Shopify Pricing: Every Plan, Every Fee

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Shopify advertises five prices. None of them is what you will pay. The plan fee is usually the smallest line on the invoice, because payment processing scales with revenue and app subscriptions scale with ambition. This page has every published plan and rate, the processing maths that decides which tier you should be on, what apps genuinely cost, three worked first-year totals, a three-year comparison against WooCommerce and BigCommerce, and an honest account of who should not use Shopify. We build and maintain Shopify stores, and we also talk clients out of them, so none of what follows is a sales pitch for the platform.

The short answer

Billed annually in the United States, Shopify costs $5 a month for Starter, $29 for Basic, $79 for Grow, $299 for Advanced, and from roughly $2,300 a month for Plus on a three-year term. Month-to-month billing costs about 25% more on every tier above Starter.

Those numbers are close to irrelevant on their own. A store turning over $20,000 a month on the Basic plan pays $348 a year in plan fees and roughly $7,320 a year in card processing. The plan fee is 4% of what Shopify actually collects from that business. Any comparison that stops at the sticker price is comparing the wrong number.

The three questions that decide your real cost, in order of how much money they move: what your card processing rate is, how many paid apps you run, and what you paid somebody to build the store. The plan tier comes fourth.

Every Shopify plan, and what each one is actually for

Starter, $5 a month

Not a store. Starter gives you product pages and checkout links you can drop into Instagram, TikTok, a link-in-bio, or a message to a customer, plus the Shop app. There is no browsable storefront and no theme. The card rate is a flat 5%, which is punishing on anything but tiny volume.

It is genuinely useful in exactly two situations: you are testing whether a product sells before committing to a build, or your entire business runs through social DMs and you just need a way to take money. For anybody else it is a false economy, because you will pay 5% on every sale to save $24 a month.

Basic, $29 a month billed annually

A complete, unrestricted online store. Unlimited products, a full theme, discount codes, abandoned cart recovery, multi-channel selling, and the standard 2.9% + 30c US online rate. Basic is where the overwhelming majority of new stores should start and where a great many should stay.

The real limits are one staff account and no professional reports. One staff account matters the moment you hire anybody or bring in an agency, because you end up sharing a login, which is both a security problem and an audit problem. That single constraint pushes more stores to Grow than the card rate does.

Grow, $79 a month billed annually

Formerly just called Shopify. Five staff accounts, professional reports, a 2.7% + 30c rate, and the third-party gateway penalty drops from 2% to 1%. The rate saving against Basic is 0.2%, which is $40 a month on $20,000 of revenue, against a $50 a month increase in plan fee.

So Grow does not pay for itself on processing until you are somewhere around $25,000 a month. Below that, you are buying staff accounts and reporting, which may well be worth $50 — just be clear that that is what you are buying rather than telling yourself it is cheaper.

Advanced, $299 a month billed annually

2.5% + 30c, fifteen staff accounts, the custom report builder, and calculated third-party shipping rates at checkout. That last feature is the one people actually upgrade for: it lets you show live carrier rates from your own UPS, FedEx or DHL account rather than Shopify’s flat-rate approximations.

On processing alone, Advanced beats Grow above roughly $110,000 a month. Plenty of stores buy it far below that because they need carrier-calculated shipping, and that is a legitimate reason. Buying it for the reports usually is not, because a $30 analytics app covers most of what the report builder does.

Plus, from about $2,300 a month

Plus is a different product wearing the same name. You get checkout you can genuinely modify, Shopify Functions with full extensibility, 200 inventory locations, the B2B wholesale channel, multiple expansion stores under one contract, and named support. Pricing is negotiated: roughly $2,300 a month on a three-year commitment, about $2,500 month-to-month, with a variable-rate component that kicks in above a revenue threshold in the contract.

Below roughly $10 million a year, the processing saving alone does not cover the jump from Advanced. Stores that move onto Plus profitably are almost always buying one specific capability — checkout control, real B2B pricing rules, or the ability to run several country stores from one contract — not a lower percentage.

Retail, $89 a month per location

Shopify POS Lite is included with every plan and handles basic in-person selling. POS Pro is $89 a month per physical location and adds staff permissions, unlimited registers, in-store analytics, omnichannel features like buy-online-pickup-in-store, and proper stocktake tools.

Per location is the part that catches people. Three shops is $267 a month on top of your online plan, and that is before card readers. It is priced fairly for what it does, but it is not a rounding error.

Shopify fees: payment processing is the number that decides your bill

Of all the Shopify fees, this is the one most pricing articles skip, and it is the one that matters. Shopify takes no commission on your sales — there is no revenue share — but every card transaction carries a processing fee, and that fee is a percentage, so it grows exactly as fast as your business does.

Figures assume the percentage component only and are rounded; the 30c per-transaction element adds roughly $360 a year per hundred monthly orders on top. Read the table across rather than down: at $20,000 a month the entire annual difference between Basic and Advanced processing is $960, and Advanced costs $3,240 a year more in plan fees. The upgrade loses you $2,280.

The per-transaction 30 cents is not trivial at low order values

If your average order is $15, the flat 30c is another 2% on top of the percentage rate — your effective rate on Basic is nearly 5%, not 2.9%. Low-AOV stores are systematically punished by flat-fee components and should be far more aggressive about bundling and minimum order thresholds than their margin spreadsheet suggests.

At a $150 average order the same 30c is 0.2% and barely worth modeling. This is the single most under-discussed variable in ecommerce platform choice, and it is entirely within your control.

In-person rates are different again

Card-present transactions are cheaper because they are lower risk: roughly 2.6% + 10c on Basic, 2.5% + 10c on Grow, 2.4% + 10c on Advanced. If a meaningful share of your revenue is in person, model it separately rather than applying your online rate to everything.

Shopify Payments against a third-party gateway

If you use any payment provider other than Shopify Payments — Stripe directly, PayPal as a primary gateway, Authorize.net, a regional processor — Shopify charges an additional fee on every transaction: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. This is on top of whatever your gateway charges you.

On a $240,000 year that 2% is $4,800, which dwarfs every plan fee under discussion. There are only three good reasons to accept it: Shopify Payments is not available in your country, your product category is prohibited by Shopify Payments’ underwriting, or you have negotiated a rate elsewhere that beats the combined cost. The third is rare below eight figures.

• Shopify Payments is available in around two dozen countries; if you are outside them the choice is made for you.
• Prohibited and restricted categories include firearms and parts, certain supplements, CBD in many jurisdictions, adult content, and some financial services. Check before you build, not after.
• PayPal offered as an express checkout button alongside Shopify Payments does not incur the extra fee. Only using a third party as your main gateway does.
• Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay all run through Shopify Payments and carry no extra fee.
• Manual methods — bank transfer, cash on delivery, invoicing — carry no Shopify fee at all, which matters for B2B.

Apps: where the money actually goes

Across the Shopify stores we maintain, the median is seven to nine paid apps, and total app spend routinely exceeds the plan fee by three or four times. A store on Basic at $29 a month with $240 a month of apps is not a $29 store, and its owner is frequently unaware of the split until somebody itemises it.

Two structural points. First, app pricing is very often tiered by order volume or list size, so the quote you see when you install is the number you will pay in month one and not in month twelve — Klaviyo in particular scales sharply with list size and regularly becomes the largest single line in a growing store’s software budget. Second, uninstalling an app does not always remove the code it injected into your theme, which means a store that has churned through twenty apps can be carrying the performance cost of all of them.

Themes, design and the build itself

Shopify’s free themes — Dawn and its siblings — are genuinely good. They are fast, accessible, responsive, and maintained by Shopify itself, which means they keep working when the platform changes. A large number of successful stores run a lightly customized Dawn and are right to.

Paid themes from the Shopify Theme Store run $180 to $400 as a one-time purchase, which covers a single store and includes updates from the developer. The good ones save real development time. The bad ones are visually impressive, heavy, and bolt on features you will later pay a developer to remove.

We sit in the fourth row and are transparent about when a client belongs in the first. If you are pre-revenue or testing a product, paying an agency to build a Shopify store is close to the worst use of that money available to you. Build it yourself badly, prove people want the thing, then pay somebody to build it properly.

Watch: ecommerce and search

Three from Google Search Central that bear directly on the material above.

Domain, email and the small recurring lines

None of these individually matters much. Together they are $150 to $400 a year that nobody puts in the budget.

Shipping: a real cost that belongs in the platform comparison

Shopify Shipping gives you discounted carrier rates — often materially better than a small business could negotiate alone — with labels bought inside the admin. That discount is a genuine and under-credited part of Shopify’s value, and it is worth modeling if you ship physical goods in volume.

What it does not do below the Advanced plan is show live carrier-calculated rates at checkout from your own account. On Basic and Grow you are setting flat rates, weight-based rates or price-based rates yourself. For most stores that is fine and arguably better, because flat-rate shipping converts more reliably than a live number that fluctuates. For stores with heavy, bulky or highly variable freight, it is the reason to be on Advanced.

Annual against monthly billing

Annual billing saves 25% on every tier from Basic upward. On Grow that is $300 a year, which is real money. The catch is that you are pre-paying twelve months on a business that may not exist in twelve months, and Shopify’s refund policy on annual plans is at its discretion rather than guaranteed.

Our rule with clients: stay monthly until the store has had two consecutive profitable quarters, then switch to annual. The 25% is not worth locking capital into an unproven model, and it is absolutely worth taking once the model is proven.

What a store actually pays in year one: three worked examples

Example one: a side business doing $5,000 a month, built by the owner

Example two: an established store doing $20,000 a month, freelancer-built

Example three: a growing brand doing $60,000 a month, agency-built

The pattern across all three is the same and it is the point of this page: the plan fee never gets above 13% of what the store costs to run, and at realistic revenue it is 2%. If you are choosing a platform on the monthly headline price, you are optimizing the smallest variable in the model.

Three-year total cost against every serious alternative

Modeled on a store doing $20,000 a month for three years, including build and ongoing maintenance. Processing rates differ slightly by platform because the default gateways differ.

Reading that table honestly

Squarespace and Wix come out cheapest, and for a store selling a handful of products with simple shipping they are legitimately the right answer. What they do not survive is complexity: multi-location inventory, real subscription logic, wholesale pricing, serious international selling, or a catalog in the thousands. We have moved clients off both, and the migration cost usually exceeds everything they saved.

WooCommerce shows a $0 license and is not free. The money reappears as build cost, hosting, and the $7,200 of three-year maintenance — because on WooCommerce, security patching, plugin conflicts, and PHP upgrades are your problem. If you have a developer already, that trade can be excellent. If you do not, you are buying yourself a second job.

Adobe Commerce is in the table for completeness and to make a point about scale. Nothing under roughly $20 million a year should be looking at it, and most things above that are better served by Shopify Plus these days.

Shopify against WooCommerce, specifically

• Total build cost is comparable; ongoing cost is not. Woo shifts spend from subscription to labor.
• Shopify handles PCI compliance, SSL, uptime and checkout security. On Woo those are contractual obligations you have taken on personally.
• Woo wins decisively when content is the primary business and commerce is secondary, because WordPress is a better publishing system than Shopify.
• Shopify wins decisively on checkout conversion. Shop Pay’s accelerated checkout is measurably faster than anything you will assemble on Woo.
• Woo has no transaction fee of its own, so at very high volume with a negotiated gateway rate the arithmetic can flip. That threshold is far higher than most people assume.

What it costs to migrate onto Shopify

Migration pricing is driven almost entirely by data complexity and URL preservation, and almost not at all by how the new store looks. Clients consistently expect the opposite.

The line that destroys SEO on a badly run migration is redirects. Shopify imposes its own URL patterns, so every product, category and content URL on the old site needs a mapped 301 to its new equivalent. Miss them and you lose the rankings you were migrating to protect. We treat the redirect map as the first deliverable of any migration, before a single design decision, and we would suggest you demand the same from anybody you hire. There is more on this in our guide to how search actually works.

Costs nobody puts on a pricing page

None of these are hidden in a sinister sense — they are all documented somewhere. They are simply never in the number you were quoted.

1. Chargebacks. $15 per dispute on most gateways, refunded if you win. A store with a delivery problem can accumulate these fast, and excessive rates put your Shopify Payments account at risk.
2. Currency conversion. Selling in currencies other than your payout currency carries a conversion fee of roughly 1.5% domestically and 2% internationally, on top of the card rate.
3. Shopify Markets Pro. Convenient merchant-of-record handling for cross-border selling, priced as a percentage that materially exceeds standard processing. Model it before enabling it.
4. App onboarding fees. Several serious apps — particularly subscriptions and loyalty — charge a one-off implementation fee that is not shown in the app listing.
5. Theme update labor. A heavily customized theme does not update cleanly. Budget developer time when Shopify ships breaking changes, which is roughly annually.
6. Staff account overage. Not a fee, but the reason people upgrade tiers. Sharing a login to avoid it is a genuinely bad idea.
7. Plus variable fees. Plus contracts include a revenue-linked component above a threshold. Read the term sheet rather than the marketing page.
8. Abandoned migration. The most expensive line item in ecommerce is a replatforming project canceled at 70% completion. It happens more than anybody admits.

Who Shopify is right for, and who should not use it

Shopify is genuinely the right answer if

• You sell physical products and want hosting, security and PCI compliance to stop being your problem.
• You want to be live in weeks rather than months, with a checkout that converts well out of the box.
• You expect to sell across channels — web, social, marketplaces, in person — from one inventory.
• You are selling internationally and want multi-currency and local payment methods without building them.
• You would rather pay a predictable percentage than employ a developer to keep a site alive.

Shopify is the wrong answer if

• Your business is content-first and commerce-second. WordPress will serve you better and cost less.
• You need checkout behavior you cannot get without Plus, and you cannot justify Plus pricing.
• You need complex B2B pricing, quoting or approval workflows below the Plus tier.
• You are selling exclusively low-value digital goods, where the 30c per transaction is brutal.
• You are in a category Shopify Payments will not underwrite and cannot absorb the third-party fee.
• You want to own your platform outright and you have the technical capacity to run it.

We have told clients all six of those things and lost the work as a result. It is cheaper for everyone than a migration in eighteen months.

How to actually reduce your Shopify bill

1. Audit apps first, always. It is the largest recoverable line and it takes an hour. Everything else on this list is smaller.
2. Raise average order value rather than chasing the rate. Moving AOV from $40 to $60 does more for your effective processing rate than any plan upgrade, because the 30c stops mattering.
3. Do not upgrade tier for a single feature. Price the app that does the same job. It is usually an order of magnitude cheaper.
4. Use Shopify Payments unless you genuinely cannot. The 2% third-party penalty on Basic is the most expensive avoidable fee on the platform.
5. Switch to annual once the business is proven, not before. 25% is worth having and not worth gambling on.
6. Consolidate overlapping apps. Most stores run two things that both send email, or two that both do popups. Pick one.
7. Negotiate Plus properly. The term length, the rate and the variable threshold are all on the table. Get a second quote from a Plus partner before signing.
8. Reduce chargebacks with delivery tracking and clear policies. This is a support problem masquerading as a payments cost.
9. Do not buy a $350 theme to fix a $0 problem. Most theme purchases we see were made to avoid a design decision, not to solve a functional gap.

Mistakes we see in Shopify budgets

International and regional pricing

Shopify prices plans in local currency in many markets, and the conversion is not always flattering — UK, EU, Australian and Canadian merchants frequently pay more than the USD figure converted at spot. Processing rates also vary by country, and are generally higher outside the US.

Two things to check before you model anything if you are outside the United States: whether Shopify Payments operates in your country at all, and what the local card rate actually is rather than the US rate you read in an article like this one. Shopify publishes both on its regional pricing pages, and the difference is large enough to change which tier makes sense.

What Shopify includes that you would otherwise buy separately

The fairest way to judge a Shopify plan fee is to price what it replaces. On a self-hosted stack, every line in the top half of that scorecard is either a subscription, a plugin, or somebody’s job.

Hosting, bandwidth and the CDN

Genuinely unlimited, with no overage billing. This matters more than it sounds: on self-hosted platforms, the day you get written about is the day your hosting bill spikes or your site falls over. Shopify absorbs that entirely, and a comparable managed WooCommerce host with the same headroom starts around $50 a month and rises steeply.

PCI compliance and checkout security

Shopify is certified as a PCI DSS Level 1 provider, which means card data never touches infrastructure you are responsible for. On a self-hosted store that compliance burden is contractually yours, and the cost of getting it wrong is not a subscription fee.

Fraud analysis

Every order gets a fraud assessment at no extra charge. Standalone fraud tools on other platforms run $50 to $500 a month depending on volume. It is not perfect and it does not indemnify you against chargebacks, but it is a real cost that never appears in a comparison table.

Abandoned checkout recovery

Included on every paid plan including Basic, which is unusual — most platforms gate it behind a tier or an app. For a store recovering even 5% of abandoned carts, this single included feature frequently exceeds the entire plan fee in returned revenue.

What is genuinely not included

Email marketing beyond simple broadcasts, product reviews, advanced search, subscription billing and loyalty are all apps. Klaviyo, Judge.me and Recharge are the category leaders and none of them is free at scale. Budget for them from the start rather than discovering them in month three.

Your effective rate depends on average order value

This is the most consequential thing on this page that almost nobody models, so it gets its own section. The 30c per-transaction fee is fixed, which means its cost as a percentage of the order is entirely determined by how large the order is.

Low average order value is punished twice

At a $10 average order, the 30c is 3% on its own, so your effective Basic rate is 5.9% rather than 2.9%. You are paying roughly what Shopify Starter charges while also paying for a plan. Stores in this position should be far more aggressive about bundles, minimum order thresholds and free-shipping tiers than their gross margin spreadsheet suggests, because the payment cost is a hidden second margin hit.

High average order value makes the plan tier almost irrelevant

At a $250 average order, the flat fee is 0.12% and the difference between Basic and Advanced percentage rates is 0.4%. On $20,000 a month that is $80, against a $220 monthly plan difference. High AOV stores should stay on lower tiers far longer than they typically do.

What this means for the platform decision itself

If your average order is under about $20, per-transaction economics should drive your platform choice more than features do — and it may push you toward a model with fewer, larger transactions rather than toward a different platform at all. We have advised clients to change their bundling before changing their platform, and it has been the cheaper fix more than once.

What different kinds of store actually spend

Generic pricing advice fails because business models have genuinely different cost shapes. These are monthly running costs from stores we work on or have audited, excluding the one-off build.

Dropshipping

Basic plan, high order count, low margin. The killer is that dropshipping margins are thin enough that a 2.9% + 30c cost is a meaningful share of profit rather than of revenue. Add a supplier-sync app and the cost structure is tighter than most people modeling it realize. It works, but the arithmetic leaves very little room for paid acquisition.

Print on demand

Similar to dropshipping but with fewer apps, because the print partner handles fulfillment and inventory. Frequently the cheapest way to run a real store, and one of the few models where Basic is genuinely sufficient indefinitely.

Own-brand apparel

Higher revenue, so processing dominates. Heavy app spend on reviews, email, size guides and returns, because returns are the defining operational problem in apparel and a returns portal pays for itself quickly. Usually belongs on Grow.

Subscription box

The app line is the highest of any model because subscription billing platforms charge both a monthly fee and frequently a percentage of subscription revenue on top of card processing. Model that percentage carefully — stacked with Shopify’s rate it can approach 4% all in.

Single premium product

The most efficient shape on Shopify. High average order value means the flat fee is irrelevant, few SKUs means no search app, and a focused catalog means a free theme is genuinely adequate. Basic, indefinitely.

B2B and wholesale

The awkward one. Real B2B pricing rules, quoting and net terms live on Plus, so businesses below that threshold end up on Advanced with apps stitching the gap. It works, but it is the model where Shopify is least comfortable and where BigCommerce is worth a serious look.

Work out your own number

Ten minutes in a spreadsheet beats any generic article, including this one. The six steps below are exactly what we do on a first call with a client, and it takes about as long as reading this page.

Why amortising the build matters

A $6,000 freelance build is $250 a month over two years. Compare that with a $29 plan fee and the conventional platform conversation looks absurd. Any comparison that treats build cost as a separate conversation from running cost is not a cost comparison at all — it is two half-comparisons.

Why you should run it for two tiers, not one

The crossover points in this guide are averages. Your order count, average order value and app needs will move them. Running the same six steps for Basic and Grow takes an extra two minutes and gives you a defensible answer rather than a rule of thumb.

How Shopify’s pricing has actually changed

Pricing pages are snapshots. Anything you read about Shopify costs — this page included — has a date on it, and the platform has made several changes that materially affected merchant bills without always changing a headline number.

The plan rename

The middle tier was renamed from Shopify to Grow, which means a large volume of older comparison content refers to plans by names that no longer exist. If an article mentions a plan called simply Shopify, check its date before trusting its numbers.

Checkout extensibility

The deprecation of checkout.liquid in favor of checkout extensions was a pricing event for Plus merchants even though no price moved, because heavily customized checkouts had to be rebuilt. It is a useful reminder that platform-imposed migration is a real cost of renting rather than owning.

Markets and cross-border selling

Shopify Markets pulled multi-currency and localization into the platform, removing app spend for international sellers. Markets Pro added a merchant-of-record option that handles duties and compliance at a percentage which is convenient at low volume and expensive at high volume. Model it rather than assuming it.

How to actually cut your Shopify bill

The ranking matters more than the individual numbers. Merchants spend a great deal of energy arguing about plan tiers and almost none auditing apps or gateway choice, which is precisely backwards.

The gateway question is worth checking first

If you are not on Shopify Payments and you are not in a prohibited category or an unsupported country, this is the single largest recoverable line on the platform. A $240,000-a-year store on Basic using Stripe or PayPal directly is paying about $4,800 a year purely for the privilege. Check Settings, then Payments, before anything else on this list.

Then the apps

An hour with the billing page and a list of app owners typically recovers $80 to $300 a month. Nothing else on this page has that return on time invested.

Then, and only then, the plan tier

Plan tier is the last thing to optimize because it is the smallest number and the hardest to get wrong expensively. Use the crossover thresholds in this guide, set a calendar reminder, and stop thinking about it.

Where Shopify fits against the alternatives

The matrix is the honest one-picture summary. Shopify’s whole cluster sits high on the checkout-quality axis, and that is what the money buys.

If checkout quality is not your lever

Squarespace and Wix are legitimately cheaper and legitimately adequate for a simple catalog with simple shipping. We say this as a Shopify partner. What they do not survive is operational complexity, and the migration when you outgrow them usually costs more than everything you saved.

If you have technical capacity

WooCommerce on WordPress is a genuinely good answer when you already employ or contract a developer, and an actively bad one when you do not. The license is free; the responsibility is not.

If you are genuinely enterprise

Adobe Commerce and Shopify Plus are the two serious options above roughly $10 million a year, and for most businesses in that band Plus is now the better-value answer. Adobe Commerce earns its cost only where the commerce logic is genuinely unusual.

Quick answers to what people actually ask

Shopify fees come in four buckets — the subscription, the card rate, the apps and the build — and most of the questions below are really about which bucket somebody is looking at. Short answers first; the detail is in the sections above.

How much is Shopify per month?

$29 a month for Basic on annual billing, $79 for Grow, $299 for Advanced. Month-to-month is about 25% more. Shopify Starter is $5 a month but is not a full store. Add card processing and apps to get your real Shopify monthly cost, which for a working store is typically three to twenty times the plan fee.

How much is Shopify a month for a real store?

A functioning small store usually lands between $150 and $600 a month all in: the plan, processing on actual revenue, and five to nine apps. A store doing $20,000 a month pays roughly $29 in plan fees, $610 in processing and $120 in apps — about $760 a month.

How much is Shopify a year?

$348 for Basic, $948 for Grow and $3,588 for Advanced in plan fees on annual billing. Total annual cost including processing and apps runs from about $2,600 for a small DIY store to $46,000 for an agency-built brand at $60,000 a month.

What does Shopify cost per month compared to competitors?

Shopify Basic at $29 sits above Squarespace Commerce at about $23 and below BigCommerce Standard at $29 to $39. The Shopify website cost difference is not in the subscription — it is in apps and the build, which is where the platforms genuinely diverge.

How much does Shopify take per sale?

Shopify takes no commission on your sales. What you pay per sale is card processing: 2.9% + 30c on Basic, 2.7% + 30c on Grow, 2.5% + 30c on Advanced in the US. If you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a further 0.2% to 2% — those are the Shopify selling fees people usually mean.

Is Shopify free to use?

No. There is a free trial and promotional first-month pricing, but no permanently free tier. You can build an entire store during the trial without paying and only start the subscription when you are ready to sell, which is the closest thing to free Shopify offers.

What are the Shopify pricing tiers?

Five: Starter, Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. The Shopify pricing plans differ on card rate, staff accounts, reporting depth and checkout control. Every tier from Basic upward is a complete store with unlimited products — the tiers do not gate catalog size.

What do Shopify subscription plans include?

Hosting with unlimited bandwidth, SSL, a global CDN, PCI-compliant checkout, fraud analysis, abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, multi-channel selling and basic SEO controls. Shopify hosting plans are not sold separately — hosting is bundled into every subscription at no extra charge.

Is there a Shopify annual plan, and is it cheaper?

Yes. The Shopify yearly plan saves 25% against monthly billing on every tier from Basic upward, pre-paid for twelve months. It is worth taking once the business is proven and worth avoiding while you are still testing, because refunds on annual terms are discretionary.

How much is a Shopify account to start?

$29 a month on Basic covers everything you need to open a store. Beyond that, expect a domain at roughly $16 a year, optional business email at $84 a year, and whatever apps you genuinely need. A careful first-year Shopify store price on a free theme comes in under $2,700 including processing.

What is Shopify Premium?

There is no plan called Shopify Premium. People searching that usually mean either Advanced at $299 a month or Shopify Plus, the negotiated enterprise tier starting around $2,300 a month. Premium themes are a separate thing at $180 to $400 one-off.

How much does it cost to use Shopify for ecommerce specifically?

Shopify ecommerce pricing is the plan fee plus processing. There is no separate ecommerce charge and no listing fee per product, which distinguishes it from marketplaces. Unlimited products are included on every paid tier.

Shopify pricing and plans, at a glance

If you have landed here searching shopify pricing and plans, or shopify plans and pricing, and want the structure rather than the analysis: there are four subscription tiers plus a cut-down Starter option and a $0 agentic tier for selling through AI channels. Every tier carries the same core storefront and unlimited products; what changes as you move up is the card-processing rate, the number of staff accounts, and the reporting and international features. The plan fee is the small number. Processing is the large one, and it is the reason the tiers exist at all.

Where is the official Shopify pricing page?

At shopify.com/pricing, and you should check it before acting on any figure here. Shopify US pricing changes, and regional pricing differs materially — every number on this page is dated August 2026 for that reason.

What percentage does Shopify take per sale, and what is the Shopify commission?

Shopify does not take a commission on sales in the way a marketplace does. What it charges is a card-processing rate on each transaction, plus an additional fee only when you use a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments.

This is the single most misunderstood part of Shopify pricing, and the confusion is expensive because it changes which plan is cheapest for a given business. Shopify does take a percentage of sales, but it is a payment-processing percentage, not a cut of your revenue: on Shopify Payments there is no separate platform commission at all. The extra fee people are usually thinking of applies when a merchant routes payments elsewhere, and it falls as the plan tier rises.

What is the Shopify fee on a typical order?

The card rate on the order, and nothing else if you use Shopify Payments. On a third-party gateway, add the plan’s additional transaction fee on top of whatever that gateway charges.

Shopify price per month by plan

A Shopify store costs per month according to the plan tier, paid monthly or annually, with annual billing discounted. The Shopify Basic plan price is the entry point; Shopify Plus is quoted rather than listed.

How much does a Shopify store cost per month in practice?

The subscription is rarely the largest line. Apps, a theme, and the payment percentage together usually exceed it, which is why comparing plan headline prices alone gives the wrong answer.

How much is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is quoted rather than published, and is priced against volume. Shopify states current Plus terms on its own pricing page; treat any third-party figure, including this page, as indicative rather than a quote.

How expensive is Shopify compared with the alternatives?

It is rarely the cheapest subscription and frequently the cheapest total cost, because the hosted platform absorbs work that self-hosted alternatives bill for separately.

What is the cost to sell on Shopify at low volume?

At low volume the monthly subscription dominates and the percentage barely registers. The crossover, where the transaction percentage becomes the bigger number, is the point at which moving up a tier starts to pay for itself.

Shopify store pricing and the Shopify percentage fee, stated plainly

Two figures decide what a Shopify store costs: the plan subscription, and the percentage taken on each transaction. They move in opposite directions as you go up the tiers.

That inverse relationship is the whole of Shopify store pricing. Higher plans cost more per month and take a lower percentage; lower plans do the reverse. The Shopify percentage fee is therefore not one number but a schedule, and which tier is cheapest for you is arithmetic on your own order volume rather than a matter of opinion.

The two numbers that matter

Monthly subscription and the percentage per transaction. Everything else is secondary.

Why they move in opposite directions

Higher tiers trade a larger subscription for a lower percentage. That is the entire pricing design.

Finding your own crossover point

Multiply your monthly order value by the percentage difference between tiers and compare it to the subscription difference. Where they cross is where upgrading pays.

The Shopify percentage fee on third-party gateways

An additional fee applies on top of the outside gateway’s own charge, and it falls as the tier rises. This is where most miscalculation happens.

What the arithmetic leaves out

Apps and theme costs, which frequently exceed the subscription and are absent from every comparison table.

How much a Shopify account costs, in the words people actually use

The same question arrives as how much does a Shopify account cost, what the Shopify subscription price is, how much Shopify charges, and what a Shopify membership costs — and they all mean the monthly plan fee, which in the United States runs $5 for Starter, $29 for Basic, $79 for Grow, $299 for Advanced and from roughly $2,300 for Plus. The Shopify basic plan cost is the figure most small stores are really asking about, and it is the plan most stores should start on. Two things make the real Shopify website cost per month higher than the plan fee, and both are predictable: payment processing, which is charged per transaction rather than monthly, and paid apps, which is where a store’s costs quietly compound. When comparing Shopify plans, add an honest app budget to each tier before deciding — the difference between plans is usually smaller than the difference between app stacks.

What changes as you move up, and when the next tier pays for itself

Moving up a Shopify website plan buys three things: lower card rates, more staff accounts, and reporting. For most stores the deciding factor is the card rate, because it scales with revenue while the plan fee does not. The arithmetic is straightforward — take your monthly card volume, multiply by the difference in rate between the tiers, and compare it with the difference in plan fee. Below the crossover the cheaper plan wins no matter how attractive the reporting looks. Shopify enterprise pricing, meaning Plus, is a different decision entirely and is driven by checkout customization, multiple storefronts and support terms rather than by card rates.

What a Shopify store actually costs beyond the plan

The Shopify website price people quote is the plan fee, and it is reliably the smaller half of the real bill. Asking how much it costs to have a Shopify store means adding four things to the subscription: payment processing, which is charged per transaction and is unavoidable; apps, which are the line that surprises people most because each is small and they accumulate; the theme, either a one-off purchase or a custom build; and the domain. A store running eight to ten apps can easily spend more on them monthly than on the plan itself. The plan fee is also the only part that drops when you prepay annually — the rest scales with what you sell and what you install. Budget the subscription as a floor rather than an estimate.

Shopify rates and fees: what the platform charges beyond the plan

How much Shopify charges depends on which line you mean, and there are three. The subscription is the published plan fee. Payment processing is charged per transaction, at a rate that varies by plan and by country, and is unavoidable on any sale. The third is the transaction fee Shopify adds when you use an external payment gateway instead of its own — a percentage on top of whatever the gateway charges, which is the fee most often overlooked when comparing processors. Shopify rates and fees are revised periodically, and Shopify pricing in 2025 and since has included both plan changes and regional variation, so the published pricing page is the only figure worth quoting. Apps, themes and domains sit outside all three and are billed by whoever sells them.

Frequently asked questions