How much does a Shopify store cost?

By Alex Abushanab, founder of Apex Software Engineering · Oct 9, 2026 · Shopify prices checked on Oct 9, 2026

A Shopify store has four kinds of cost: a monthly plan, a fee on every sale, one-time setup (a theme and the build), and any apps you add. You can open a store yourself for little more than the plan. Hiring a developer adds a one-time build cost, which should be a fixed price you see in writing before any work starts.

The short answer

• Shopify plan: $29 to $399 a month from Basic to Advanced, cheaper when billed yearly. Plus starts at $2,300 a month.
• Payment fees: from 2.9% + 30¢ per online card sale on Basic.
• Theme: free, or $100 to $500 once for a paid theme.
• Apps: nothing if you add none. Each app sets its own price.
• Domain and hosting: hosting and an SSL certificate come with every plan. You bring a domain you own or buy one.
• The build: your own time if you do it yourself, or a fixed quote if you hire someone. At Apex, new websites start at $3,000.
• Upkeep: your own time, or a care plan. Apex’s is $100 a month.

1. The Shopify plan

Shopify charges a monthly subscription. There is no setup fee on any plan, and hosting, unlimited products and the checkout are included in all of them.

New stores get a 3-day free trial, then most plans cost $1 a month for the first 3 months. You can change plans later, so start on Basic unless you already need what the bigger plans add: Grow adds up to 5 staff accounts, Advanced up to 15, plus live shipping rates from third-party carriers.

Do not move up a plan just for the lower card rate. Grow saves 0.2% on each online card sale compared with Basic, and costs $50 a month more on yearly billing. That only pays for itself once you sell more than $25,000 a month online by card.

2. Payment fees on every sale

With Shopify Payments, Shopify takes a card rate on every order. On Basic that is 2.9% + 30¢ online, so a $50 order costs $1.75 in fees: 2.9% of $50 is $1.45, plus 30¢. International online payments add 1%. In-person card sales on Basic are 2.6% + 10¢.

If you use another payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify charges its own transaction fee on top of that provider’s: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. On a small store that adds up quickly, so use Shopify Payments unless you have a specific reason not to.

3. The theme

The theme is your store’s design. The Shopify Theme Store has free themes, and paid themes cost $100 to $500. A paid theme is a one-time payment, not a subscription: the Theme Store describes it as a lifetime license for your store.

A free theme is enough for most small stores. Buy one when it has a layout or feature you need, not because it looks more polished in the demo.

4. Apps

Apps add features Shopify does not have. Each one sets its own price in the Shopify App Store, often as a monthly subscription, and a handful of small subscriptions can end up costing more than the plan itself.

Before you install one, check whether your plan already does the job. Every plan includes email campaigns, marketing automations, abandoned checkout recovery, discount codes, gift cards and discounted shipping labels.

5. The build: do it yourself or hire someone

Setting up a store means choosing a theme, adding products with photos and descriptions, and setting up payments, shipping and taxes before you connect your domain. Shopify is built so an owner can do this without code.

Do it yourself if you have a small catalog, standard products and the time to learn the Shopify admin. Your cost is the plan and your hours.

Hire someone when the store needs more than setup:

• A large catalog, or product data that needs cleaning up before it goes live
• Prices, inventory or product details that change and need to stay correct
• A feature Shopify and the App Store do not offer, which means a custom app
• Google Merchant Center, Google Shopping listings and ad tracking set up correctly
• Moving from a static website or a marketplace to your own store
• You would rather spend your time selling than setting up a store

What makes a Shopify store cost more

The plan and the theme rarely decide the cost of a build. These do:

• Custom features. Anything Shopify and existing apps do not do has to be built and then maintained.
• Catalog size and data quality. Hundreds of products with inconsistent titles, missing photos or no descriptions take work to fix, by hand or with a script.
• Connections to your other systems, such as inventory, accounting or a price feed.
• Search and advertising setup: product feeds for Google Shopping, structured data, and conversion tracking for ads.

What keeps it down: a free theme, the Basic plan, few apps, and product photos and descriptions that are ready before the build starts.

An example: Almaza Fine Jewelry

Almaza sells 21K, 18K and 14K gold jewelry, and the price of every piece moves with the gold market. The business started with a static landing page. Apex built it a full Shopify store, which now lists more than 2,000 products.

The store runs on Dawn, one of Shopify’s free themes. The custom work went where Shopify had no answer: a pricing app that re-prices every gold piece from its weight, its karat and the live gold price. It runs every 30 minutes, switches to a second gold price source if the first one is down, and emails a summary of the changes. Daily jobs keep product titles consistent and fill in the product details that Shopify’s catalog passes on to AI shopping channels.

The lesson for your budget: spend on what makes your store different, not on the parts Shopify already does well. Read the Almaza case study.

What Apex charges for a Shopify store

• A fixed price in writing before any work starts, based on what your store needs. No hourly bills.
• New websites start at $3,000. There is no minimum project size: fixing or adding a feature to an existing store is quoted the same way.
• $100 a month after launch on the Website Care Plan for updates and fixes, month to month. See pricing for everything it covers.
• You own the store. It is on your Shopify account and billed to you. Apex works on it as a collaborator.

Apex is based in Austin, TX and works with businesses across the US, so a store in San Antonio, Houston or Dallas is quoted the same way as one in Austin. See what a build includes on the shopify stores page.

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