Open source
The software is free. The hosting is what you pay for.
Squaark is an MIT-licensed ecommerce platform. You can download it, read it, change it, and run it on your own machine without paying anybody, forever. Squaark Cloud is that same software running on our servers, with the parts nobody enjoys doing taken care of.
One process and one file
Squaark is a Node application with a SQLite database. There is no cluster to stand up, no message queue and no separate search service to keep alive.
The same code either way
Hosted shops do not run a special edition with extra features. What we add is the hosting around it, not capability inside it.
Nothing phones home
A self-hosted install talks to nothing of ours. No licence check, no usage reporting, no account required to run it.
Leaving
Take the whole shop, not a CSV file
Export from the admin and you get everything: products, variants, images, orders, customers, pages and settings. Point a Squaark install at that file and you have your shop back, on your own machine, the same afternoon.
This is deliberate. A subscription that survives because leaving is painful is not a business we want to be running. Read the self-hosting docs
leaving, hypothetically
# 1. Export from the admin store.squaark # 2. Run it anywhere Node runs git clone https://github.com/Squaark/squaark node server.js --import store.squaark → localhost:3000 → products, orders, pages, customers
Which one
Host it yourself, or don't
Both are reasonable. It depends on whether looking after a server is something you have time for and enjoy.
| Comparison | Squaark Cloud | Self-hosted |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | A monthly subscription | Free, plus a server |
| Getting started | A few minutes | An afternoon, if you know your way around |
| HTTPS certificates | Issued and renewed for you | Yours to set up and watch |
| Updates and security patches | Applied for you | When you get to them |
| Backups | Nightly, off-site on Growth | Whatever you set up |
| Sending email | Configured and working | Your own provider and DNS records |
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
Try the hosted version first
It is the quickest way to see whether Squaark suits how you sell. If you decide you would rather run it yourself, everything you built comes with you.
Free for 7 days. No card needed to start.