Shopify's subscription is the part everyone quotes and rarely the part that decides your bill. The plan is a predictable monthly figure; apps, transaction fees and development are where the total actually comes from, and they vary by an order of magnitude between two shops on the same plan.
Here is the published pricing, then the costs that sit on top of it.
Shopify's UK Plan Prices
These are the figures on Shopify's own UK pricing page as published in October 2026. Shopify changes pricing periodically, so check the current page before you budget — but the structure below is stable even when the numbers move.
| Plan | Paid yearly | Paid monthly | Online card rate | Fee for using another payment provider |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | £19/mo | £25/mo | 2% + 25p | 2% |
| Grow | £49/mo | £65/mo | 1.7% + 25p | 1% |
| Advanced | £259/mo | £344/mo | 1.5% + 25p | 0.6% |
| Plus | — | from £1,800/mo | 1.3% + 25p | 0.2% |
Two things worth noticing immediately.
The headline prices are the annual rates. Paying monthly costs roughly a third more. If you are confident you will still be trading in a year, annual billing is the easiest saving available.
The jump from Grow to Advanced is steep. £49 to £259 a year-billed is a fivefold increase, which catches people out. The reasons to move up are usually specific — more staff accounts, better reporting, lower card rates at volume — rather than general growth.
The Transaction Fee That Costs People Money
This is the single most misunderstood part of Shopify's pricing, and it can quietly cost more than your subscription.
If you use Shopify Payments, you pay the card rate in the table — 2% + 25p on Basic, down to 1.3% + 25p on Plus — and nothing else.
If you use a different payment provider, Shopify charges an additional fee on top of whatever that provider charges you. On Basic that extra fee is 2% of the order. That is separate from your provider's own processing cost.
Work it through on a shop turning over £20,000 a month on Basic. Using Shopify Payments, the card cost is roughly 2% plus 25p per order. Using an external provider, you pay that provider's rate and hand Shopify an extra 2% — around £400 a month, which is more than twenty times the subscription.
So the practical rule: unless you have a specific reason to use another provider, Shopify Payments is almost always cheaper. And if you do need another provider, that decision belongs in the budget as a line item, not an afterthought.
Apps: Where the Budget Actually Goes
A Shopify store with no apps is rare, and app subscriptions are usually the second largest recurring cost after the plan.
The categories most stores end up paying for:
- Reviews — social proof on product pages
- Email and SMS marketing — often priced by contact volume, so it grows with you
- Subscriptions — if you sell recurring orders, frequently a percentage of subscription revenue
- Bundles, upsells and cross-sells
- Search and filtering — Shopify's native search is basic once you have a large catalogue
- Loyalty and rewards
- Accounting integration — syncing to Xero, QuickBooks or Sage
- Shipping and fulfilment — rate calculation, label printing, multi-warehouse
The structural problem is that app pricing frequently scales with your success. An email tool priced per contact and a subscription app priced as a percentage of revenue both increase as you grow, so your cost base rises with turnover rather than staying fixed. Model that before you commit to a stack.
Two habits that keep this under control: audit your apps quarterly and uninstall what you are not using, and before adding an app, check whether a developer could build the same thing into your theme once. A £29/month app is £348 a year, indefinitely.
Theme and Development
Shopify's free themes are genuinely usable, and plenty of successful stores run on them. Paid themes are a one-off purchase and give you a more distinctive starting point.
Development is the variable that dwarfs everything else, and it depends entirely on what you want:
Minimal — a free or paid theme, configured, with your products and content loaded. Achievable without a developer if you are comfortable in the admin.
Theme customisation — your branding applied properly, custom sections, changes to product and collection page layouts. The most common arrangement.
Custom build — bespoke front end, custom functionality, integrations with your ERP or stock system, B2B pricing logic. Where the serious cost sits.
We go through what that work costs in Shopify development costs in the UK. The thing to decide first is which of those three you need, because it determines whether your Shopify project is a few hundred pounds or a capital expenditure.
The Costs Nobody Puts in the Spreadsheet
Your domain. Small, annual, easy to forget.
Photography. Often the biggest one-off cost for a new store, and the one most underestimated. Product photography that sells is not a phone and a windowsill.
Content. Product descriptions, collection pages, policies. Someone has to write them, and if nobody is paid to, they do not get written well.
Migration. Moving from another platform means product and customer data, plus URL redirects. Skip the redirects and you lose the search visibility you already had.
Someone's time. The ongoing cost people never count. Stock, orders, customer service, content updates.
Is Shopify Expensive?
Against alternatives, Shopify is mid-market: more than running WooCommerce on your own hosting, considerably less than enterprise platforms. What you buy is reliability, PCI compliance, hosting, updates and an app ecosystem you do not maintain. We've compared it directly in Shopify vs WooCommerce for UK businesses.
The fair way to judge it is total cost of ownership, not subscription. A £19/month plan with £200 of apps and an external payment provider taking an extra 2% is not a cheap store. A £49/month plan with Shopify Payments, three apps and a well-built theme often is.
A realistic budgeting approach: take the annual plan price, add your expected app subscriptions, add your card processing at the published rate on your forecast turnover, and treat development as a separate one-off. That number is what Shopify costs you. The subscription alone is not.
If you are planning a build or a migration and want the cost broken down properly, our ecommerce development team will scope it — and if you are already live, our Shopify SEO guide covers getting the traffic that justifies any of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Shopify cost in the UK?
As published on Shopify's UK pricing page in October 2026, plans run from £19/mo for Basic to £259/mo for Advanced when billed yearly, with Plus starting at £1,800/mo. Paying monthly instead of yearly costs roughly a third more. Apps, transaction fees and development sit on top and usually exceed the subscription.
Does Shopify charge transaction fees?
If you use Shopify Payments you pay only the card rate — 2% + 25p on Basic down to 1.3% + 25p on Plus. If you use a different payment provider, Shopify adds an extra fee on top of that provider's own charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus.
Is it cheaper to pay for Shopify yearly or monthly?
Yearly, by a significant margin — the advertised headline prices are the annual rates, and monthly billing costs around a third more. If you expect to still be trading in twelve months, it is the simplest saving available.
How much do Shopify apps cost?
It varies enormously, and apps are usually the second largest recurring cost after the plan. The structural issue is that many scale with your success — email tools priced per contact, subscription apps priced as a percentage of revenue — so your cost base grows with turnover. Audit quarterly and remove what you are not using.
What is the real total cost of running a Shopify store?
Take the annual plan price, add your app subscriptions, add card processing at the published rate against your forecast turnover, and treat design and development as a separate one-off. Also budget for product photography and content, which are the two most commonly underestimated costs for a new store.