Prestashop has a new owner

[musicmaster]

https://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/1104807-prestashop-has-a-new-owner-d/

PrestaShop has new ownership as of December 2025, acquired by Polish tech group Cyber_Folks (through its subsidiary Cyber_Pixel) along with Sylius and BitBag, forming a major European e-commerce ecosystem, moving from its previous owner, MBE Worldwide (now Fortidia). This acquisition combines PrestaShop's open-source platform with headless (Sylius) and custom solution (BitBag) tech, aiming to create a strong European alternative to global players, with Cyber_Folks holding a majority stake in the new structure. 

[the.rampage.rado]

Good for them...

[DRMasterChief]

Good for customers? Time will tell.

In any case, a lot would have to change. The current model is no longer suitable for e-commerce today (from the retailers' perspective).

[the.rampage.rado]

13 hours ago, DRMasterChief said:

Good for customers? Time will tell.

In any case, a lot would have to change. The current model is no longer suitable for e-commerce today (from the retailers' perspective).

Good for the previous owner - they squeezed whatever they can and sold a shell...

[Yabber]

Cyber_Folks is owned by H88, a company that has been acquiring smaller hosting companies in Poland for many years. After each such acquisition, the prices of all services are raised by an average of 300%.

Also, after this acquisition, Prestashop will be the most expensive SaaS in the world.

[Kashir2000]

As Yabber said. They consolidated many hosting companies over years, shut them down and moved everyone under Cyber_folks brand.

Prices rose, and quality dropped (not for all, depends on needs). However available server resources were restricted. Many say that its worse. I know many people who ran away after that (including myself). 
 

On 1/31/2026 at 8:01 AM, the.rampage.rado said:

Good for the previous owner - they squeezed whatever they can and sold a shell...

 

It will be no different here I think. Knowing Cyber_folks, they didn't acquire it for no reason. Monetization process will surely continue, one way or other I belive.

I think this project might end up like many other open source projects. Open source development will slow or even stop, and new features will be available only when you will host on their servers. Where they will have good optimizations. So PS will work as it worked till now, and alternative version may be developed for those who use their infrastructure. 

However, maybe they will come up with another monetization method. Who knows... I have bad feelings about it.

What I can tell for sure, they all are Symfony worshippers and everything will be more and more based on symfony. Sylius (one of companies invloved in purchase) is creating headless commerce platform based on Symfony. So Symfony will surely be they way they go (I'm not a fan of symfony)

[Acer]

On 1/30/2026 at 7:07 PM, DRMasterChief said:

Good for customers? Time will tell.

In any case, a lot would have to change. The current model is no longer suitable for e-commerce today (from the retailers' perspective).

Well, the current model where the software is provided for free (ThirtyBees), is also not so great for ThirtyBees.
Will be interesting to see if there is a silver bullet technique for free software that is supported by the community.
Imo, it would help if everyone that is a long term user of ThirtyBees sees the merit of what we've done and donate or signup as a member - if only for the purpose of supporting development, server cost and keeping the lights on. If everyone does it, we can do more themes, modules, bug fixes and get more than one developer - and still keep the software free without losing the plot and going PS and even Magento routes. Which we all know how that landed up...

[OKR82]

Hello everyone.

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone at ThirtyBees.

That said, I've managed large forums using vBulletin (I don't mean to advertise). It was fantastic paid software; people paid for it if they really wanted to run a serious forum. But nowadays, people don't consider the work that goes into it; they want it for free and they want it to work like a charm...

I'm a programmer, I'm pretty good with Go, but I love PHP (I absolutely hate Symfony). I don't consider myself skilled enough to build an e-commerce site. I've done other projects, but a store is scary to mess up, so here we are. Finding a product like ThirtyBees puts a little smile on my face.

I believe that ThirtyBees should ideally be a paid license product (like Xenforo, the previous developers of vBulletin). That's the way forward. I'm sure that back in the 2000s/2008s there would have been hundreds of sponsors and donations, just like with SMF, PHPBB, etc., but that's no longer the case.

I know many people who even tell me, "Bagg, Shopify makes everything so easy." Really? A system, users, private data, etc., that will never truly belong to you? But of course, for $30 a month you get your own cool store...

I'm very pessimistic about buying PrestaShop, and the poor choice of Symfony as the framework. Even phpBB already uses the Symfony core...

And here we are. Seeing this thread makes me reconsider ThirtyBees precisely because of what's being said: people are indifferent, nobody wants to donate, there are no funds, and people aren't here to waste their time offering something for free that no one supports, which will cause this project to fail like PrestaShop did.

So here I am, watching the days go by without knowing exactly which system to use in the future, and after reading this thread, PrestaShop is completely out of the question.

P.S. Excuse my English, I'm from Spain. ;)