Niblr: A Shopify Alternative With No Transaction Fees

Niblr is an open-source commerce platform that charges a flat monthly hosting fee and takes 0% of your sales — no per-transaction cut, ever. You bring your own Stripe or Razorpay keys, so payment processing goes straight to you, and your customer data stays yours. If you've been looking for a Shopify alternative that doesn't tax every order, that's the whole idea.

Does Niblr charge transaction fees?

No. Niblr never takes a percentage of your sales. The hosted plan is a flat fee — $10/month during beta — and that's the entire cost from the platform's side. Because you connect your own payment gateway, the only per-order cost is what your processor (Stripe, Razorpay, etc.) charges you directly. Niblr sits out of the money flow entirely.

This is the opposite of the marketplace model, where the platform adds its own cut on top of processing fees. On a store doing real volume, that cut is often the single largest platform expense — and it grows precisely as you succeed.

How is Niblr different from Shopify?

Three structural differences, all pointing the same direction — you own more of your store:

• Your payment keys. You configure your own Stripe/Razorpay account. Payouts land in your account on your processor's schedule, and Niblr never touches the funds.
• Your data. Products, customers, and orders live in your own Postgres database and export in standard formats. There's no proprietary lock-in on the way out.
• Your infrastructure, if you want it. Niblr is MIT-licensed and open source. The hosted plan and the self-hosted code are the same codebase, so you can move between them in either direction without a migration project.

Can I move off the hosted plan later?

Yes — and that's the point of the architecture. Because hosted and self-hosted are the same application, "leaving" is just deploying the code to your own Vercel and Postgres and pointing your database at it. No exit fee, no sales call, no data held hostage. The worst-case migration is the same path a self-hoster takes on day one.

Do I need to be technical to use it?

Not on a hosted plan. You pick a template, compose pages from blocks in the admin, and run the store day-to-day without touching code. Self-hosting is where some setup is expected — deploying to Vercel and setting a handful of environment variables — and that path is documented in the self-hosting guide.

Who is Niblr for?

Independent merchants, makers, and small brands who are selling enough that a percentage-of-sales fee has started to sting — and who'd rather own their storefront, their customer relationships, and their payment flow than rent them. If that's you, the flat-fee, keys-and-data-you-own model is built for exactly your situation.

Ready to try it? Create a store on the hosted plan, or read the self-hosting guide to run it yourself.