Shopify Pricing: What You'll Actually Pay Over Three Years
The plan price is what Shopify shows you. It is not what you will pay.
Most founders notice the real cost four to six months in, when the monthly outlay is double the subscription and the migration decision is long behind them.
This piece builds the full cost model — plans, transaction fees, apps, and development — so the number exists before you commit to it, not after.
Please note: the numbers in the post were correct at the time of writing :)
Shopify Plans: What the Pricing Page Shows
Shopify currently offers five main plans billed in USD, with GBP equivalents that fluctuate with exchange rates. These are the headline figures most people start with.
Shopify Basic
Priced at $29 per month, billed annually. Basic suits very early-stage stores with limited product ranges, no wholesale requirements, and minimal integration needs. The credit card rate is 2% on third-party payment processors if you are not using Shopify Payments. Legitimate uses at this tier tend to be early DTC testing, staging stores, or side projects running low volume.
Shopify (Standard)
At $79 per month, this is where most growing brands land initially. You get reduced credit card rates, five staff accounts, and professional reports. The transaction fee drops to 1% on third-party processors.
Shopify Advanced
$299 per month. Custom report builder, 15 staff accounts, third-party calculated shipping rates, and a 0.5% transaction fee. A brand processing significant volume through a third-party processor will often find the transaction fee reduction justifies the step up from Standard. At £5m GMV, moving from 1% to 0.5% saves £25,000 per year — the plan uplift costs a fraction of that.
Shopify Plus
Starts at $2,500 per month for most merchants, moving to a revenue-based model — typically 0.25% of monthly revenue — once GMV exceeds a threshold. Shopify Plus removes transaction fees entirely when using Shopify Payments, adds B2B functionality, automation tools, expanded API limits, and a dedicated merchant success manager.
The ceiling on the revenue-based model is currently around $40,000 per month.
Shopify Starter
$5 per month, designed for selling via social or existing websites. Not relevant to established ecommerce operations.
Transaction Fees: The Cost That Scales With Revenue
If you use Shopify Payments, transaction fees disappear. If you use any other payment processor — Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, or anything else — Shopify charges a transaction fee on top of whatever the processor charges.
On the Standard plan, that fee is 1%. For a brand doing £5m in revenue, that is £50,000 per year going to Shopify before your processor takes anything. The only ways to eliminate it are to use Shopify Payments or upgrade to Plus.
In the UK, Shopify Payments processes through Stripe. Credit card rates through Shopify Payments currently range from 1.5% to 1.7%, depending on the plan. For many brands, consolidating onto Shopify Payments is financially straightforward once you run the numbers, but it does mean losing flexibility over your payment stack and the ability to negotiate rates independently as volume grows.
Payment processing is almost never included in the initial estimate when brands first price up the platform.
Apps: Where the Monthly Cost Quietly Doubles
Shopify's lean core means you pay for most operational requirements through apps, and apps bill you every month.
A typical mid-market Shopify store with £2m to £10m in revenue will carry between eight and twenty paid apps. Common categories include:
Reviews and social proof
Yotpo, Okendo, Stamped, and Junip all fall in the £30-£300 per month range, depending on plan tier and review volume.
Subscriptions
Recharge, Seal, Bold, and others. Pricing models vary — some charge flat monthly fees, others take a percentage of subscription revenue. On £500k of subscription revenue, the percentage models can become expensive quickly.
Loyalty and retention
Smile, LoyaltyLion, and similar tools typically run £150 to £500 per month at mid-market volumes. This category is frequently underestimated in initial budgets, particularly by brands planning to launch a loyalty programme post-migration.
Upsell and cross-sell
Rebuy, Frequently Bought Together, CartHook. Flat monthly fees in the £50 to £250 range, or a percentage of attributed revenue.
Advanced search and merchandising
Searchanise, Boost Commerce, and Constructor. These matter significantly for stores with large catalogues. £50 to £400 per month, depending on product count and traffic. Brands migrating from platforms with strong native search — Magento in particular — often underestimate the cost of replacing this category.
Returns management
Loop, Swap, or bespoke integrations. £100-£400 per month, depending on volume.
Reporting and analytics
Glew, Daasity, Triple Whale. £200 to £800 per month for tiers that provide mid-market teams with meaningful data.
Add these up across a realistically equipped store and £1,000 to £2,500 per month in app fees is not unusual. Some stores carry more. A brand doing £10m with mature retention and merchandising programmes can comfortably exceed £3,000 per month in app spend.
Apps also interact with each other in ways that create ongoing development overhead — theme conflicts, checkout extension compatibility issues, and data flows that need maintaining. The app fee appears in your billing. The development time those apps generate does not.
Development Costs: One-Off and Ongoing
The initial build cost for a Shopify store covers theme development or customisation, integration work, data migration if replatforming, and QA. For a mid-market brand, a realistic build is typically £25,000 to £80,000 depending on complexity.
What most brands underestimate is the ongoing development spend once the store is live.
An established Shopify store with £3m to £10m in revenue will typically spend between £2,000 and £6,000 per month on ongoing development. That covers:
Conversion rate improvements and A/B test implementation
App integrations and maintenance
Checkout customisations using Shopify Functions
Theme updates and compatibility work
New feature builds as trading requirements change
This number increases if the business is actively growing, adding channels, or facing complex operational requirements. It goes down if the store is essentially stable and the team is managing most changes internally.
The model — agency, in-house, or blended — matters less than having an honest estimate of the spend.
A Three-Year Shopify Cost Model
The following ranges assume a brand doing £3m to £8m in revenue on Shopify Standard or Advanced, using Shopify Payments, with a realistic app stack.
Year One
Platform plan (Advanced, annual): £2,800 to £3,200
Initial build and migration: £25,000 to £60,000
App stack: £12,000 to £25,000
Ongoing development: £24,000 to £50,000
Payment processing (1.5–1.7% on £5m GMV): £75,000 to £85,000
Year One Total: £138,800 to £223,200
At £2,800 to £3,200 against a build of £25,000 to £60,000, the plan fee is under 5% of year-one spend.
Year Two
Platform plan: £2,800 to £3,200
App stack (typically grows year on year): £15,000 to £30,000
Ongoing development: £24,000 to £60,000
Payment processing (assuming growth): £80,000 to £100,000
Year Two Total: £121,800 to £193,200
Year Three
By year three, most brands either upgrade to Shopify Plus — which reduces per-transaction costs but increases the base subscription — or carry a larger app and development footprint than they originally budgeted for. Assuming continued growth and no platform change:
Platform plan: £2,800 to £3,200
App stack: £18,000 to £36,000
Ongoing development: £30,000 to £72,000
Payment processing: £90,000 to £120,000
Year Three Total: £140,800 to £231,200
Three-year total range: approximately £400,000 to £650,000
Payment processing dominates this model for most brands. The plan fee represents less than 2% of the total three-year spend in most scenarios.
When Shopify Plus Changes the Economics
The case for upgrading to Shopify Plus typically rests on three things: removing transaction fees on third-party processors, unlocking checkout customisation via Shopify Functions, and accessing the B2B and wholesale features.
At $2,500 per month ($30,000 per year), Plus pays for itself through transaction-fee savings alone if you process significant volume through a third-party processor. A brand doing £8m on Shopify Advanced, paying 0.5% in transaction fees, is spending £40,000 per year on those fees. The Plus subscription is cheaper than the fee saving.
The break-even calculation varies by payment setup. If you are already on Shopify Payments, the transaction fee benefit disappears, and the case for Plus rests on features and API access rather than immediate cost reduction.
Plus also reduces app spend for some brands — functionality that requires third-party apps on lower plans (certain B2B features, advanced automation via Shopify Flow, multi-store management) is built into Plus. For others, the app stack does not change materially.
Where Shopify Pricing Gets Unpredictable
Standard pricing discussions omit four cost areas that routinely catch brands out.
Shopify Payments rate tiers. Shopify Payments card rates are fixed by plan. As volume grows, you cannot renegotiate. Brands processing £15m or more annually often find that their Shopify Payments rate is no longer competitive compared with what a direct Stripe relationship would offer — but moving off Shopify Payments reintroduces transaction fees. It is a deliberate lock-in.
Theme licensing. Premium themes cost £150-£350 as a one-off purchase. The ongoing cost is not the theme itself but the development time to maintain it as Shopify's platform evolves.
App price increases. App pricing is set by third-party developers and changes independently of Shopify's own pricing. Apps that cost £50 per month in 2021 now cost £150 to £200. There is no cap on this. Budget your app stack today, and assume it will cost 15%-20% more in three years.
Checkout extensibility migration. Shopify deprecated checkout.liquid in favour of checkout extensibility. Brands with customised checkouts had to rebuild those customisations using Checkout UI Extensions and Shopify Functions. For some brands, this was straightforward. For others, it required significant development time against a fixed deadline.
The Three Numbers That Matter Before You Commit
Three numbers matter more than the plan price before you commit to Shopify.
The first is what you will actually pay in payment processing. Calculate the transaction fee at your current GMV if you are using a third-party processor, and check whether it affects your plan choice. On £5m of revenue, moving from Standard to Advanced saves £25,000 in transaction fees — the plan uplift costs £2,400 per year.
The second is a realistic app stack cost, not a minimum one. Cover reviews, retention, merchandising, and reporting at the level your business actually operates. Most mid-market estimates land £800 to £1,000 per month too low because they model the stack they hope to need rather than the one they will need.
The third is an honest ongoing development number. This figure is almost always underestimated in platform evaluations, and it compounds every year as trading requirements change. It is also the number that most often causes the three-year total to exceed the projection by the widest margin.
Shopify works for most brands in the £1m-£20m range. The brands that struggle most are those that planned against the headline subscription and then encountered the full-cost model six months into operation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Shopify cost per month in the UK?
The Standard plan costs around £60-£70 per month, billed annually, depending on the USD/GBP rate. Shopify Advanced costs roughly £230-£250 per month. Shopify Plus starts at around £2,000 per month for most merchants. These figures exclude apps, transaction fees, and development costs, which typically dwarf the plan fee for established businesses.
Does Shopify charge transaction fees in the UK?
Shopify charges transaction fees on all plans below Plus if you use a third-party payment processor rather than Shopify Payments. On the Standard plan that fee is 1% of revenue. On Advanced it is 0.5%. Shopify Payments removes the transaction fee but still charges credit card processing fees of 1.5% to 1.7%, depending on the plan.
Is Shopify Plus worth the cost for UK brands?
It depends almost entirely on your payment setup and operational requirements. If you are paying transaction fees on a third-party processor at significant volume, the maths often favours Plus before you factor in the additional features.
If you are already on Shopify Payments, the case rests on B2B features, checkout extensibility, and API access. Run the numbers against your specific payment situation rather than making the decision based on features alone.
How much do Shopify apps cost?
Individual apps range from free to several hundred pounds per month. A realistically equipped mid-market store — covering reviews, subscriptions, loyalty, search, returns, and reporting — will typically spend £1,000 to £2,500 per month on apps. That figure grows as trading requirements become more complex and as app developers adjust their pricing.
What is the cheapest way to run Shopify?
The Basic plan at $29 per month is the lowest cost entry point. For a brand generating meaningful revenue, the cheaper plan options usually end up costing more overall. Either through higher transaction fees that outweigh the plan savings, or through capability gaps that generate workarounds and additional development spend.
