What a Shopify store really costs to run each month

Ask what Shopify costs and you will be told a plan price. That number is real, but for most shops it is not the biggest line on the bill — and the bigger lines are the ones nobody adds up. This is a plain walk through every cost, with the figures Shopify publishes, and a way to work out your own total in half an hour.

1. The plan

These are Shopify's US prices at the time of writing (October 2026). Prices differ by country — in Europe they are set in euros, for example — and they change, so check shopify.com/pricing for yours.

• Basic: $39 a month, or $29 a month if you pay for a year up front.
• Grow: $105 a month, or $79 a month paid yearly.
• Advanced: $399 a month, or $299 a month paid yearly.
• Shopify Plus, for large businesses: from around $2,300 a month.

2. Payment fees — usually bigger than the plan

Every card payment costs a percentage plus a fixed amount. With Shopify Payments in the US, the standard online card rate is 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow and 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced. Some cards, such as American Express or cards from other countries, cost more.

If you use a different payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own fee on top of that provider's: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced.

To see why this matters, take an imaginary shop on Basic selling $20,000 a month across 400 orders. The percentage alone is $580 (2.9% of $20,000), and the 30¢ per order adds another $120 — about $700 a month in card fees, against a $39 plan. Your numbers will be different; the point is which line is the big one.

3. Apps

Shopify does a lot on its own, but reviews, subscriptions, wishlists, upsells, advanced filters, loyalty points and email pop-ups usually come from apps — and most apps are a monthly subscription of their own. Many charge more as you get more orders.

Apps also cost you in a way that never appears on a bill: each one tends to add code to your pages, and slower pages sell less. It is worth listing every app you pay for and asking, for each one, when it last earned its place.

4. Theme and design

Shopify has free themes. Paid themes from its theme store are usually a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. Any custom design or development work on top is billed by whoever does it — and changes later are billed again.

5. Everything else that quietly adds up

• Your domain name, renewed every year.
• Business email for your domain, usually charged per inbox.
• Shipping labels, and the gap between what you charge customers for shipping and what you actually pay.
• Currency conversion fees if you sell in more than one currency.
• Chargebacks: when a customer disputes a payment, you typically lose the sale and pay a dispute fee.
• Your own time, or a freelancer's, spent keeping all of it working.

How to work out your real number

You don't need an accountant for this. Pick the last three full months and gather:

• Your Shopify bills — in the admin under Settings, then Billing. These include the plan and most app charges.
• Your payment fees — from your Shopify Payments payouts, or your payment provider's statements.
• Any app or service billed outside Shopify, from your bank or card statement.
• Your shipping label costs, and what customers paid you for shipping in the same months.

Add it all up and divide by the number of orders in those months. That is what it costs you to run the shop per order — before the products themselves. Most owners who do this are surprised, and nearly always by the same two lines: payment fees and apps.

If a number is missing — you don't know what shipping really costs you, or what a product costs to land in your warehouse — write that down rather than guess. A total built on a guess feels precise and leads you to confident wrong decisions.

Is it worth it?

Often, yes. A platform that works on day one, with payments, hosting and security handled, is worth paying for — especially early on. The trouble only starts when the bill grows faster than the shop and nobody has looked at it as a whole. Adding it up once a year is enough to stay on the right side of that line.