Hidden costs to watch on each platform?

Both have surprise costs that don’t show up in the initial sales pitch.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud hidden costs:

• Revenue-share creep. SFCC pricing scales with GMV — every successful year increases license cost. Renewals at $1B GMV often surprise CFOs.
• Sandbox limits. SFCC sandboxes are quota-limited (development sandbox, staging, etc). Hitting limits means buying more environments at premium rates.
• Tier-1 SI lock-in. The certified-SI ecosystem is a small club; rate negotiations are limited. Switching SIs is expensive (knowledge transfer + certification).
• Cartridge upgrades. Salesforce platform upgrades sometimes break cartridge integrations; tier-1 SI fixes are billable.
• Einstein AI seat fees. Salesforce charges per-seat for Einstein features that started "free" in evaluations.

Adobe Commerce hidden costs:

• Hosting overruns at peak. Adobe Commerce Cloud auto-scales but the bill follows. Black Friday spikes can 2–3× a quarterly hosting bill.
• Extension dependency hell. Mid-market AC stores accumulate 30–60 third-party extensions. Upgrades become regression-test marathons. Budget $20k–$80k/yr for extension maintenance.
• Security patch lag. Adobe ships security patches monthly; if you don’t apply within 30 days, breach risk rises sharply. Patch-application is real ops work — $5k–$20k/patch with regression.
• Hyvä theme licensing. Hyvä is paid (~€1k/yr/store-view + per-developer fees). Often missed in initial budgets.

Both platforms cost more in year 2 than year 1 — plan for it.