My First Shopify Invoice Was $71, Not $39
Last updated: August 2026
I signed up in April 2024 on the $39 Basic plan, spent a weekend building the store, and got an invoice at the end of the month for $71.40. Nothing had gone wrong. I'd added a $19 review app because every guide said social proof mattered, and paid $13.40 in transaction fees because I was using PayPal rather than Shopify Payments. Both were entirely my own doing, and neither had shown up on the pricing page I'd been reading.
By month four I was at $118 and had four apps I couldn't remember installing.
So: how much is shopify per month? Basic is $39, Grow is $105, Advanced is $399, all billed monthly, with about 25% off if you pay yearly. Realistically, budget 40-60% above the plan price once apps and payment processing are counted.
The Plans, and Which One You Actually Need
Shopify sells four tiers and almost every small seller belongs on the cheapest one. The differences between them are not features you'd notice day to day — they're card processing rates and staff accounts, and both only matter at volume.
| Plan | Monthly | Card rate (US online) | Staff accounts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $39 | 2.9% + $0.30 | 2 |
| Grow | $105 | 2.7% + $0.30 | 5 |
| Advanced | $399 | 2.5% + $0.30 | 15 |
| Starter | $5 | 5% + $0.30 | 1 |
Every plan gives you unlimited products, the same themes, the same checkout, and the same app store. You are not buying features by moving up; you're buying a lower percentage.
Which means the upgrade decision is arithmetic rather than judgement. Basic to Grow costs $66 more per month and saves 0.2% on card fees. That's break-even at $33,000 in monthly card volume. Below that number, Grow is worse — and I've watched sellers upgrade at $6,000 a month because it felt like the serious choice.
The Starter plan at $5 deserves more attention than it gets. It has no online storefront in the normal sense — you get product pages and checkout links you can drop into Instagram, a bio link, or a message. If what you actually want is a way to take card payments for items you promote on social media, Starter does that for $5 and Basic does nothing extra for it.
In July 2024 I moved a small side catalogue from Basic to Starter after realising all my traffic came through Instagram links anyway and nobody had ever browsed the storefront. Same sales, $34 a month back. I'd been paying for a shopfront that received about eleven visits a month, most of them mine.
Then the yearly discount. Paying annually takes roughly 25% off, so Basic drops to about $29 a month. Real money, and the obvious catch is that you're committing a year to a platform you may not stay on. My rule now is to run three months monthly first, and only switch to annual once the store has proven it earns.
Where this advice breaks down is if you need something specific from the higher tiers. Advanced includes custom reports that genuinely can't be replicated on Basic, and if your business runs on cohort analysis or complex reporting, that's a real reason rather than a status one. Third-party checkout on Plus, custom shipping rates calculated by carrier — same. Those are narrow needs and most people don't have them.
The Shopify POS side is worth naming too. If you sell at markets or a physical location, POS Lite is included with every plan, and POS Pro is $89 per location per month. For a reseller doing occasional flea markets, Lite handles it — card reader, inventory sync, receipts.
I'm honestly uncertain whether Shopify is the right platform for most resellers at all. It's excellent when you have a brand people search for by name and repeat customers who come back directly. It's poor when your buyers are searching for a product rather than for you, because a Shopify store has no built-in audience — you're renting infrastructure and supplying the traffic yourself. Marketplaces supply the traffic and take a cut instead. Which trade is better depends on whether anyone knows your name yet, and for most people starting out, they don't.
The Costs That Don't Appear on the Pricing Page
The plan fee is usually the smaller half of a Shopify bill. Apps, payment processing, and the theme are where the rest goes, and none of them are visible when you're deciding whether to sign up.
Apps are the biggest and the most insidious, because each one is individually reasonable. A reviews app at $19, an email tool at $16, a bundling app at $12, a currency converter at $9. Nobody installs $56 of apps in one sitting — they accumulate over four months, each solving a real irritation, and then the invoice arrives.
Payment processing is the second. If you use Shopify Payments, the card rate is bundled into your plan and there's no extra platform charge. If you use PayPal, Stripe, or any external gateway, Shopify adds a transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.5% on Advanced — on top of whatever the gateway itself charges. That's a penalty for not using their processor, and it's the line item that made my first invoice $71 instead of $39.
Then themes. The free ones — Dawn, Craft, Refresh — are genuinely good and I'd start with Dawn every time. Paid themes run $180 to $400 as a one-off, and the honest answer is that a paid theme makes a store look more polished and has never, in my experience, made one sell more.
What a realistic monthly bill looks like for a small store:
- Basic plan: $39, or $29 paid annually
- Two or three apps you actually use: $25-45
- Domain: about $15 a year, so roughly $1.25 monthly
- Transaction fees: zero if you use Shopify Payments, otherwise 2% of revenue
In January 2025 I went through my app list and uninstalled six of the eleven I had running. Bill dropped from $118 to $67 a month. Sales over the following quarter didn't change measurably — three of those apps had been installed for a trial I'd forgotten to cancel, which is the most ordinary way this happens. , according to U.S. Census Bureau economic data
Is there a free Shopify plan?
No, but there's a free trial and the $5 Starter plan, and the trial is the part worth using properly. Shopify runs a three-day free trial followed by a promotional first month at $1 in most regions, which gives you roughly a month to build the store and test a real sale before paying anything meaningful. Use it to actually process one order — buy from yourself with a real card — because that surfaces the tax settings, shipping rates, and email notifications that look fine until money moves.
What there isn't is a permanently free tier the way Etsy or eBay let you list without a subscription. Shopify charges rent whether you sell anything or not, which is the fundamental difference between running a store and listing on a marketplace.
The limitation of all this budgeting is that it assumes traffic, and traffic is the actual cost of a Shopify store. Nobody arrives at your domain by accident. If you're planning to buy traffic, ad spend will dwarf every number in this article within a month — I've spent $300 in a month on ads against a $67 platform bill, and the platform cost stopped being the question.
So the answer to how much is shopify per month is $39 on paper, about $65 in practice, and whatever your traffic costs on top. The first two are predictable. The third one isn't, and it's the one that decides whether the store works.
Shopify Against the Marketplaces, in Money Terms
The comparison people want is Shopify versus eBay or Etsy, and the two charge in fundamentally different directions. Shopify charges rent regardless of sales. Marketplaces charge commission and nothing else.
On $1,000 of monthly sales, Shopify Basic costs $39 plus card processing of about $29 — roughly $68, or 6.8% all in. eBay on the same $1,000 takes about 13.25% plus $0.40 an order, so around $145. Etsy takes 6.5% plus processing, landing near $125.
So Shopify looks dramatically cheaper, and at $1,000 a month it is — provided the sales happen. That proviso is doing enormous work. eBay's $145 buys you 130 million active buyers who arrive already searching. Shopify's $68 buys you software and an empty room.
The way I'd put it to someone deciding: marketplaces charge you for demand, Shopify charges you for infrastructure. If you have demand — an audience, an Instagram following, repeat customers who know your name — Shopify is much cheaper. If you don't, Shopify is cheaper than nothing and worth exactly that.
Where it gets interesting is running both, which is what most established resellers I know actually do. Marketplace listings bring in new buyers and pay the commission for the privilege; the Shopify store serves repeat customers who found you there and now buy direct at a much better margin. The store isn't a replacement for the marketplaces, it's what you graduate a customer into.
In October 2024 I ran that split for the first time properly. Of 61 orders that month, 48 came through marketplaces and 13 through the store — but the 13 direct orders had an average margin about 14 percentage points higher, because no commission came off them. Small number of orders, disproportionate share of the profit.
Can I sell the same inventory on Shopify and eBay at once?
Yes, and you should — but the inventory has to stay in sync or it will bite you. A one-of-a-kind item live on your Shopify store and on eBay can sell in both places within the same hour, and on eBay cancelling an order for stock you no longer have is a defect against your seller metrics. Shopify has official channel integrations for eBay, Facebook, and Instagram that handle stock levels automatically, and those are worth setting up on day one rather than later.
For the marketplaces Shopify doesn't integrate with directly — Poshmark, Depop, Mercari, Vinted — you're either syncing manually or using a crosslisting tool that pulls items down everywhere when one sells. Manual sync works fine up to about thirty listings and stops working reliably above that, which is roughly where I found out.
The other cost worth naming is time rather than money. A Shopify store needs product photography, category structure, shipping rates, tax settings, and an email flow before it's presentable, and that's a weekend at minimum. A marketplace listing needs photos and a title. If you're comparing platforms on how much is shopify per month alone, you're leaving out the largest input.
My recommendation for a reseller: stay on marketplaces until you notice the same buyer names appearing twice. That repetition is the signal that you have an audience worth owning, and it's the point where paying rent starts making sense. Before that, you're paying to build a shop on a street with no footfall.
Keeping the Bill Down Without Crippling the Store
Most of the difference between a $45 Shopify bill and a $130 one is decisions made in the first month, when everything feels necessary and nothing has proven itself yet.
Use Shopify Payments if it's available in your country. That single choice removes the 2% external-gateway penalty on Basic, which on $2,000 of monthly sales is $40 — more than the plan itself. You can still offer PayPal as an additional option at checkout without triggering the fee on card orders, which is the arrangement I'd recommend.
Start on Dawn, the free default theme. It's fast, it's maintained by Shopify, and it's what most stores you admire are running under a coat of paint. A $300 theme is a decision to make once the store earns, if ever.
Install nothing for the first month. Genuinely nothing. Every app you'd install on day one is solving a problem you haven't confirmed you have — abandoned cart emails matter when you have abandoned carts, and reviews matter when you have customers to review you. Wait for the irritation to be real. , according to Federal Trade Commission consumer guides
The habits that keep it from creeping back up:
- Set a calendar reminder for every app trial you start — trials auto-convert and nobody remembers
- Review the app list quarterly and uninstall anything you can't name a use for
- Check the yearly discount only after three months of monthly billing has proven the store
- Keep the domain registered somewhere you control, not through the platform
That last one is about leverage rather than cost. Owning your domain independently means moving platforms is a DNS change rather than a negotiation, and it costs about $15 a year either way.
What I would spend on, without hesitation: an email tool once you have a customer list worth mailing. Shopify Email is included free up to 10,000 sends a month, which is far more than a small store needs, and it's the cheapest way to turn a one-time buyer into a repeat one. Repeat buyers are the entire economic case for having a store rather than a marketplace listing.
Pausing is worth knowing about too. Shopify has a Pause and Build option at $9 a month that keeps your store online but disables checkout, which is useful for seasonal sellers or anyone stepping away for a few months. Cancelling entirely deletes the store after a retention window; pausing keeps it. I've used it once over a slow winter and it saved about $90 across three months.
The number that actually decides whether any of this is worth it isn't the platform fee — it's what percentage of your sales come from people who arrived by typing your name. If that's near zero after six months, the store isn't working and no amount of cost trimming fixes it. If it's growing, the rent is trivially worth paying and you should stop optimising it.
Asked plainly, how much is shopify per month for a careful small seller: about $45 all in, on Basic, with Shopify Payments, a free theme, and one or two apps. That's a realistic floor rather than a marketing number, and it's achievable if you resist the first month's urge to fill the store with tools.
Everything above that floor should be a decision you can point at a reason for.
When the Store Is Worth It, and When It Isn't
Six months in, the store either has a pulse or it doesn't, and the signal is specific enough to check in five minutes.
What you're looking for is direct traffic — people arriving by typing your domain or clicking a link you sent them, rather than by chance. Shopify's analytics separates this out under Sessions by referrer. If direct and email together are a growing share of your orders, the store is doing its job. If everything still comes from paid ads or a marketplace link, you're paying rent for a checkout page.
The second signal is repeat purchase rate, in the same analytics panel. A store where 20% of customers buy twice is a business. A store where every customer buys once is a marketplace with extra steps and worse discovery.
What actually generates those two things, in my experience, is having something people can only get from you. That might be a brand, a curation people trust, a niche you're known for, or simply being the person who always has the thing. Resellers who succeed on their own domain almost always have a recognisable specialism — vintage workwear, a particular era of glassware, one category of parts — rather than a general catalogue of whatever they found this week.
If your inventory is genuinely miscellaneous, the marketplaces are a better fit and that's not a failure. eBay exists precisely because a buyer searching for one specific object doesn't care who's selling it. There's no version of a personal brand that beats that for a discontinued dishwasher part.
The mixed model is what most people land on. Marketplaces for discovery, the store for the people who came back. Keeping inventory synchronised between them is the operational cost of that arrangement, and it's not trivial — Shopify's own sales channels cover eBay, Facebook and Instagram, and for Poshmark, Depop, Mercari or Vinted you need a crosslisting tool that writes each listing into that platform's format and pulls it down everywhere the moment it sells. Doing that by hand works up to about thirty listings and then quietly stops working, usually announcing itself as a cancelled order.
My honest read after two years of running both: the store earns its keep from about the point where a hundred people have bought from you twice. Below that, it's an expensive habit that feels like progress. I kept mine through a stretch where it was clearly not paying for itself, mostly because closing it felt like admitting something, and that was $400 or so of sentiment.
The good news is that the decision is reversible in both directions. Pause and Build at $9 a month keeps a store dormant without deleting it, so stepping away doesn't mean starting over. And a marketplace account you neglected for six months is still there with its feedback score intact.
What I'd tell someone standing at the signup page: don't build the store first. Sell on marketplaces until you can name three customers who've bought from you more than once, and let those three tell you whether anyone would follow you to your own domain. That question is worth more than every pricing comparison on the internet, and it costs nothing to answer.
The Number I'd Budget For
Basic is $39 and my realistic bill settled at about $67 once apps and processing were counted — my first invoice was $71 because I used PayPal and installed a review app in week one. If I started again I'd take Shopify Payments, stay on the free Dawn theme, and install nothing for a month. The caveat that matters more than any of these numbers: Shopify charges rent whether or not anyone visits, and it only pays off once people arrive by typing your name.
Keeping the same stock live on marketplaces alongside the store is what Closo handles for me, so a sale in one place clears it from the rest.
