What are the real costs of running a Shopify store?

Short answer: budget $100 to $300 a month for a small store, not $39. The subscription is just the rent — the real bill comes from payment fees, apps, and the advertising you will need to get anyone through the door.

Shopify's pricing page is not lying. The Basic plan really is $39 a month on monthly billing ($29 if you pay yearly). But that number is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it. Ask store owners what they actually pay and you will hear numbers that sound like a different product: $150, $400, sometimes over $1,000 a month. The gap between the sticker price and the real bill is where most new sellers get surprised — so let us walk through every layer.

The subscription: just the rent

Shopify's plans are simple on the surface. As of 2026, new stores choose from Basic ($39/month monthly, $29/month billed yearly), Grow ($105/month monthly, $79 yearly), and Advanced ($399/month monthly, $299 yearly), with Plus starting around $2,300 a month for large brands. New signups get a short free trial, then typically $1 a month for the first three months.

Two things worth knowing. First, the middle plan was renamed from "Shopify" to "Grow" in 2026, so older guides use the old name — same plan, new label. Second, the $5 Starter plan is closed to new stores; Basic is now the cheapest real entry point.

For almost every new store, Basic is the right choice. The higher plans buy you lower card rates and more staff accounts, which only matter at volume. A store doing $5,000 a month gains nothing from a $105 plan. Start at Basic and upgrade when the math says so — which, for most stores, is somewhere past $30,000 a month in sales.

The subscription is the most predictable line on the bill. Everything after this gets fuzzier.

The card fees you cannot avoid

Every sale costs you a slice, and this slice is non-negotiable. On Basic with Shopify Payments, you pay 2.9% plus 30 cents per online transaction. On a $50 order, that is $1.75 — about 3.5% of the order gone before you have paid for the product, the box, or anything else.

Small orders hurt more than big ones, because the fixed 30 cents does not shrink. On a $10 order, the fee is nearly 6%. This is one of the quiet reasons cheap products struggle on Shopify: the payment math eats them first.

Then there are the add-ons. Use a third-party gateway like PayPal or Stripe instead of Shopify Payments, and Shopify adds its own surcharge on top — 2% on Basic. For a store doing $10,000 a month through PayPal, that is $200 a month for nothing. International cards add another 1%, and currency conversion on US stores adds 1.5%. None of these appear on the pricing page's headline. All of them appear on your bill.

The practical takeaway: use Shopify Payments if you can, and build roughly 3 to 4% of revenue into your pricing as the cost of getting paid.

The app tax: where the bill doubles

Here is the layer that surprises everyone. Shopify out of the box is deliberately spare — reviews, upsells, loyalty programs, advanced SEO, subscriptions, live chat — most of it lives in the app store, and most of it charges monthly.

The median store runs about five apps; the average is six. Typical app spending for a small store lands between $30 and $150 a month, with one widely cited figure putting the average merchant at around $58 a month. But averages hide the creep: email marketing tools like Klaviyo run $20 to $150 a month depending on list size, review apps $0 to $50, upsell tools $30 to $100, customer support $50 to $300. It is easy to wake up one day paying more for apps than for Shopify itself.

This is not a scam — many of these apps genuinely earn their fee. The problem is accumulation. Every app was a good idea at the time: the reviews app for social proof, the upsell app for average order value, the loyalty app for retention. Individually reasonable. Collectively, a second rent payment.

The discipline that saves real money: audit your apps twice a year and ask of each one, "what breaks if I cancel this today?" Uninstalling does not always remove the code the app injected into your theme either, so a bloated app history can slow your store down long after you stop paying. Fewer, better apps beat a full toolbox you never open.

The one-time costs: theme and domain

Not everything is a subscription. A custom domain costs roughly $10 to $20 a year — trivial, and worth it for credibility. Shopify includes the SSL certificate, so there is no security upsell hiding here.

Themes are the bigger decision. Shopify's free themes, like Dawn, are genuinely good — fast, clean, and honest. A premium theme from the official store costs $150 to $400 as a one-time purchase, buying you better conversion features and design flexibility. It is a reasonable investment once the store is earning, and an unnecessary one before it is. Start free. Upgrade when the store has proven it deserves the expense.

The upgrade question: when a bigger plan pays for itself

At some point every growing store wonders whether the Grow plan is worth it. The answer is arithmetic, not ambition.

Grow costs $66 a month more than Basic ($105 versus $39), and in exchange your card rate drops from 2.9% to 2.7% — a saving of 0.2% per order. Divide the extra $66 by 0.002 and you get the break-even: about $33,000 a month in sales. Below that, Grow is just a more expensive Basic. Above it, the lower rate starts paying for the upgrade by itself.

This is the general rule for every Shopify cost decision: each tier, app, and add-on should clear a number, not a feeling. "We are growing, so we need the bigger plan" is how stores end up paying $105 a month for features they do not use. "Our volume crossed the break-even last quarter" is how professionals do it. Run the division before you click upgrade — it takes thirty seconds and it never lies.

The cost nobody budgets: traffic

Here is the uncomfortable truth about the total bill: Shopify does not bring you customers. A marketplace like Etsy or Amazon has built-in search traffic; a Shopify store has a URL and silence. Every visitor must be earned — through ads, content, SEO, or social — and that earning has a cost.

This is the line item that breaks most first-year budgets, because it is the one new sellers forget to include. Paid ads are the fastest lever and the most expensive lesson: without tested creative and a converting store, ad spend is tuition, not investment. Content and SEO are cheaper but slower — months, not weeks.

There is no honest universal number here, because it depends entirely on your strategy. But the principle is fixed: a store with no traffic budget is a store with no sales, and "I will figure out marketing later" is how $39-a-month plans become expensive hobbies. Budget something for traffic from day one, even if it is just your own time spent consistently.

What a realistic first year looks like

Let us put it together for a small store finding its feet:

• Subscription: $39/month ($468/year, less with annual billing or the $1 intro months)
• Apps: $50–$100/month once you have the essentials ($600–$1,200/year)
• Domain: ~$15/year
• Theme: $0 to start, maybe $200–$350 later
• Payment fees: ~3.5% of revenue — on $30,000 of first-year sales, about $1,050
• Traffic: whatever you spend, but spend something

A realistic all-in for year one, excluding inventory and ad spend: roughly $1,200 to $2,000 before you have sold a thing, plus ~3.5% of every sale. One case study of twenty store owners found small stores averaging around $585 a month before transaction fees. Your mileage will vary, but "a few hundred a month all-in" is the honest neighborhood — not $39.

Keeping the bill honest

A few rules that keep the costs sane:

• Start on Basic, monthly. Annual billing saves ~25%, but only commit once you know the store will survive the year.
• Use Shopify Payments. The third-party surcharge is pure waste.
• Audit apps twice a year. Cancel anything you cannot defend with a number.
• Start with free themes and free app tiers. Pay for upgrades with revenue, not hope.
• Track cost per order, not just monthly totals. A $200/month stack is cheap at 1,000 orders and ruinous at 50.

Shopify is not expensive for what it is — a store that just works, with payments, hosting, and security handled. The surprise is never the platform. It is everything around the platform, added one reasonable decision at a time, until the bill is triple the sticker price. Go in with the real numbers, and there is no surprise at all.