding between launching fresh or reselling someone else's catalog will find both angles covered before committing to a license, not after.
The category's throughline: self-hosted does not mean harder, it means the server and the data belong to whoever rents the VPS, not the platform. The trade is responsibility for the box itself — OS patching, disk backups, and uptime monitoring stay with the renter, the engine does not absorb them. When that trade does not fit the business, the honest list of limits is in When NitroCart is not a fit.