Shopify review: the subscription is the cheap part

Shopify's pricing page is accurate and it is not the price. The subscription is a small fraction of what running a Shopify store costs, and the gap between the two is entirely predictable if somebody tells you about it in advance. Nobody does, so here it is.

The plans

• Basic — $19 a month annually, $25 monthly. 2% fee on third-party payment gateways. No staff accounts.

• Grow — $49 annually, $65 monthly. 1% third-party fee. Up to 5 staff accounts.

• Advanced — $299 annually, $399 monthly. 0.6% third-party fee. Up to 15 staff accounts.

• Plus — from $2,300 a month. 0.2% third-party fee. Unlimited staff.

There is also an introductory offer — three days free, then $1 a month for three months. Useful for building; irrelevant to your business case.

The third-party gateway fee, which is the real pricing lever

If you take payments through Shopify Payments, you pay card processing rates and no platform fee. If you use any other gateway, Shopify charges an additional percentage of every transaction: 2% on Basic, falling to 1%, 0.6% and 0.2% as you move up the plans.

On a store doing $50,000 a month, a 2% penalty is $1,000 a month — fifty times the Basic subscription. Two consequences follow, and both are worth stating plainly:

• Use Shopify Payments if it is available in your market and your risk profile fits. The fee is designed to make anything else uneconomic and it succeeds.

• If you must use a third-party gateway — because of your industry, your market or an existing acquirer relationship — the plan upgrade maths changes completely. Advanced at $299 with a 0.6% fee beats Basic at $19 with 2% at surprisingly modest volume.

Work out your crossover point before choosing a plan. For a merchant on a third-party gateway, the plan decision is a payments decision, not a features decision.

Apps: the line nobody budgets

A typical store beyond its first year runs several paid apps. A realistic set and realistic monthly costs:

• Reviews — $20 to $50

• Email marketing — $45 upward, scaling with list size

• Subscriptions, if you sell them — $50 plus a revenue share

• Advanced search and filtering — $30 to $90

• Loyalty or referrals — $30 to $200

That is $175 to $430 a month on top of a $49 plan. It is not unreasonable — each app does something a competitor would charge for inside the platform — but it means the true cost of a functioning Shopify store is closer to $300 a month than to fifty.

Audit apps quarterly. The most common finding is two apps that overlap and one installed for a campaign that ended eight months ago.

Staff accounts

Basic includes no staff accounts. One login, the owner's. Grow allows five, Advanced fifteen, Plus unlimited.

For a solo merchant this is fine. The moment you hire someone to handle fulfilment or customer service, Basic stops working and you are on Grow. Worth knowing before you pick a plan on price alone.

Why it still scores well

Checkout

Shopify's checkout converts better than almost anything else, and it is the single highest-leverage component in an ecommerce stack. A one percentage point improvement in checkout conversion on a $50,000 month is $500 — more than the platform costs. Years of testing at enormous scale are embedded in that flow, and no self-hosted alternative reproduces it.

Nothing to maintain

No server, no patching, no PCI scope to manage, no plugin conflicts, no scrambling when a campaign goes well and traffic multiplies. If you have run a self-hosted store through a Black Friday, you know exactly what that is worth.

The ecosystem

Whatever your requirement — a specific shipping carrier, a regional tax rule, a warehouse system, a marketplace integration — somebody has built it. That breadth is the reason Shopify wins evaluations against more elegant platforms.

Where it limits you

Theme customisation beyond the visual editor means learning Liquid, Shopify's templating language. It is not difficult, and it is a real skill requirement that people do not anticipate when they choose a no-code platform.

Checkout itself is largely fixed below Plus. For most merchants that is a feature rather than a limitation — Shopify's checkout is better than whatever you would build — but if you have an unusual flow, you will be constrained.

And the Plus threshold is steep: $299 a month to $2,300 a month. What you get is checkout extensibility, B2B tooling, higher API limits and multiple storefronts. Below roughly $2,000,000 in annual revenue it is rarely justified.

Verdict

8.7, the second-highest score in this round-up. Shopify is the most complete commerce platform available and the one that most reliably lets a merchant spend their time on selling rather than on infrastructure.

Budget the plan, plus card processing, plus the third-party gateway fee if it applies to you, plus $200 a month for apps. That is your real number. If the business works at that number, Shopify is the right platform and the rest is execution. Current plans are on Shopify's pricing page.