Hyvä went free in November 2025, and for a few weeks that was the only thing anyone in the Magento world talked about. The licence fee that used to sit at the top of every migration quote disappeared overnight.
It was also the smallest line on the invoice.
If a free theme is the reason you are now looking at a Hyvä migration, the number you actually need is not the licence. It is everything underneath it, and none of that got cheaper.
Your Magento store has two halves. The back office runs your catalog, pricing, stock, and orders. The storefront is everything a shopper sees.
Hyvä replaces the storefront half. Magento's default storefront, Luma, was designed for a web that no longer exists: it asks a phone to download and run a large amount of code before anyone can tap anything, and on a mid-range Android that shows up as a page that just sits there. Hyvä discards that layer and rebuilds it with a fraction of the weight.
Everything else stays. Your products, prices, integrations, admin panel, order flow, reporting: untouched. That is the whole reason a Hyvä project is measured in weeks instead of quarters. You are replacing one layer, not the system, which also makes it a far smaller bet than the full headless rebuild many owners get talked into.
On 10 November 2025 the Hyvä team released the theme and its supporting modules as open source, under the same dual licence Magento Open Source itself uses. That part is real and permanent. The theme costs nothing.
The rest of the product line still has a price on it. Hyvä's own licence page lists Hyvä UI at €250 per store, Hyvä Checkout at €1,000, Hyvä Commerce at €3,000 a year, and Hyvä Enterprise at €7,500 a year for Adobe Commerce stores.
Checkout is the one worth pausing on, because it is the page where your money is actually made and it is sold separately from the free theme. Whether you need it depends on how much of your revenue leaks between the cart and the confirmation page, which is a question your analytics can answer today, before you commit to anything.
Community support on the free theme comes from the community. Paid support comes with the paid products. For most owners that distinction never matters, because your agency is the support. It matters a great deal if you were planning to run this in-house.
Here is the part most quotes get wrong, and the reason two Hyvä estimates for the same store can differ by a factor of three.
Every third-party extension on your store was written against Luma. Hyvä's own documentation is blunt about what that means: modules built for Luma or Blank require a compatibility module to work, and that module re-implements the parts of the extension that do not work out of the box on a Hyvä storefront.
Some of your extensions already have one, maintained by the vendor or the community. Some do not. For those, someone writes it, and that someone is billing you.
So the honest version of a Hyvä estimate starts with a list, not a design. Layered navigation, product reviews, the loyalty programme, the size-guide popup, the third-party payment method your finance team insisted on in 2019, the abandoned-cart tool nobody remembers buying. Each one is either already supported, cheap to bridge, or the thing that quietly doubles your timeline.
In our own migrations the number almost never turns on the theme work. It turns on that list. An owner who sends it over before asking for a quote gets a real number back; an owner who asks "how much for Hyvä" gets a range wide enough to be useless to both of us.
Speed pays, and there is decent evidence for how much. Google, Deloitte, and 55 measured 37 European and American brand sites across more than 30 million sessions, with data collected at the end of 2019, and found that a 0.1 second improvement in load time lifted retail conversion by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%. Read it as a direction rather than a promise for your store, since those were large brands and the measurement is now several years old. The direction is consistent with everything we see on client stores: shoppers do not wait.
The SEO argument you will hear alongside it is weaker than it sounds. Google confirms that Core Web Vitals feed its ranking systems, and in the same breath says it will still show the most relevant content even when the page experience is poor. A faster store does not out-rank a more useful one. Treat the speed gain as a conversion investment that helps your rankings a little, not as a search strategy.
Skip it if your storefront was already rebuilt recently and your mobile pages load fine. You would be paying to solve a problem you do not have.
Skip it if you are seriously considering leaving Magento in the next year or so. Sort the platform question first; there is no point rebuilding a storefront you plan to abandon, and if that decision is still open, the Open Source versus Adobe Commerce comparison is the more useful thing to read first.
Postpone it if your Magento release is already out of support. Upgrade the core first, then rebuild the storefront on a version that still receives fixes.
And skip it if your real problem is that customers abandon checkout. That is usually payment options, shipping costs revealed too late, or a form that asks for too much. A fast storefront will not fix any of those, and you will have spent the budget that would have.
Four stages, and only one of them is interesting to look at.
It starts with an audit of what you are running: extensions, custom work, and where your current storefront is actually slow. Then the storefront gets rebuilt, either keeping your existing design or taking the opportunity to refresh it. Then the compatibility work, which is the unglamorous middle where most of the hours go. Then testing on real devices and real network conditions before anything goes live.
For most mid-sized stores that lands in weeks rather than months. The variable is the extension list, which is why it comes first.
If you are weighing this up and want an honest read on whether it is worth the budget for your store specifically, that sort of assessment is most of what our Hyvä theme development work starts with. We tend to open with the extension audit rather than a design mockup, because that is where the answer usually lives.
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