What's the long-term maintenance burden?

Real talk — this is where most agencies undersell the cost. Going headless adds:

• Two codebases to maintain — Magento backend AND headless frontend. Each has its own dependency tree, security patches, deployment pipeline.
• Frontend developer skillset — You need a React / Vue / Astro engineer on retainer. Magento PHP devs can’t do this work.
• GraphQL schema drift — Each Magento upgrade may change GraphQL responses. We document a regression-test suite as part of the build.
• Service worker bugs — Stale-while-revalidate logic gets tricky for cart / checkout. Plan for ~2–4 hours/month of frontend tuning.

Our retainer (~$999–$2,499/month depending on size) covers all of this. If you don’t have a frontend dev on staff and don’t want a retainer, headless is the wrong call — stay on Hyvä.