A Snipcart alternative with no transaction fee
Snipcart solved a real problem before most people knew they had it: you have a website, you want to sell from it, and you do not want to rebuild the whole thing on a platform. Drop in a script, add a few HTML attributes, get a cart. That design has aged well.
The pricing has aged less well.
What each one actually costs
Snipcart takes 2% of every transaction, on top of whatever Stripe or PayPal already charge you. Below $1,000 in monthly sales the 2% is replaced by a $20/month minimum. (Verified against snipcart.com/pricing, July 2026 — check it yourself before making a decision on it.)
Brainerce charges a flat monthly fee per store and 0% on transactions. Pro is $25/month, Growth is $70/month, and there is a free tier. Your gateway fee is the only percentage anyone takes.
The difference is structural rather than cosmetic. One price scales with your revenue; the other does not.
The break-even, with the assumptions written down
Brainerce bills by orders and Snipcart bills by revenue, so any comparison depends on your average order value. The table below assumes AOV of $50. Neither column includes payment-gateway fees, because both models sit on top of those identically.
| Monthly sales | Orders | Snipcart (2%) | Brainerce | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1,000 | 20 | $20 (floor) | $25 (Pro) | –$5 |
| $5,000 | 100 | $100 | $25 (Pro) | $75 |
| $15,000 | 300 | $300 | $25 (Pro) | $275 |
| $25,000 | 500 | $500 | $70 (Growth) | $430 |
| $50,000 | 1,000 | $1,000 | $70 (Growth) | $930 |
| $100,000 | 2,000 | $2,000 | $270 (Growth + overage) | $1,730 |
Two notes on that last row, because the number looks too good otherwise. Growth includes 1,000 orders and bills $0.20 for each one beyond that, so 2,000 orders is $70 + $200. And at $100,000/month the 2% line has become $24,000 a year — which is a hire, not a line item.
Break-even is around $1,250/month in sales. Under that, Snipcart's floor is cheaper. Over it, the gap widens every month you grow, and it never closes.
When Snipcart is still the right answer
This is a vendor's blog, so treat the recommendation accordingly — but there are real cases where we are the wrong choice:
- You are selling under ~$1,000/month and want to stay there. $20 beats $25 and the setup is genuinely simpler. Take the $20.
- You want a cart and nothing else. Snipcart's scope is deliberately narrow and it executes that narrowly-scoped job well. Brainerce is a commerce backend — inventory, orders, customers, shipping, discounts, multi-currency. If you do not need that, you are carrying weight you will not use.
- You have a working Snipcart store and no pain. "Cheaper at scale" is not a reason to migrate a store that is fine. Wait until the 2% actually annoys you.
What you get instead of a cart script
Where the two genuinely diverge is what happens after checkout. Brainerce is the backend, not a widget: inventory with real variant modelling and stock reservations, order management, customer accounts, shipping rates, discounts and bundles, multi-currency, and an API your frontend talks to.
That also means bringing your own gateway. Stripe, PayPal, and Israeli providers including Cardcom, Grow, Max and Takbull connect directly — the money moves between your customer and your processor, and we are not in the middle of it. That is the mechanical reason we can charge 0%: we never touch the transaction.
Migrating
There is no import button, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. A Snipcart catalogue lives in your HTML as data-item-* attributes rather than in a database, so the move is: create your products in Brainerce (the dashboard, the API, or by pointing an AI assistant at our docs), then swap the cart script for SDK calls. For a small catalogue it is an afternoon. For a large one, the API and the AI Manager's bulk import do most of the typing.
The frontend you already have stays exactly as it is. That was always the good idea in Snipcart's design, and we did not change it.
Start free — no card, no transaction fee, and you can check the arithmetic above against your own numbers with the fee calculator.