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For a self-assessment first pass, yes. For a final sign-off audit, no — that’s a 1–3 day paid engagement.

Here’s the honest breakdown of what these 50 questions can and cannot do:

• What 5 minutes covers: the questions a senior Magento operator can answer from memory + a quick admin-panel glance — patch level, 2FA on/off, FPC enabled, indexers in schedule mode, cron running, composer audit last result, sessions on Redis. About 35–45 of the 50 questions fall here.
• What 5 minutes can’t cover: things requiring code-reading or query-running — how many custom modules use deprecated APIs, whether a quote workflow still validates after the last patch, whether canonical tags are correct on every layered-nav permutation. Skip those, then ask your dev team. About 5–10 of the 50.
• What this checklist deliberately doesn’t do: custom-module security review, slow-query log analysis, dependency vulnerability deep-scan, ERP integration data-integrity check. Those are the deep-audit territory.

So: 5 minutes for the self-assessment, then a paid 1–3 day deep audit ($1.5k–$3k) if your overall grade is C or below, or any single category is at D.

Honest answer: directionally accurate within ~15–25% for the median case in each GMV bracket, less accurate at the extremes. It’s a first-pass screening tool, not a procurement-grade quote.

What it gets right:

• License tier ordering. Magento Open Source $0 vs Adobe Commerce $30k–$150k+ vs SFCC $200k+ — the ranking won’t change.
• Per-tx fee impact at scale. Shopify Plus 0.15% adds up identically every time; the math is exact.
• Dev cost order of magnitude. A $5M GMV store on Magento needs ~$40k upfront + $30k/yr ongoing — the bracket holds across most engagements I’ve seen.

Where it’s less accurate:

• SFCC and Adobe Commerce license — both are negotiated. Tier-1 SI partners often hold ±30% pricing power. The calculator uses public list-equivalent ranges; your actual quote may be lower (negotiated) or higher (uplift for Adobe Commerce Cloud Pro vs Starter).
• Custom dev edge cases — if your scope includes headless commerce, ERP integration, or multi-region inventory orchestration, dev cost can be 2–3x the calculator’s number.
• Region-specific pricing — the model assumes US dev rates. EU SI partners run 0.7–0.9x; India / Eastern Europe freelancers run 0.3–0.5x; Tier-1 US/UK SIs can run 1.2–1.5x.

Use it to rule out platforms and frame the conversation, not to write a budget line.

Every entry in the database is something I’ve installed, configured, and shipped on a real client store between 2019 and 2026 — no “found-it-on-the-marketplace” entries, no AI-generated brochure summaries.

The shortlist for each of the 12 categories is filtered through five gates:

1. Live install — ran on a paying-client production store for at least 90 days. If I’ve only POC’d it on staging, it doesn’t make the list.
2. Active maintenance — vendor shipped a release in the past 12 months. Silent vendors get cut even if the module is technically excellent.
3. Pricing transparency — vendor publishes a public price (not “contact us for a quote”). Enterprise-only modules get tagged but de-prioritized.
4. Hyvä compatibility known — I’ve either tested it on a Hyvä storefront or read the vendor’s explicit compat statement.
5. No undisclosed conflicts — doesn’t silently break checkout, search, or admin when stacked with the other 3-4 modules in its category.

That filters ~150 candidates I’ve touched down to the 60 entries you see. Re-curated quarterly — if a vendor goes silent, they’re marked deprecated and rotated out at the next refresh.

The calculator output is a budgeting range, not a quote. The low–high spread (-20% / +50%) intentionally absorbs the things you can’t see from outside your codebase: undocumented customisations, vendor extensions that have gone silent, hidden cron-orchestrated integrations, and the dependency-resolution chaos that only surfaces when you actually run composer update.

From my own data on 200+ shipped upgrades:

• ~78% of projects landed inside the calculator’s low–high range without a change order.
• ~17% needed a small change order (median +12%) usually for an extension swap-out the audit caught.
• ~5% needed a substantial replan — almost always when the client had hidden a major customisation from the audit step (rare, but it happens).

To turn the calculator output into a hard number, run a paid 1–3 day audit ($1.5k–$3k). Post-audit my fixed quote falls within ±5% of the audit estimate.

Three patterns work, in increasing complexity and cost:

• Quiz-based shade finder — 5–7 questions on undertone, depth, finish, climate. Built natively in Magento with custom product attributes + a thin Alpine.js quiz UI on Hyvä. Conversion lift typically 0.8–1.4x baseline. Cost: ~$3k–$8k.
• AR try-on (Modiface / YouCam Makeup / Perfect Corp) — live camera overlay on PDP. Integration via REST + JS SDK. Conversion lift 1.4–2.8x on PDPs with AR. Cost: ~$8k–$20k integration + $1k–$5k/mo licence to the AR vendor depending on traffic.
• Hybrid (quiz → AR confirm) — quiz narrows to 3 shades, AR confirms the pick. Best conversion in my data.

For brands under ~$5M GMV, start quiz-only. AR pays for itself above ~$5M because the licence amortises across volume.

Both are industry-standard vehicle databases, but they cover different markets and price differently:

• TecDoc (owned by TecAlliance) — the European standard. ~80,000 vehicle records, deep coverage of EU makes (VW, BMW, Mercedes, Stellantis, Peugeot). Most EU-based aftermarket distributors run on TecDoc. Licensing: ~€3k–€15k/yr depending on scope. Magento integration via XML feed import on a daily schedule.
• SEMA Data Coop — the US standard. ~100,000+ vehicle records covering US makes (Ford, GM, Stellantis-NA, Toyota-USA, Honda-USA), light trucks, motorcycles, ATVs. Coverage of EU makes is shallow. Licensing: ~$2.5k–$8k/yr. Format is ACES (Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard) + PIES (Product Information Exchange Standard).
• Hybrid — for global brands, license both and merge in Akeneo PIM before the data hits Magento. Adds ~$5k–$10k of one-time integration work but covers ~95% of global vehicle parc.

Magento side: vehicle records become a custom entity (auto_vehicle) with attributes year, make, model, trim, engine, drive-type. Product-to-vehicle compatibility is a many-to-many junction table. Layered nav filters by selected vehicle. I default to SEMA Data Coop for US-only stores, TecDoc for EU-focused stores, hybrid above $10M GMV with global ambitions.