I Built a Headless WordPress Multisite Platform. It Worked Perfectly. Then the Server Bill Arrived.

This is a story about building something technically impressive that couldn't survive as a business. Everything worked. The architecture was solid. The client loved it. And we still had to abandon the model. If you're building platforms on top of WordPress — especially headless — this might save you six months of work. The idea A few years ago, before AI-assisted development was a thing, my team and I set out to build a platform that would let anyone spin up a fully functional ecommerce store through a guided wizard. The pitch was simple: answer a few questions, pick a template, and get a live WooCommerce store with sample products, payment gateway configured, and a custom domain — all automated. No technical knowledge required. The twist: the frontend was headless. Every store ran a decoupled frontend that pulled data from WordPress via the REST API. The result was a shopping experience that felt like a native app — instant page transitions, snappy product filtering, smooth cart inter