Shopify price calculator: real take-home, not just fees

§Shopify's published price is half the answer

The Shopify pricing page lists four numbers: $39, $105, $399, and $2,300. That is the subscription. It is not what running a Shopify store actually costs. The real monthly total adds payment processing on every sale, apps that replace features other platforms include by default, optional gateway surcharges, and currency conversion on international cards. For a typical store doing $10,000 per month in sales, those add-ons run more than the subscription itself.

The calculator above models all of them. The four useful answers it produces are: the true monthly total at your volume, the same total as a percentage of revenue, the cheapest plan at your specific order count, and the revenue level at which it makes sense to upgrade. Most fee calculators answer the first question and stop there.

The optimization piece matters because the published rule "Basic for new stores, Grow at $25K revenue, Advanced at $100K" is wrong on the math. Plan break-even comes much later than most articles claim.

§What the published rates actually are (2026)

Annual billing applies a flat 25 percent discount across Basic, Grow, and Advanced (shopify.com/pricing). Plus is an annual contract with a $2,300 base for up to $1M monthly GMV, then a 0.25 percent revenue share above that. The middle plan was called "Shopify" until 2024 and is now "Grow." Rates have not changed.

§Break-even orders: when Shopify covers itself

The first question a new merchant should ask Shopify is not "what does it cost?" It is "how many orders do I need before the platform covers its own subscription and apps?" Most pricing-page calculators do not surface this number. Shopify itself certainly does not.

The math: Contribution per order is what you keep on each sale before paying subscription and apps. Break-even orders per month = (subscription + apps) divided by contribution per order.

Worked example on Basic. A typical store: $50 AOV, $20 COGS, $4 shipping, $8 CAC, $1.75 processing. Contribution per order: $16.25. Fixed costs: $39 subscription + $100 apps = $139/month. Break-even: 9 orders per month.

Two failure modes the calculator surfaces:

Contribution per order is negative. AOV minus all variable costs falls below zero. You lose money on every sale before paying any subscription. No volume of orders fixes this; the unit economics are broken upstream. The only fixes are raising AOV, dropping COGS, or reducing ad spend per order. Anything else is rearranging deck chairs.

Contribution is positive but you are below break-even orders. The common case for hobby-tier stores running 1 to 5 orders per month on Basic with $100 in apps. Technically profitable on each sale but paying Shopify $50 to $100 per month out of pocket to host a store that does not yet generate enough volume to cover its own platform overhead.

The actionable framing: track contribution per order first (must be positive), then track months until break-even orders are sustainable, then track months until take-home covers your time. Skipping straight to the third question is how merchants run unprofitable Shopify stores for two years without realizing it.

§What you actually keep per sale

The Shopify pricing page implies that a $50 sale on Basic costs you $1.75 in fees ($50 × 2.9% + $0.30). That number is technically correct and substantively misleading. The $1.75 is what Shopify takes. It is not what you keep.

The full per-sale math on Basic at 100 orders per month:

• $50 sale (AOV)
• $20 COGS
• $4 shipping (your spend)
• $8 CAC
• $1.75 Shopify processing
• $1.39 amortized subscription + apps per order ($139 fixed / 100 orders)

That leaves $14.86 per order in your pocket. Real take-home margin: 29.7 percent. Not the 96.5 percent that "Shopify charges 3.5 percent" arithmetic suggests.

Two qualifications that move the number meaningfully:

Volume changes the amortization. Fixed platform costs at $139/month divide across all orders. At 100 orders the per-order fixed allocation is $1.39. At 50 orders it is $2.78. At 500 orders it is $0.28. Per-sale take-home grows with volume on the same product economics; this is why scale matters more than rate optimization at any plan tier.

Real take-home rarely runs above 15 percent for healthy DTC at full scale. The 29.7 percent number above assumes a generous AOV/COGS ratio and modest CAC. Most successful DTC brands run 10 to 15 percent real margin once acquisition is at scale. If your real margin sits at 25 percent or higher consistently, you either have unusually strong unit economics or you are not yet acquiring customers at scale and ad costs will compress the number once you push for growth.

The "real margin %" stat in the calculator is the line item to track. It determines whether your store is a business or an expensive hobby. Treating Shopify cost as 5 percent of revenue ignores the 70 to 90 percent that COGS, shipping, and ads consume before Shopify takes its share.

§The plan optimization curve

Most Shopify advice tells new stores to start on Basic and upgrade at fixed revenue thresholds. The math says the crossover is much higher than the conventional wisdom.

Plan A and Plan B cost the same when:

(monthly_A - monthly_B) = revenue × (rate_B - rate_A)

Working it out across plans gives:

Below those numbers, the cheaper plan saves money even though its processing rate is higher. The reason is that a 0.2 percent rate cut needs significant transaction volume to repay a $66 or $294 jump in subscription. Most stores upgrading on the conventional advice end up paying more, not less.

Plus is the most over-recommended plan in ecommerce. Its $2,300/month base only pays back against Advanced above roughly $150K monthly revenue at typical AOV. Below that, Plus is a downgrade by total cost. The reasons to take Plus anyway (B2B wholesale checkout, multi-store, dedicated CSM, Shopify Functions) are real but need to be load-bearing for the business case. Plan upgrade alone does not justify Plus.

The calculator runs this comparison live at your specific order count and AOV across all 4 plans, then highlights the cheapest in the bar chart. The 12-month projection slider adds the second decision: at 5 percent monthly order growth a $5K/month Basic store reaches the Basic-to-Grow crossover around month 24; at 10 percent monthly growth it reaches it around month 13. Plan ahead because Shopify Plus specifically is an annual contract with no mid-term downgrade option.

§Where the hidden cost actually lives

Subscription and processing fees are bounded. The variable that makes total Shopify cost balloon for most stores is apps.

Shopify's app marketplace is the platform's competitive advantage and its biggest hidden cost. Functionality that ships with WooCommerce or BigCommerce often requires a paid app on Shopify. A typical store ends up running between eight and fifteen apps, with monthly costs ranging from $20 to $100 each. Klaviyo, ReConvert, Recharge, Smile.io, and Loox alone can clear $300 per month on a small store.

The calculator default of $100 in monthly apps is on the low side. A store doing email marketing, reviews, upsells, and loyalty seriously is closer to $200 to $400. App spend frequently exceeds the subscription, and it is the line item most often forgotten in fee comparisons against competing platforms.

Two other costs that compound without showing on the pricing page:

Third-party gateway surcharge. If you use Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, or any payment processor that is not Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a surcharge per transaction on top of the gateway's own fee. The surcharge is 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Grow, and 0.5 percent on Advanced. For most stores there is no good reason to take this hit. The exception is gateway-specific features (recurring subscriptions handled by a particular processor, fraud rules tied to a specific provider) that justify the cost.

International card surcharge. Sales processed in a currency different from your payout currency add 1 percent to the processing rate. If 30 percent of your sales are international, the effective processing rate goes from 2.9 percent to 2.9 + (0.30 × 1.0) = 3.2 percent. On $10,000 monthly revenue, that is an extra $30 per month, not catastrophic but real.

§How to read the calculator

Three selectors set the cost structure: plan, billing cycle, payment gateway. Six numeric inputs and two sliders control volume and unit economics.

Plan: Basic, Grow, Advanced, Plus. Plus is in the panel because it is the upgrade decision most growing stores get wrong on cost.

Billing: monthly or annual. Annual is a 25 percent subscription discount on Basic, Grow, Advanced.

Gateway: Shopify Payments or third-party. Third-party adds a per-plan surcharge (2.0% on Basic, 1.0% on Grow, 0.5% on Advanced, 0.15% on Plus).

Volume inputs:

• Average order value
• Orders per month
• Apps cost per month (the line item most often underestimated)

Unit-economics inputs (added so the calculator returns real take-home, not platform-only cost):

• COGS per order
• Shipping cost per order (your spend, regardless of who pays at checkout)
• Ad spend per order (CAC attributed to the new customer driving the sale)

Sliders:

• International sales percentage (1 percent extra processing on non-payout-currency sales)
• Projected monthly order growth rate (powers the 12-month upgrade timeline)

The hero number flips between two values: monthly take-home if you are above break-even, or a break-even warning with the order gap if you are below. The position bar measures Shopify + apps cost as a percentage of revenue (low <3%, healthy 3-7%, high >7%). The 4-plan bar chart compares your current volume against all plans, highlighting the cheapest. The 12-month line chart plots take-home and Shopify cost forward over your projected growth, with the cheapest plan recomputed each month.