AddTheShop vs Snipcart
Snipcart is the developer's classic for adding a cart to a static site. It is also showing its age: a monthly minimum, product data kept in HTML attributes that must be crawled, and little movement since it was acquired. AddTheShop takes the same drop-in idea and hosts the catalogue so your AI can manage it.
| Snipcart | AddTheShop | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee | 2% with a $20/mo minimum (Standard) | None |
| Transaction fee | 2% + gateway fees | 2% + Stripe's fee |
| Where products live | In your HTML as data attributes, validated by crawling your page | In AddTheShop; the page only needs a store key |
| Checkout | Snipcart's own modal checkout | Stripe hosted checkout |
| AI management | None | OAuth MCP server, REST API |
| Setup | Script + data attributes per product | Script + div, or buy buttons |
The attribute approach and its cost
Snipcart reads price and name from attributes on your buy buttons and then crawls your page to confirm them. It works, and it keeps your product data in your repo, but every price change is a deploy and the validation step is a source of mysterious failures. AddTheShop keeps products in your dashboard, so changing a price is one click or one sentence to your AI, and checkout always validates against the database.
Fees
Snipcart's 2% comes with a $20 monthly minimum. AddTheShop's 2% comes with no minimum. Small shops notice.
For AI-built sites
Snipcart was designed for developers hand-writing HTML. AddTheShop is designed for the person who prompted a site and wants to sell from it, with a prompt-based install and an MCP server for the AI that built the site.