Short answer: a Shopify store costs $25 to $399 per month for the platform, plus a one-time build that starts around $1,750 for a store with a real catalog, payment gateway and admin panel. Apps and payment processing sit on top. The monthly plan is the number everyone quotes and the smallest part of the bill.
This breaks down every line, with the figures checked against Shopify's own pricing page on 28 August 2026.
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Shopify Basic is $25 per month billed monthly, or $19 per month billed annually. The full ladder, as published by Shopify:
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | Third-party gateway fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $25/mo | $19/mo | 2% |
| Grow | $65/mo | $49/mo | 1% |
| Advanced | $399/mo | $299/mo | 0.6% |
| Plus | from $2,300/mo | — | 0.2% |
Most stores doing under roughly 100 orders a month have no reason to leave Basic. The jump to Grow and Advanced buys lower transaction fees and reporting, so it pays for itself only once volume makes the percentage bigger than the plan difference.
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If you process payments through anything other than Shopify Payments, Shopify charges an extra percentage of every sale on top of what your processor charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. This is the line item that quietly changes which plan is cheapest for you, and most cost comparisons skip it.
Do the arithmetic before you pick a plan. A store on Basic doing $30,000 a month through an external gateway pays $600 a month in surcharge alone — more than ten times the plan. Moving to Grow at $65 cuts that to $300. The plan comparison that matters is not $25 against $65; it is $25 + 2% against $65 + 1%.
Using Shopify Payments removes the surcharge entirely. Whether that is the right call depends on your processing rates and whether Shopify Payments supports your business category, which is worth confirming before you commit.
At 3R Core, a Shopify or WooCommerce store starts at $1,750 USD, and that covers catalog setup, payment gateway, inventory management and the admin panel. The range above that depends on three things and nothing else: how many products, how much custom design, and how many systems it has to talk to.
Cheaper offers exist and some are legitimate — a template installed with a small catalog can genuinely be a few hundred dollars. What you should ask is what happens after launch: who fixes the checkout when it breaks, and whether analytics and conversion tracking were installed before launch or bolted on afterward. We install them before, because a store that has been live for two months without tracking has two months of unmeasured decisions behind it.
Apps are billed per app, per month, and Shopify does not publish a typical total — it depends entirely on which ones you install. Each app lists its own price in the Shopify App Store, so the only honest way to budget this is to add up the ones you actually plan to use.
The pattern we see repeatedly: a store launches with four apps, someone adds a review widget, then an upsell tool, then a loyalty program, and eighteen months later there are eleven subscriptions and nobody can say which ones are earning their keep. Review the list quarterly and cancel what has not been opened. It is the cheapest cost saving in ecommerce.
Payment processing is a percentage of every sale and it is not optional on any platform. Rates depend on your processor, your country and your business category, so any article quoting a single universal number is guessing. Get the rate from your processor in writing before you model your margins.
What matters for the comparison here is that processing is charged whichever platform you choose. It is not a Shopify cost; it is a cost of accepting cards.
WooCommerce has no platform fee — the core plugin is free — but it moves the cost to hosting and extensions, which WooCommerce publishes as $25–$350 per month for hosting and $29–$299 per year per paid extension. So "free" is a description of the software, not of the project.
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | $25–$399/mo (Plus from $2,300) | $0 |
| Hosting | Included | $25–$350/mo |
| Extensions / apps | Per app, monthly | $29–$299/yr each |
| Third-party gateway surcharge | 0.2%–2% | None |
| Who keeps it patched | Shopify | You or your agency |
The honest summary: Shopify costs more in visible monthly fees and less in attention. WooCommerce costs less in fees and more in maintenance, because updates, security and compatibility are now your problem. Pick based on whether you have someone to own that, not on the headline price. We build on both and say the same thing to every client.
For a small U.S. store built properly: roughly $1,750–$3,000 one-time for the build, plus the plan — $228 a year on Basic billed annually, $300 billed monthly — plus apps and processing. That is the realistic band for a business launching with a manageable catalog and no exotic integrations.
The number that ruins budgets is never the plan. It is the rebuild eighteen months later because the first store was built without tracking, without a migration path and without anyone who understood the checkout. That rebuild costs more than doing it once.
The plan is $25/mo on Basic, $65 on Grow and $399 on Advanced, discounted to $19, $49 and $299 respectively when billed annually. On top of that: any apps you install (each priced individually in the Shopify App Store) and payment processing charged as a percentage of sales.
They are not alternatives. Shopify is the platform; a developer builds the store on it. You will pay the plan either way. What a developer changes is whether the store is configured correctly at launch — catalog, gateway, tax and tracking — or configured by trial and error afterward.
Yes, and for a first store with a handful of products it is a reasonable way to learn what you actually need. The parts that most often go wrong unattended are state-level sales tax, shipping rules and conversion tracking, because all three fail silently — the store keeps taking orders and the numbers are simply wrong.
Stores start at $1,750 USD, including catalog, payment gateway, inventory management and admin panel. Websites start at $850 and corporate sites at $1,200 (range $1,200–$2,400 depending on scope). Prices are net, in U.S. dollars, with no mandatory contract.
Figures for Shopify and WooCommerce checked at shopify.com/pricing and woocommerce.com/pricing on 28 August 2026. Plan prices change; verify before budgeting.
Planning a store? See how we build ecommerce for U.S. brands, compare platforms in our platform guide, or check our published pricing.
Ready to sell online with a store that converts?
We build your store on Shopify, WooCommerce or Tiendanube with local payments, ready to sell. Get a quote.
Keep reading: How much should a small business spend on marketing? · 12 questions to ask a marketing agency before you sign
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