Realistic build cost — Hyvä vs PWA Studio at the same scope?

For a typical mid-volume Magento store (50 – 500 SKUs, B2C, 1 storefront, no exotic UX):

• Hyvä build: $5 – 20k. Hyvä parent license + child theme bootstrap + brand tokens + PLP/PDP/header/footer/cart re-implementation in Tailwind + Alpine. 4 – 12 weeks elapsed time.
• PWA Studio build: $50 – 200k+. Apollo Client setup + GraphQL schema design + React component library + service-worker config + bundle optimization + SSR / SEO config + headless cache strategy. 16 – 40 weeks elapsed time.

The gap is roughly 8x and it doesn’t close as scope grows. Custom features in PWA Studio cost more to build (every feature touches React + GraphQL + Apollo cache) and more to test. The "PWA Studio is faster long-term" argument doesn’t hold up against production data — most teams are still shipping features faster on Hyvä three years in.