We’re building Ever Works in public. Some things may be incomplete, missing, or broken while we continue improving the platform.We’re building Ever Works in public — expect a few rough edges.
Compare · Store builders
Hosted SaaS commerce platform
BigCommerce runs a working shop from the day you sign up — catalog, checkout, payments, tax and shipping, with B2B depth sold as a separately quoted add-on on the top tier. Ever Works researches the topic, writes the directory content, generates the site and keeps it improving on a schedule, with content and code in your Git. Its Store builder is coming soon.
BigCommerce has been running real shops since 2009, and that is the honest headline: catalog, checkout, payments, tax, real-time shipping rates, inventory, refunds and PCI scope are someone else’s problem the day you sign up, with B2C and B2B run from one platform instead of two — though B2B Edition is a separately quoted add-on on the top Performance tier, not something an entry plan includes. Its distinguishing bet is “Open SaaS” — the commerce engine, admin and checkout stay closed and cannot be self-hosted, while the APIs are genuinely open (REST plus a GraphQL Storefront API and webhooks) and Catalyst, its Next.js headless storefront, is MIT-licensed and hosted wherever you like; BigCommerce’s own native hosting for Catalyst was still in closed beta as of September 2026. The parent company rebranded to Commerce in 2025, and the 2026 announcements point its AI at three things: an admin assistant that answers when asked, catalog attribute enrichment, and making your catalog transactable inside other people’s shopping agents through a Stripe partnership announced in December 2025 with no published ship date. That is AI inside a store admin rather than an autonomous builder — nothing announced creates a catalog from a prompt or keeps working between logins, and a merchant on BigCommerce’s own EMEA panel reported roughly 0.3% of its revenue from agentic sources, with panel consensus that the behaviour is still emerging. Ever Works comes at the other half of the problem, and the caveat belongs first: its Store builder is coming soon, so what it ships today is websites, blogs, directories and landing pages that it researches, generates, deploys and then keeps improving on a schedule — writing the directory content itself while dedicated blog-post and landing-copy writers roll out — with content and code committed to your own Git under AGPLv3. One number to price in either way: since June 1, 2026 BigCommerce charges an Open Payment Provider Fee on orders taken through non-embedded gateways (2.0% on Core, down to 0% under a Performance contract), so the decade-old “no transaction fees at the lower tiers” shorthand no longer holds as written.
BigCommerce hands you an empty catalog and an admin to fill it. Its first-party AI stops at an announced admin assistant and at Feedonomics-powered attribute enrichment; there is no first-party generator for product, category or collection copy, and marketplace apps fill that gap. Ever Works treats the research and the writing as the job: its pipeline analyzes the niche, discovers entries through web search, extracts and deduplicates them, assigns categories and tags, validates sources, captures screenshots, and writes the descriptions, SEO metadata and A-vs-B comparison pages — then generates the site that presents them. Two honest limits: that pipeline is deepest for directory-shaped content, with Blog, Website and Landing Page Works wired end to end but still riding the same items pipeline while dedicated post and landing-copy writers catch up; and product and category copy belongs to the planned Store builder, not to what ships today.
BigCommerce’s announced admin assistant is request-driven — it pulls reports and runs bulk edits across thousands of products when you ask, and nothing in the 2026 announcements describes scheduled or unattended operation, or publishes a release stage for the assistant itself. Ever Works makes the loop the default: scheduled updates on seven cadences from hourly to monthly, with automatic retry and a pause after repeated failures; Agent heartbeats on a cron, where each named Agent wakes on its own schedule and takes the single most useful next action; and scheduled Missions that keep proposing new Ideas. Around that sit the controls unattended work actually needs — spend caps enforced before an AI call runs, quality gates that send red work back to the Agent instead of to you, and a merge policy that starts with Agents opening pull requests and people merging.
With BigCommerce the storefront front-end can live in your repository — Catalyst is MIT — but the catalog, orders and customers live in BigCommerce’s database, and the engine, admin and checkout can be neither inspected nor self-hosted. The fair framing of the licence difference is about feature gating, not permissiveness: MIT is more permissive than AGPLv3 for anyone embedding the code, but it covers only the storefront layer. Ever Works is plain AGPLv3 with no capability held behind a commercial tier; content, code and the Knowledge Base are committed to Git repositories you own, with a Work Changelog so an overnight run is a reviewable, reversible diff; and the runtime self-hosts on Docker Compose or Kubernetes, or runs hosted by us, on whichever of eleven model providers you choose — including local Ollama, LM Studio and vLLM servers.
BigCommerce gives one merchant one very good control panel. Ever Works gives you a model above that: a Mission keeps proposing Ideas, accepted Ideas become Works generated from prebuilt templates, and named Agents with their own budgets, schedules and per-tool grants keep each Work moving, organized into teams with roles. Stores are the piece still on the roadmap, and the plan is explicitly to connect a commerce backend — open source, hosted, or your own — through plugins rather than rebuild checkout. Worth knowing in the meantime: the sites Ever Works generates today already ship subscription checkout across four payment providers, per-plan feature gating, sponsored placements and promo codes, so a content site can take money before the Store kind lands.
Ever Works vs BigCommerce, head to head.
| Feature | Ever Works | BigCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt → working app/site | ✓ | Themes + admin setup |
| Researches the topic for you | ✓ | – |
| Writes the content (copy, posts, SEO) | Directory data today; posts and product copy planned | Apps; enrichment announced |
| Generated code from a template base | ✓ | Stencil themes; Catalyst |
| Ongoing autonomous maintenance | Scheduled | Admin assistant (announced), on request |
| Content version-controlled in Git | ✓ | – |
| Code in your Git | ✓ | Catalyst storefront (MIT) |
| Open source | ✓ | Storefront only; engine closed |
| Self-hostable runtime | ✓ | – |
| No vendor lock-in | ✓ | Open APIs; closed engine |
| Product catalog, variants and inventory | Planned | ✓ |
| Checkout, payments, tax and shipping | Planned | ✓ |
| B2B quotes, accounts and price lists | – | Paid add-on, top tier |
| Platform fee on your sales | None | 2.0%–0% by tier since June 2026 |
Choose BigCommerce when you are selling now and need payments, tax, shipping, inventory and PCI scope handled by someone else from day one; when you run B2B and need quotes, purchase orders, company accounts and cascading price lists (budgeting for the top tier plus the B2B Edition add-on); when you want several branded or regional storefronts under one account (budgeting the per-storefront fee and its cap); when a 1,200-app ecosystem, an agency channel, staging environments and SLAs matter; or when marketplace and ad-network feed distribution is part of the plan today. It is a working shop on day one — a real, shipped capability Ever Works does not have yet.
Visit BigCommerce ↗Ever Works already researches a topic, writes the content, generates the Next.js code, deploys it, and keeps re-running on the cadence you set — all in your own Git. The Store builder (storefront, catalog, checkout) is on the way, and the sites the runtime generates today already carry subscription checkout, per-plan gating, sponsor ads and promo codes.