Ecommerce · Platform costs

Outgrowing Shopify? See what growth will cost you.

Whether your store already feels the limits or you plan to triple sales in the next few years, the Shopify bill grows with you. Put in your numbers below, see the next three years, and choose your move while choosing is cheap.

It's your best month yet. Orders are up, a wholesale buyer wants to talk, and the new warehouse is finally running.

Then Monday happens. Three customers paid for jackets you don't have. Your biggest wholesale buyer agrees to a 50% deposit on a large order, and your plan can't take one. Your developer says there's an app for that. It would be app number sixteen.

Shopify got you here, and it did that job well. The question is how far it takes you, and what each step costs on the way.

Shopify cost calculator

What will Shopify cost you, now and in three years?

Set the sliders to match your store. It starts with the example from the receipt above. Everything runs in your browser, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

€
From €5,000 to €1,000,000 a month. Type a number for anything else.
€
Shopify plan
How you take payments
Own provider means Mollie, Adyen, Stripe, PayPal or your bank as the main gateway. Shopify then adds its surcharge on every order.
1.80% + €0.30
Typical EU card rates run from about 1.5% to 2.1% plus a fixed fee. Find yours in Shopify admin under Settings → Payments → View payment rates.
€400
10 h/week
€
Spreadsheets, stock fixes, copying orders between tools.
+80%
Use your real plan. Doubling every year is +100%.
This year on Shopify
€44,438

6.2% of your online revenue

Paid to Shopify itself€7,992Plan and surcharge
Fees on every order2.80% + €0.301% of it is Shopify's surcharge
Grows with every order52%of this bill rises with sales
Plan€792
The number everyone compares.
Payment processing€16,046
Paid to your provider. You'd pay this on any platform.
Shopify surcharge€7,200
1% of every order, only because you use your own provider.
Apps and manual work€20,400
What it costs to fill the gaps the platform leaves.

If you grow 80% a year

In year three you'd pay €192,339 a year to run on Shopify, 4.3× today. €42,782 of that goes to Shopify itself. Over the next three years: €379,625 in total.

By year three you'd sell about €349,920 a month. At that size, compare Advanced and Plus too: switch the plan above to see each path.
Show the numbers as a table
TodayYear 1Year 2Year 3
Assumptions behind the numbers
  • Plan prices are billed yearly in euros: Basic €25, Grow €66, Advanced €289 a month. Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term, converted below. Source: Shopify pricing.
  • The surcharge for an outside payment provider is 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Source: Shopify Help Center.
  • Card rates vary by country, card type and plan. The slider default changes with the plan until you move it yourself.
  • Apps and manual hours grow at half your revenue growth rate. Processing and surcharge grow in step with revenue.
  • The plan stays the same across all three years unless you change it.
€
Check today's rate before quoting a number.
Talk them through with us
What to do about it

Four ways forward: clean up, Plus, headless or custom

Most stores don't need to leave Shopify. The four moves below run from cheapest to deepest. If you're planning ahead, pick the one you'll need at your target size, not today's.

Lightest

Clean up

Move to Shopify Payments where you can, cut apps nobody uses and merge overlapping ones. The cheapest win, and for many stores enough.

Right when
The platform fits, but the setup grew messy
What it takes
An app and fee audit, a few weeks
Trade-off
Fixes the bill, not the limits
Moderate

Upgrade to Plus

Plus removes the checkout wall and cuts the surcharge to 0.2%. Model it first: the fee is locked in for years and the rest of the bill stays.

Right when
Checkout or wholesale rules are the main blocker
What it takes
From $2,300 a month, three-year term
Trade-off
You pay more to rent more
Deep

Go headless

Keep Shopify as the engine for catalogue and checkout, and build your own storefront and logic around it.

Right when
You need your own storefront and flows, and Shopify's checkout still works
What it takes
A custom front end plus integration work
Trade-off
Two systems to run and keep in sync
Deepest

Own your logic

Build the parts that make you different as your own platform, on your own code or an open-source engine such as Shopware. Plug in standard services for the rest.

Right when
Operations are your edge: checkout, stock, loyalty, B2B
What it takes
A custom platform, built in phases
Trade-off
You need a team that owns it with you
From our work · JJ Activewear

One stock count and one set of rules across web and app

JJ Activewear sells activewear online and through its own app. We built a custom store and a native mobile app on one shared API, with multi-tier inventory that keeps every channel in sync, their own checkout and shipping, and loyalty that rewards behaviour as well as spend.

A sold-out item is now sold out everywhere, and a new checkout or loyalty rule ships in their own code, on their schedule.

See the project →

jjactivewear.com
JJ Activewear production website built by MIT-DEV
The short version

Renting is right, until the rent becomes a tax

Shopify is a great landlord. Most brands should start there, and many should stay. Look again when the rent grows with every order and the rules of the building start deciding how you run your business.

Not sure which move fits your numbers? Copy your calculator results and send them to us with the workaround your team dislikes most. A senior engineer will go through them with you in 30 minutes and tell you which option fits, including when the answer is to stay.

Contact us

Mihai Țugui is CEO of MIT-DEV, a senior-only engineering studio from Chișinău that builds custom platforms for growing businesses in Europe.