Costs · Margins · The business of ecommerce
Four plans, two billing modes, a third-party payment surcharge that quietly quadruples between tiers — the full price sheet, read line by line from Shopify's own page.
Shopify’s pricing page answers “how much” four different ways at once: plan tier, billing period, payment processing and the third-party surcharge. Most comparisons quote only the first. Here is the whole sheet, with the parts that actually move money highlighted.
| Plan | Annual billing | Monthly billing | 3rd-party payment surcharge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $29/mo | $39/mo | 2% |
| Grow | $79/mo | $105/mo | 1% |
| Advanced | $299/mo | $399/mo | 0.6% |
| Plus | custom (from ~$2,300/mo) | — | 0.2% |
Plus the current promo: $1/month for the first 3 months on standard plans for new sign-ups.
If you use Shopify Payments, the surcharge column doesn’t apply. The moment you process through an external gateway — PayPal-only setups, regional processors, high-risk gateways — Shopify adds its own cut on top of what the gateway charges: 2% of every order on Basic. That is not a rounding error; on $10,000/month of sales it is $200/month, nearly seven times the Basic subscription itself. The surcharge is also the steepest discount curve in the whole price sheet: it falls tenfold between Basic and Plus while subscriptions rise a hundredfold, which tells you exactly which customers Shopify negotiates hardest to keep.
For a new store the decision tree is short. Take Basic annual at $29. Use Shopify Payments if your country supports it, and the surcharge disappears. Take the $1 promo months as a testing runway, not as the price — the real number starts in month four. And diarize a rate review for the month your revenue first clears $5,000: from there, every tier decision should be made by comparing processing savings against subscription cost, because past that point the percentages matter more than the flat fees.
Beyond features (staff accounts, reports, shipping rates), the economic difference is processing: each tier up cuts card rates and cuts the third-party gateway surcharge — 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. High-volume stores upgrade for the rates, not the features.
Annual billing prices work out roughly 25% below monthly at every tier: Basic $29 vs $39, Grow $79 vs $105, Advanced $299 vs $399. If you are confident the store runs 12 months, monthly billing is a convenience fee with no upside.
When your processing savings exceed the subscription difference. The exact crossover depends on your card rates and volume; the third-party surcharge alone drops a full percentage point between Basic and Grow, so stores clearing several thousand dollars a month through an external gateway should run the numbers.