Shopify Pricing Plans 2026: Complete Cost Breakdown (Basic, Grow, Advanced, Plus)

Shopify pricing plans in 2026 look simple on the surface: four tiers, one price tag each. The reality is messier. The “Shopify” plan was renamed to Grow earlier this year. Basic merchants lost staff accounts entirely (yes, zero, the owner is it). Annual billing now saves a flat 25%. And the “starting at” sticker price almost never matches what you actually pay once card fees, third-party gateway penalties, and required app subscriptions are added in.

This breakdown lists every public Shopify plan side by side: Starter, Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus. Real monthly costs. Real card rates. The fees Shopify does not put on the pricing page. We rebuild the math you actually need to decide which tier fits.

Quick context: we build Shopify apps for a living (Craftshift, the people behind Rubik Variant Images and Rubik Combined Listings). So we work with merchants on every plan tier and pay close attention to how the choice plays out at different revenue points. This post is not a sales page for Shopify. It is the comparison we wish someone had handed us when we were picking a plan ourselves.

In this post

• Shopify pricing plans 2026 at a glance
• Starter ($5/month)
• Basic ($39/month)
• Grow ($105/month, formerly the Shopify plan)
• Advanced ($399/month)
• Plus ($2,300+/month)
• Credit card rates and third-party fees
• Hidden costs Shopify does not show on the pricing page
• When does upgrading actually pay for itself?
• Annual vs monthly billing: 25% off, with a catch
• Pricing by country
• What stays the same on every plan
• Frequently asked questions
• Related reading

Shopify pricing plans 2026 at a glance

Five plans, five very different audiences. Here is the side by side.

Plan	Monthly	Annual (per month)	Online card	3rd-party gateway fee	Staff	Locations
Starter	$5	N/A	5%	Not applicable	Owner only	N/A
Basic	$39	$29	2.9% + 30¢	2.0%	Owner only	10
Grow	$105	$79	2.7% + 30¢	1.0%	5	10
Advanced	$399	$299	2.5% + 30¢	0.6%	15	10
Plus	$2,300+	Custom	~2.15% + 30¢	0.2% or waived	Unlimited	200

The biggest jump is between Basic and Grow ($66 more per month, but you finally get staff seats and the third-party gateway fee drops in half). The smallest jump in real value is between Advanced and Plus, unless you specifically need B2B, checkout extensibility, or Shopify Functions.

Want the same comparison with your own sales numbers plugged in? Try the Shopify Plan Comparison tool for a side by side, or the Fee Calculator for monthly cost projections at your sales volume.

Starter ($5/month)

Starter is the smallest plan Shopify still sells. It is not a true online store. You get a checkout, a product link, and a buy button you can paste into Instagram bios, TikTok comments, or a basic landing page. No themes, no full storefront, no apps in the way most merchants think of apps.

The catch is the card rate: 5% on every transaction. That is roughly double Basic’s rate. So Starter only makes sense if you sell five or ten things a month and just need a way to take payment. The moment you start selling regularly, Basic costs less per dollar of revenue, even with the higher monthly fee.

Who Starter is for: creators, hobbyists, and people testing a product before committing. Most of those people graduate fast. If you are reading a blog post about Shopify pricing plans, you are probably already past Starter.

Basic ($39/month)

Basic is the entry point for an actual storefront. $39/month if you pay monthly, $29/month if you pay yearly (so $348 for the year, all up front). You get a full theme-based store, unlimited products, the App Store, abandoned cart recovery, and Shopify Payments.

What Basic gives you:

• Unlimited products and unlimited bandwidth
• Up to 2,048 variants per product (read our variant limit guide for what changed)
• 10 inventory locations
• Shopify Payments at 2.9% + 30 cents per online card sale
• 2.0% extra fee if you use a non-Shopify gateway like PayPal
• Up to 77% off USPS, UPS, and DHL shipping
• Sell internationally with Shopify Markets

What Basic does not give you (and this is where Shopify’s own pricing page goes quiet):

• Staff accounts. Zero. This changed back in 2024. The store owner is the only login. Need a virtual assistant, a designer, or your accountant to access the admin? Either upgrade to Grow, or send them a collaborator request through a Shopify Partner account (free workaround, but clunky).
• Shopify Flow (the automation tool). Locked to Grow and up.
• Professional reports. You get the fundamentals, not the cohort and behavior breakdowns.
• Carrier-calculated shipping at checkout (the live USPS/UPS/DHL/FedEx rate quote). Basic stores have to use flat or table-based rates.

Basic is fine for stores doing under roughly $10,000 a month in card sales. At that volume, the higher card rate (2.9% versus Grow’s 2.7%) costs you about $20 a month in extra fees, which is way less than the $66 you would spend upgrading. The math is straightforward.

Grow ($105/month, formerly the Shopify plan)

Heads up: this is the plan most older blog posts call “Shopify” or “Shopify Standard.” Shopify renamed it to Grow in 2026 to make the tier ladder feel less awkward (Basic, Shopify, Advanced was confusing because “Shopify” was both the company and a plan). Same plan, new name. $105/month, $79/month with annual billing.

What Grow adds over Basic:

• 5 staff accounts (huge for stores with even one employee or freelancer)
• Card rate drops from 2.9% to 2.7% online, 2.6% to 2.5% in person
• Third-party gateway fee cut in half (2.0% to 1.0%)
• Shopify Flow access (free automation, surprisingly powerful)
• Professional reports with cohort, retention, and behavior data
• Up to 88% shipping discount
• 5 expansion stores (limited countries)

Grow is the most upgraded-to plan because it removes the two real Basic ceilings: no staff and the 2% gateway penalty. If you already use PayPal alongside Shopify Payments, that 2% penalty alone can be $200+ a month for a $10K store. Grow makes that go away.

The break-even point on the card rate alone (2.9% to 2.7%) is around $33,000/month in Shopify Payments sales. Below that, you are paying for the staff seats and Flow access. That is usually worth it. Above that, the card rate savings cover the upgrade by themselves.

Advanced ($399/month)

Advanced is for stores that have outgrown Grow’s reporting and need the lowest standard card rates available outside of Plus. $399/month, $299/month annual.

What Advanced adds:

• 15 staff accounts
• Custom report builder (build the dashboard your CFO actually wants)
• Card rate drops to 2.5% online, 2.4% in person
• Third-party gateway fee drops to 0.6%
• Carrier-calculated shipping rates at checkout (the live FedEx/UPS quote shows in the cart)
• Tailored regional storefronts via Shopify Markets (B2B-style country gating, but on Markets, not Plus B2B)

Most stores that move to Advanced do it for the carrier-calculated rates and the custom reports, not the card-rate savings. The math: the rate drops only 0.2% (2.7% to 2.5%) from Grow. To save $294/month in card fees (the price difference), you would need around $147,000/month in Shopify Payments revenue. So if you are upgrading just to save on cards, you probably should not.

If you ship heavy or oversized items, calculated shipping pays for itself fast. A wrong shipping quote on a $200 furniture order can wipe out the entire margin. Run the numbers in our profit margin calculator if you are not sure.

Plus ($2,300+/month)

Plus is the enterprise tier. The starting price is $2,300/month on a three-year term. Shopify also runs a percentage-of-revenue model on top of the base: roughly 0.25% of monthly revenue, whichever is higher. So a store doing $1M/month typically pays $2,500/month. Past a certain revenue level the percentage gets capped. The exact cap depends on your specific deal with Shopify, so negotiate, especially at the larger sizes.

What Plus actually unlocks:

• Checkout extensibility: write your own checkout UI and logic, drop in custom apps
• Shopify Functions: custom discount, shipping, and payment rules at the platform level
• B2B / wholesale: company accounts, price lists, payment terms, draft orders
• Up to 200 inventory locations and unlimited staff
• Up to 9 expansion stores included (the multi-store, multi-currency setup)
• Negotiated card rates (typically around 2.15% online, sometimes lower)
• Dedicated launch engineer and merchant success manager

Honest take: most stores under $1M/year in revenue cannot justify Plus. The card-rate savings rarely cover the price gap on their own. The reason to be on Plus is checkout extensibility, B2B, or scale. Below those needs, Advanced does the same job for less than a sixth of the cost.

Credit card rates and third-party fees

This is where Shopify’s actual cost lives. The monthly fee is usually a small share of the total invoice. Card processing eats more.

Plan	Online (Shopify Payments)	In-person POS	If using PayPal/Stripe instead
Basic	2.9% + 30¢	2.6% + 10¢	+ 2.0% extra
Grow	2.7% + 30¢	2.5% + 10¢	+ 1.0% extra
Advanced	2.5% + 30¢	2.4% + 10¢	+ 0.6% extra
Plus	~2.15% + 30¢ (negotiable)	Custom	+ 0.2% or waived

That third-party gateway fee is the trap most merchants miss. It is on top of whatever PayPal or Stripe charges you. So if you sell $20,000/month through PayPal on Basic, you are paying PayPal’s 2.9% + 30¢ and Shopify’s 2.0% penalty. That is roughly $400 a month for the privilege of not using Shopify Payments. Worth it? Almost never.

Want the full picture on transaction fees by region and card type? Read our Shopify transaction fees breakdown.

Hidden costs Shopify does not show on the pricing page

The published price is rarely the real price. Here are the line items that quietly add up.

Apps

Most stores end up with 6 to 12 apps installed. Average mid-range app cost is $15 to $50/month. So budget $100 to $400/month on top of your Shopify plan, depending on what you sell. Variant images, reviews, upsell, email, SEO, page builder, customer service: each has a market leader and a price tag.

Some apps replace each other. We hear from merchants all the time who pay separately for a swatch app, a variant image app, and a “show variants on collection page” app, when one of them already covers the other two. If you sell apparel, jewelry, or anything with color and size, our Rubik Variant Images handles product page swatches and per-variant galleries in one app, and Rubik Combined Listings handles separate-product grouping plus collection page swatches in one app. Stack consolidation is the easiest way to cut your monthly app bill in half.

Theme

Shopify’s own free themes (Dawn, Horizon, Crave, Sense) are decent and most stores can launch on them. Premium themes from the Shopify Theme Store run $180 to $400 as a one-time purchase. Custom-built themes from agencies start around $5,000 and go to six figures.

Domain

About $14 to $20/year for a .com from Shopify. Cheaper if you buy from Cloudflare or Namecheap and connect it. Trivial cost, but it shows up on the bill.

Currency conversion fee

If you sell in multiple currencies through Shopify Payments, Shopify charges a 1.5% currency conversion fee (2% in the US). On a $50K/month international store, that is $750 quietly disappearing every month. Shopify Markets manages the conversion, but it does not waive the fee.

POS Pro hardware and subscription

POS Lite is included on every plan. POS Pro (the one with serious retail features) is $89/month per location, on top of your plan. Add $50 to $300 for hardware. If you have three retail locations, that is roughly $267/month before hardware.

Tax filing apps and add-ons

Shopify Tax replaced the old “Avalara on Plus only” model and runs at 0.35% per online order in states where you are registered, capped at $0.99/order and $5,000/year. Cheaper than Avalara at scale, but it is still a line item.

When does upgrading actually pay for itself?

Three rough rules of thumb, based on the difference between plan prices and card rate savings:

1. Basic to Grow: upgrade once you cross $20,000 to $33,000/month in card sales, OR the second you need a staff account, OR the moment you start using PayPal alongside Shopify Payments.
2. Grow to Advanced: upgrade for the features (custom reports, calculated shipping, 15 staff seats) rather than the card rate. The card-rate break-even is around $147,000/month, which is past the point where most stores already need Advanced for other reasons.
3. Advanced to Plus: upgrade only if you need checkout extensibility, B2B, multi-store, or you are doing $1M+/month and the negotiated rates plus dedicated support actually pay back. Otherwise stay on Advanced.

Plug your own monthly revenue and card mix into the Shopify Fee Calculator for the exact crossover for your store. The rule-of-thumb numbers above assume an average $100 order value and a typical Shopify Payments / PayPal mix. Your numbers will move the threshold.

Annual vs monthly billing: 25% off, with a catch

Shopify offers a flat 25% discount if you pay for a year up front. The catch: it is one payment, not twelve. Basic at $29/month annual is actually $348 charged the day you sign up. Grow is $948. Advanced is $3,588. If your cash flow is tight, monthly billing wins even at the higher rate.

What about cancellation? If you cancel mid-year on annual, Shopify refunds the unused months on a pro-rata basis. You will not lose the entire prepayment. But you will lose any time-bound promo discounts you had locked in.

The current $1/month for the first 3 months promo applies to Basic, Grow, and Advanced when you sign up new. It is a real discount, not just an introductory tease. Use it. Then decide on annual versus monthly when month four hits.

Pricing by country

Shopify’s headline plan price (the $39, $105, $399 numbers) stays roughly the same in USD across markets, but local currency prices and card rates move with the local payment landscape. A few quick reference points:

• UK: Basic £25/month, Grow £65/month, Advanced £259/month. Online card rate 1.5% + 25p on Basic.
• EU (most markets): Basic €27/month, Grow €69/month, Advanced €289/month. Card rates vary by country.
• Australia: Basic A$45/month, Grow A$117/month, Advanced A$449/month.
• Canada: Plan prices in USD. Card rates 2.4% + 30¢ on Basic with Shopify Payments.
• India: Plan prices in INR with steep local discounts. Card processing through Shopify Payments not yet available; use Razorpay or a similar local gateway.

Shopify’s pricing page shows local currency prices when you visit it from each country. If you are billed in one country and selling in another, your plan price stays in your billing currency. Currency conversion fees on the customer side are separate.

What stays the same on every plan

This part rarely gets discussed. There is a lot of stuff every plan includes, and it is the reason picking the wrong tier is not catastrophic.

• Unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited file storage
• Free SSL certificate
• Abandoned cart recovery emails
• Discount codes and automatic discounts
• Gift cards
• Full Shopify App Store access (every app, every plan)
• Sidekick AI assistant
• Shopify Markets for international selling (free tier)
• POS Lite for in-person sales
• 24/7 support

Apps work identically on every plan. A merchant on Basic can use the exact same variant image, review, page builder, and email apps that a Plus merchant uses. The plan does not gate the app experience. We get this question constantly: “do I need Plus to use Rubik?” The answer is no. Every Rubik app works on Basic with the same features.

Frequently asked questions

What are the Shopify pricing plans in 2026?

Shopify offers five plans in 2026: Starter ($5/month), Basic ($39/month, $29 annual), Grow ($105/month, $79 annual), Advanced ($399/month, $299 annual), and Plus (starting at $2,300/month on a 3-year term). The “Shopify” plan was renamed Grow earlier in 2026.

How much is Shopify Basic per month in 2026?

Shopify Basic is $39/month if billed monthly, or $29/month ($348/year) if billed annually. Shopify also runs a $1/month for the first 3 months promo for new sign-ups on Basic, Grow, and Advanced.

Did Shopify rename the “Shopify” plan?

Yes. In 2026 Shopify renamed the middle plan from “Shopify” to “Grow.” The price ($105/month, $79 annual), the staff account count (5), the card rate (2.7% + 30¢ online), and the third-party gateway fee (1%) all stayed the same. Only the name changed. If you signed up before the rename, your plan auto-migrated.

Does the Basic plan still include staff accounts?

No. Since 2024, the Basic plan does not include any staff accounts. The store owner is the only login. To give staff or contractors admin access, either upgrade to Grow (5 staff seats) or invite them as collaborators through a free Shopify Partner account.

Is Shopify Plus worth it?

For most stores under $1M annual revenue, no. Plus is worth it once you need checkout extensibility, B2B / wholesale features, Shopify Functions for custom logic, or you are processing enough volume that the negotiated card rates pay back the price difference. Below that, Advanced does the same job for a sixth of the cost.

Do all Shopify apps work on every plan?

Yes. The Shopify App Store works identically on every plan from Basic up to Plus. There is no “Plus only” gate on the App Store itself, although a few enterprise apps choose to require Plus on their own pricing page. All Rubik apps (Rubik Variant Images, Rubik Combined Listings) work on Basic with the same features as Plus.

What is the cheapest way to use Shopify?

Shopify Starter at $5/month is the cheapest plan, but it is not a full storefront. You get a buy button you can paste into social bios, no full theme. For an actual store, Basic at $29/month annual (or the $1/month first 3 months promo) is the entry point. Below that, you can build a storefront on a free platform, but you will not have Shopify’s checkout, payments, or app ecosystem.

Related reading

• Which Shopify plan should you choose in 2026? (decision framework)
• Shopify transaction fees explained (every fee, every region)
• Shopify profit margin guide (the right way to price products)
• Shopify variant limit in 2026 (what changed with 2,048)
• How much is your Shopify store worth?
• Rubik Variant Images for variant swatches and per-variant galleries
• Rubik Combined Listings for grouping separate products and collection page swatches

One last thing. Shopify changes pricing every 18 to 24 months. The numbers in this post were verified against shopify.com/pricing in May 2026. We update this post when Shopify ships a new pricing change. If something here looks off, check the official pricing page first, and let us know what is stale.