Shopify pricing: what it really costs

The bills above cover the ordinary case: a store on Shopify Payments, billed month-to-month, with no add-ons. Everything below is what moves that number, in either direction.

Which Shopify plan does a small store actually need?

The decision almost always comes down to staff logins, not how much the store sells. Basic gives only the store owner a login, no staff accounts at all, so it fits a true one-person operation, the case behind the solo bill above. The moment a second person needs their own login to fulfill orders or answer support messages, Grow is the plan: it allows up to 5 staff accounts and is the plan behind the small-team bill above. A team that needs more than 5 logins has to move to Advanced, which allows up to 15; that’s the growing-team bill above. Collaborator accounts given to a freelancer or an agency don’t count against any plan’s staff limit, so hiring outside help to build or run the store doesn’t force an upgrade by itself.

Sales volume matters less, but it isn’t nothing. Shopify’s own help center estimates that for a US store on Shopify Payments, Grow’s lower card rate pays for its higher price at about $200,000 a year in sales, and Advanced’s at about $1,320,000 a year. A fast-growing one-person store can hit that first number well before it ever hires anyone.

What pushes a Shopify store’s bill above the plan price?

The plan price is the floor, not the ceiling. Selling in person and wanting more than casual point-of-sale tools means POS Pro, at $89 per location a month on Basic, Grow or Advanced. Sending text marketing to US or Canadian phone numbers needs a dedicated toll-free number first, at $2.15 a month, on top of a per-message rate. The marketing emails Shopify sends through Shopify Messaging are free up to 10,000 a month on every plan; past that, it’s $1 per 1,000 emails, dropping to $0.65 per 1,000 after 300,000 emails in a month and $0.55 per 1,000 after 750,000.

The biggest lever is payment processing. Skip Shopify Payments for a third-party processor, and Shopify adds its own fee on top of that processor’s own charges: 2% of every order on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. That fee applies to every sale, for as long as the store uses that processor, which makes it the single easiest way to overpay for the plan you’re already on.

Is Shopify’s yearly billing worth it?

Yearly billing cuts the price on Basic, Grow and Advanced by roughly 25%: Basic drops to $29 a month, Grow to $79, and Advanced to $299. The saving comes with a condition worth noticing: yearly billing charges the whole year upfront, so that’s a $348, $948 or $3,588 charge today instead of 12 smaller payments spread out. That trade suits a store that already knows it’s staying and has the cash on hand; a newer store that wants to keep cash free for inventory or ads is often better off paying monthly and giving up the discount. Switching from yearly back to monthly, or downgrading a plan, only takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle.

Plus runs the opposite way. There’s no monthly option at all: only a 1-year term at $2,500 a month, or a 3-year term at $2,300 a month, and the subscription can only be cancelled once that term ends.

What catches merchants off guard after they sign up?

A few rules live only in the help center, not the pricing page. Stores created on or after May 12, 2025 pay the third-party transaction fee on whatever part of an order is paid with a gift card or store credit, even when Shopify Payments handles the rest of that same order. New merchants get Shopify Rewards, a subscription credit worth 1% of Shopify Payments sales for the first 6 months, but cancelling the store forfeits any credit still unused.

Grow includes carrier-calculated shipping only with yearly billing, or for an extra monthly fee that Shopify’s help center doesn’t publish a number for; on monthly billing without that fee, it simply isn’t available. Plan charges themselves are non-refundable, and there’s no setup fee to offset that. Merchants outside the US should expect a different number entirely: Shopify prices Basic, Grow and Advanced in EUR, GBP, INR or USD depending on where the store is located, and every figure on this page is the US list price.

Who should not build on Shopify?

Shopify is built around selling physical or digital products through one admin, and that shows in what doesn’t fit. Course creators whose main product is a course, a membership or coaching are paying for shopping-cart features on plans built around inventory and shipping, not cohorts or drip content; Shopify’s help center describes each plan in terms of products, orders and staff, not lessons. Service businesses that live on bookings and invoices rather than a product catalog are in a similar position.

A store that needs even one employee logged in on the cheapest possible plan should budget for Grow at $105 a month from the start. Basic’s zero-staff-account limit isn’t negotiable, and no add-on removes it.

How does Shopify’s cost stack up against WooCommerce and Webflow?

For a store that just needs to sell, WooCommerce is the closer comparison. Its core plugin has no plan fee at all, and WooCommerce’s own numbers put a comparable small team’s real bill at about $45 a month in hosting, against $105 for Shopify’s Grow plan. The gap is what that money buys: Shopify bundles hosting, checkout, point-of-sale and support behind one login and one bill, while WooCommerce spreads the cost across a host you choose yourself, paid extensions, and whoever keeps WordPress and its plugins updated.

Webflow solves a different problem. It’s built for marketing and content sites with a CMS, and its own ecommerce plans show that: the entry Ecommerce plan caps out at 500 items and adds a 2% fee on top of card processing. A store outgrowing a basic catalog fits Shopify or WooCommerce far better. The full breakdowns are at Shopify vs WooCommerce and Shopify vs Webflow.