What Shopify really costs a store doing $30k a month (2026)
The plan price is the small number. We add up what a Shopify store actually pays each month once card rates, the third-party fee, apps and the Plus wall are in, and when the bill stops making sense.
Every few weeks somebody sends us a screenshot of their Shopify bill with the question "is this normal?"
It usually is. That's the problem.
We don't work on Shopify stores, so we have no plan to sell you. But we look at a lot of e-commerce numbers, and Shopify's pricing page is written so the small number is the one you remember. Here is the whole bill.
The plan is the number they want you to remember
As of this autumn, Shopify's US plans are:
- Basic – $29 a month paid yearly, $39 month to month
- Grow – $79 a month on the yearly plan
- Advanced – $299 a month on the yearly plan
- Plus – from $2,300 a month
There is also the "$1 a month for 3 months" offer for new stores. It exists so that by month four you have a theme, apps and products in there and are not going anywhere.
None of those numbers is what you pay. They are the entry ticket.
The card rate is the real line
If you take payments through Shopify Payments, online card rates are 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow, 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced, 2.25% on Plus.
To be fair to Shopify: that is roughly what Stripe charges anyone. Payment processing costs money on every platform. It is not a Shopify tax.
The Shopify tax is the next line.
If you use any other payment provider – PayPal as your main gateway, Stripe directly, Adyen, a local bank processor, anything that is not Shopify Payments – Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee on top of whatever that provider charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus.
Two percent of revenue, for nothing. Not processing, not fraud checks, just the privilege of not using their gateway. Stores that sell in countries Shopify Payments doesn't cover, or that negotiated a good rate with their own acquirer years ago, pay this every month and mostly don't notice, because it's netted out of payouts.
Apps are where the bill actually grows
Shopify's core is deliberately thin. Reviews, bundles, a proper search, back-in-stock emails, wholesale pricing, subscriptions, a decent returns flow, translation – each one is an app, each app is a subscription, and the good ones cost $20 to $300 a month.
Most established stores we've been asked to look at carry between eight and twenty. Owners tend to guess $100 a month for apps. When they actually open the billing page it's more often $300 to $600.
Then the theme. A good paid theme is a one-off $300–$400, which is fine. The part that isn't fine is that every app injects its own scripts into that theme, and after two years the store is slow for reasons nobody can see. We wrote about that side of it in how to speed up your e-commerce store.
A worked example: $30,000 a month, 500 orders
Say your store does $30k a month, average order $60, so around 500 orders. On Grow, with Shopify Payments:
- Plan: $79
- Card processing: 2.7% of $30,000 = $810, plus 500 × 30¢ = $150. Call it $960.
- Apps: $300 (being kind)
- Total: about $1,340 a month
Same store, same plan, but you take payment through your own gateway because you sell into markets Shopify Payments doesn't serve:
- Your gateway's own fee: similar, roughly $900–$1,000
- Shopify's 1% third-party fee: $300
- Plan and apps: $379
- Total: about $1,600–$1,700 a month
At $100k a month the third-party fee on Grow alone is $1,000, which is how people end up on Advanced at $299 just to get the fee down to 0.6%. And at some point you'll want to change something in checkout – a field, a rule, an upsell – and discover that checkout is only really yours on Plus. $2,300 a month, usually on a three-year term.
That Plus wall is the one that gets stores between $50k and $150k a month. Too big to accept the limits, too small for $27,600 a year to be a rounding error.
Is self-hosted cheaper?
Not automatically, and anyone who tells you it is hasn't run one.
A WooCommerce or PrestaShop store still pays a payment processor 2.9% + 30¢ (Stripe) or whatever your acquirer charges. What disappears is the platform fee on top of it, the per-feature app subscriptions for things that are free or one-off plugins there, and the Plus wall – checkout is your code.
What appears instead is hosting and engineering. A proper managed setup for a store this size is a fixed monthly figure; ours starts at $950 a month, month to month, and that includes the host, backups, monitoring, updates on staging first and an engineer you can reach. That's real money. For a $30k store on Basic with Shopify Payments and few apps, Shopify is genuinely cheaper and you should stay.
The maths flips when two or more of these are true: you pay the third-party fee, your app stack is over $400 a month, you need something in checkout that Plus gates, or you're doing $100k+ a month and the percentages have become the biggest line in the business.
Before you decide anything, do one thing: open the Shopify billing page, add up the last three months including apps and fees netted from payouts, and divide by three. Most owners have never seen that number. It is a different conversation once you have.
If yours is a WooCommerce or PrestaShop store that's already off Shopify and struggling, that's the work we do – start with what we do or just book a call.