Shopify or Die.

'Shopify or die' is the false binary the platforms sell — either rent their foundation or fail. The title is bait. The real question is what the rent actually costs once you read the whole lease.

Renting a platform is the right call to start. It's fast, it works, and building your own storefront on day one is a placeholder-grade mistake. The trap is never re-examining the decision once the rent starts scaling with your success.

Lock-in is the part of the lease written in small type: the transaction fees, the app-tax, the features you can't change and the data you can't fully leave with. It's cheap when you're small and a tax on growth when you're not.

Independence isn't rejecting every platform. It's knowing exactly which parts of the foundation you can't afford to rent.

The commerce logic, the customer relationship, the data — those are load-bearing, and renting them is renting your own business back from a landlord. Custom infrastructure is how 1Commerce LLC keeps those in-house.

The move is surgical, not ideological: rent the commodity, own the core. Platform lock-in is the tax you pay for renting someone else's foundation — so build the parts of the foundation that have to be yours.