Shopify Pricing Explained: Plans, Plus, Themes and Fees

Prices checked September 2026. Shopify posts its plan prices on its own pricing page, and that page answers one question well: what the subscription costs. A store's real bill has more lines than the subscription, and a few of them have no fixed price anywhere.

This guide collects the figures Shopify publishes, names the page each one came from, and dates it to the month it was read. Pricing pages change, and an undated number on a blog goes wrong quietly, so if anything below disagrees with Shopify's own page on the day you read it, go with Shopify's page. The costs that have no honest single figure are described in words, with the reason there is no number.

One thing this guide does not do is quote what it costs to have a Shopify store built. That question has its own answer, linked in the build section near the end.

Basic, Grow and Advanced: the standard plans

As of September 2026, Shopify's pricing page lists Basic at $39 a month ($29 billed yearly), Grow at $105 ($79 yearly) and Advanced at $399 ($299 yearly).

Read each pair the same way. The higher number is the rate for paying month to month, and the lower number is the rate for billing a year at a time. Monthly billing costs more and leaves the store free to change course. Yearly billing costs less and fits a store that is past the trial-and-error stage and knows which plan it belongs on.

The gaps between the plans are wide. Each step up costs a multiple of the step below, so the choice deserves more than picking the middle option out of habit. Three habits help:

• Buy for this year, not for someday. Moving to a bigger plan later is a setting in the Shopify admin, not a rebuild, so there is little reason to pay ahead for room the store may never use.
• Compare only the features you would actually use. Shopify's comparison lays out what each plan adds. Skip the rows that have nothing to do with how the store sells.
• Remember the plan reaches past the subscription. When checkout payments run through an outside provider, the plan also sets the size of an added fee on every order, covered further down.

Shopify Plus and the term you commit to

As of September 2026, Shopify's Plus pricing page says Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a 3-year term or $2,500 on a 1-year term.

Two words in that sentence carry most of the meaning. "Starts" makes the figure a floor, not a quote. "Term" means Plus is sold as a commitment rather than as a month-to-month subscription, and the longer commitment carries the lower monthly figure.

For a store choosing its first plan, Plus mostly serves as the top of the ladder, and the step from Advanced to Plus is the biggest jump in the lineup. If Plus does come up, weigh it the way you would weigh any contract. The useful question is not whether the store can cover the next invoice. It is whether the business will still want this platform, at this level, on the day the term ends.

The free trial, the intro rate and Starter

As of September 2026, Shopify's pricing page offers 3 days free, then $1 a month for 3 months.

Treat that stretch as a window for setting the store up, not as a preview of what it costs to run. Once the intro rate ends, the plan bills at its regular price, so budget from the plan figures above rather than from the offer. A few ways to spend the window well:

• Configure payments, shipping and taxes early. They decide how orders actually work, and getting them right is a better use of the window than browsing themes.
• Keep a written list of every paid app you add. Many apps run their own trials, and those end on their own schedules, separate from the store's.
• Mark the day the intro rate ends. Then choose monthly or yearly billing on purpose instead of by default.

Setup is a piece of work in its own right, and Shopify store setup describes what Kelly WM handles in it.

Starter is the plan this guide leaves unpriced. Shopify's pricing page lists no Starter price, so there is no figure here to date and source. Before counting Starter as an option for a new store, look for it on Shopify's own pages, and budget from the plans the pricing page does list.

What a theme and a stack of apps add

As of September 2026, paid themes on the Shopify Theme Store run roughly $100 to $400-plus, and free themes exist.

A Theme Store theme is bought once rather than billed every month, which makes it one of the more predictable lines in a Shopify budget. Whether a Theme Store theme or a theme coded for the store is the better buy is a separate decision with its own answer: hire a Shopify developer or use a theme. A coded theme is labor rather than a purchase, so its cost lands in the build line; custom Shopify theme development covers that work, and the Shopify theme definition explains what a theme controls.

Apps are the harder line to pin down. They are priced by the companies that make them, not by Shopify, and the pricing models vary: some are free, some charge a flat amount each month, some charge by usage, and any of them can change when the app is updated. A per-month figure for apps in general would have to be invented, so this guide gives none.

The honest way to budget apps is a list. Write down each app the store needs on launch day, copy the price from its own listing on the day you install it, and date the entry the way the figures on this page are dated. Apps that place their storefront pieces through a theme app extension are also simpler to remove later, which matters when an app stops paying for itself.

Card processing and the added Shopify fee

Taking a card payment is never free, on Shopify or anywhere else, and processing is charged on each sale rather than as part of the plan. On Shopify Payments, the card rates depend on the plan and are listed on Shopify's pricing page. On an outside provider, that provider sets them. Rates differ by plan, by provider and by the kind of sale, so this guide leaves them to the source pages instead of printing a figure that may not match your store.

There is a second, separate charge. According to Shopify's pricing page as of September 2026, a store whose payments go through another provider pays Shopify an added transaction fee on each of those orders, that fee gets smaller on each higher plan, and Shopify waives it on orders paid through Shopify Payments.

The rates for that fee, with their own date and source, are in does Shopify charge transaction fees, along with how the added fee differs from processing.

Build labor, and the one range Kelly WM publishes

The last line is the work of building the store, and it is the one Shopify's pricing page can tell you nothing about.

Guides around the web quote hourly rates and project ranges from other developers. Those are their authors' numbers, not Shopify's and not Kelly WM's, and this guide does not repeat them. What a Shopify build costs, and what moves that figure, is answered on its own page: how much a Shopify website costs. Kelly WM does not publish a Shopify build price; that work is scoped per store, quoted after the free consult.

There is one figure Kelly WM does publish, and it belongs to another kind of project. For a custom storefront coded from scratch rather than run on Shopify, the published range is $3,500 to $12,000+ one-time; a small catalog with online ordering starts at $3,500. Read it as the custom-storefront range and never as a Shopify build price. How that range compares with starting on a platform is covered in the answer on what an ecommerce website costs.

Pricing a site that does not sell online is a different exercise again, covered in how much does a website cost, and the wider tradeoff between a template and a custom build gets its own treatment in custom website vs template.

What this guide prints, and what it leaves to the source

Here is the whole bill, line by line, with where each figure lives:

• Basic, Grow and Advanced. Set by Shopify and printed above, dated September 2026.
• Plus. Set by Shopify by term length and printed above as a starting figure, dated September 2026.
• The trial and intro rate. Set by Shopify and printed above, dated September 2026.
• Starter. No price printed, because Shopify's pricing page lists none.
• Themes. Printed above as a rough range for paid themes on the Theme Store, dated September 2026; free themes cost nothing.
• Apps. No figure: each app sets its own price.
• Card processing. No figure: it depends on the plan, the provider and the sale.
• The added transaction fee. Named in words here; the rates are on the transaction fees answer.
• Build labor. No Shopify build price, for the reasons in the build section above.

When you check Shopify's pricing page yourself, confirm which billing period a figure belongs to before comparing plans, keep intro offers apart from regular plan prices, and write the month next to every number you copy into a budget. A price with a date on it can be rechecked. A price without one just gets repeated.

Shopify stores are part of what Kelly WM designs and builds, and the Shopify web design and development page covers that work. To turn these lines into a budget for your own store, book a free 30-minute consult with the owner by calling (407) 694-2055.

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