As of March 24, 2025, Shopware has introduced a Fair Usage Policy. The Community Edition remains open source and free to use. But merchants generating more than one million euros in annual revenue through their shop will lose access to Shopware Account and Store without a paid plan. On top of that, everyone is now required to report their revenue. Here's exactly what has changed, who it affects, and how to make a clear decision between the Community Edition and Rise, Evolve, or Beyond.
What Shopware Changed on March 24, 2025
Hardly anyone enjoys reading licensing changes. You should read these if your shop runs on Shopware. On March 24, 2025, Shopware updated its terms and conditions and introduced a Fair Usage Policy. The policy affects everyone using the free Community Edition.
The core of the change can be summarized in three sentences. The Community Edition remains open source and may continue to be used free of charge. Merchants with annual shop revenue below one million euros retain full access to Shopware Account and Shopware Store. Those above that threshold will need a paid plan — Rise, Evolve, or Beyond — to maintain that access.
There is also an obligation that many have overlooked. All Community Edition users must report their revenue to Shopware. A dedicated extension handles this, and the first deadline already passed on June 30, 2025. Anyone who hasn't dealt with this yet is in non-compliance without realizing it.
The Nuance That Many Reports Miss
Blog posts and agency newsletters often oversimplified the change, suggesting that large shops can no longer use the Community Edition. That's not accurate, and the distinction matters.
The software itself remains free. Nobody will take your shop offline if you grow past one million euros in revenue. What you lose without a paid plan is access to Shopware Account and Shopware Store. That may sound manageable at first. In practice, it rarely is. Extensions and their updates run through the Store. A shop without access to plugin updates is not a stable long-term setup — it's accumulating maintenance debt. Security updates for extensions, compatibility across version upgrades, and new features all depend on exactly that access.
In practical terms, the policy comes down to a straightforward formula. Small shops change nothing. Growing shops need to run the numbers. And shops already well above the threshold need to make a decision.
Why Shopware Is Doing This
You can find the change frustrating. You should still understand it, because it follows a logic that is spreading across the open-source world. Platforms like Shopware fund development, security, and their ecosystem through paid plans. At the same time, thousands of high-revenue shops ran on the Community Edition for years without contributing anything. The Fair Usage Policy draws a line here. Low-revenue merchants pay nothing. Those generating significant revenue through the platform are expected to contribute to the ecosystem.
Shopware is not alone in taking this step. In 2025, Pimcore moved its Community Edition from GPLv3 to a proprietary license, likewise with a revenue threshold — in that case, five million euros. We analyzed what this means for Pimcore users in a dedicated article on the Pimcore license change. The pattern is the same, and more vendors will follow. Anyone making platform decisions today should treat licensing models as a moving variable, not a fixed constant.
What the Paid Plans Cost and What They Offer
The Rise, Evolve, and Beyond plans differ in features and support. Rise is the entry point for growing merchants. Evolve and Beyond target larger businesses and include, among other things, Shopware's B2B features, expanded support, and additional commercial features. For merchants already considering B2B functionality, better workflows, or reliable service levels, upgrading plans is often less of a constraint and more of an opportunity. You're not just paying for Store access — you're getting features that would otherwise require custom development.
That said, the numbers are worth running. Pricing is tied to revenue, and depending on shop size, the amounts can be significant. The decision should rest on solid calculations, not the first offer that comes along.
Your Three Options, Honestly Assessed
If your shop exceeds the revenue threshold, there are three paths forward — and each comes at a cost.
The first is a paid plan. You stay fully within the ecosystem, receive updates and support, and depending on the plan, gain additional features. The cost is a new line item in your budget. For most shops above the threshold, this is the right path — especially when the shop is central to the business.
The second is continuing with the Community Edition without Store access. This is technically possible and economically an illusion in most cases. Extensions would need to be sourced and maintained manually, updates become projects in their own right, and with each new Shopware version the risk grows. This path buys time while building up maintenance debt. It rarely works as a permanent solution.
The third path is the more fundamental question: is Shopware still the right platform? That question is legitimate, and sometimes a licensing change is the right prompt to ask it. The answer, however, often still favors Shopware. The platform leads the German market, with 115 of the 1,000 largest German online shops running on it. A platform migration costs many times more than any paid plan. It needs to be well-reasoned, not just gut-driven.
There is, by the way, a fourth path — and it's the only genuinely wrong one: doing nothing and ignoring the reporting requirement. That doesn't postpone the decision; it just makes your starting position worse.
How to Get Clarity in an Afternoon
Assessing your situation doesn't require a consulting engagement — just four answers. First: what is your shop's actual annual revenue through Shopware? Second: which Store extensions are in use, and how critical are they to operations? Third: have you submitted your revenue report? Fourth: is there anything coming up in the next twelve months that would justify a higher plan anyway — B2B features, a major version upgrade, or something similar?
Those four answers will almost automatically show you where you stand. We have delivered more than 45 Shopware projects and have guided this kind of assessment many times. The outcome is always the same: the decision is easier than expected once the facts are on the table. It only feels hard when you keep putting it off.
What You Should Do Now
If your shop is below the threshold, submit your revenue report and carry on as before. If you're above it — or will be within the next two years — make the plan decision now, while no urgent update or peak trading season is forcing your hand. And if you're not sure where you stand, that's exactly where to start.
How we approach these assessments and what else we build with Shopware is shown on our Shopware page. If a platform migration turns out to be the right move, you can read why it doesn't have to be a big bang in our article on replatforming without a big bang. All further analysis is available in our Shopware Insights.