Shopify Plus Cost Calculator

Shopify Plus is priced in three parts, and only the first one is on the pricing page.

The licence. $2,300/month on a 3-year term, $2,500/month on a 1-year term. Higher-volume merchants — commonly cited around $800k+/month GMV — move to a variable platform fee of roughly 0.40% of monthly GMV, never below the flat base and capped monthly. Complex structures (multi-entity, marketplaces) are quoted by sales.

Payment processing. Plus merchants get the lowest Shopify Payments rates of any plan — quoted per merchant, not published. Brands routinely land near 2.25% + 30¢ online in the US, and better past eight figures. Compare that against the published 2.9% (Basic), 2.7% (Grow), and 2.5% (Advanced) + 30¢ per transaction.

Third-party gateway fees. If part of your volume runs through a gateway that isn't Shopify Payments, Shopify charges a platform fee on that volume: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced — and 0.2% on Plus. For stores with heavy PayPal-standalone or regional-gateway mix, this line alone can swing the decision.

What's not in the price: apps, themes, development, and support retainers. Plus frequently retires paid apps — checkout customization, B2B portals, expansion-store tooling — which the fee math here deliberately leaves out.

Advanced at $399/month looks an order of magnitude cheaper than Plus at $2,300 — until processing enters the math.

Take a store doing $250k/month at $85 AOV, 90% on Shopify Payments. On Advanced, processing at 2.5% + 30¢ runs about $6,500/month. On Plus at a negotiated 2.25% + 30¢, the same volume costs roughly $5,900. That ~$560/month processing spread claws back a third of the licence gap on its own — and it scales linearly with GMV while the licence stays flat.

The general shape: subscription costs are fixed, processing costs compound. As GMV grows, the plan fee becomes noise and the rate spread becomes the whole conversation. That's why the calculator asks for GMV and payment mix instead of just comparing sticker prices.

Two inputs move the answer more than anything else. AOV — lower AOV means more orders, and the flat 30¢ per transaction hits low-AOV stores harder on every plan. Payment mix — third-party volume is 3× more expensive on Advanced than on Plus (0.6% vs 0.2%), so B2B brands settling by PayPal or regional gateways cross over far earlier.

On pure fee math, most DTC stores cross over somewhere between $700k and $1M+ monthly GMV — the exact point depends on AOV, payment mix, and the processing rate you negotiate. Run your numbers; the break-even figure in the calculator recomputes on every keystroke.

But almost nobody upgrades on fee math alone, and the fee math misses the reasons they do:

• Checkout extensibility. Custom checkout UI, Shopify Functions for pricing and validation, one-page checkout control. On standard plans the checkout is closed.
• B2B. Companies, price lists, payment terms, quote-to-cart — native on Plus, app-stitched everywhere else.
• Expansion stores. The licence includes the main store plus nine expansion stores — a multi-market or multi-brand rollout that would otherwise mean nine separate subscriptions.
• Flow + LaunchPad at scale. Automation and scheduled campaigns that replace app subscriptions and manual ops hours.
• SLAs and Merchant Success. A named escalation path, architectural reviews before big builds, early feature access.

The honest framing we give clients: below ~$500k/month GMV, upgrade for capability, not cost. Past ~$1M/month, the fee math usually closes the case on its own. In between is exactly what this calculator is for — and what our Shopify Plus practice scopes on a first call.

Every rate in the tool is editable under Assumptions — the defaults are a documented starting point, not gospel.

• Plan pricing: Basic $39, Shopify (Grow) $105, Advanced $399 per month — Shopify's published US monthly-billing prices.
• Online card rates: 2.9% / 2.7% / 2.5% + 30¢ (Basic / Grow / Advanced), per Shopify's published US Shopify Payments pricing.
• Plus licence: $2,300/month (3-year) or $2,500/month (1-year); variable platform fee defaulted at 0.40% of GMV starting at $800k/month GMV (editable), never below the base, capped at $40k/month.
• Plus processing: defaulted at 2.25% + 30¢ — a realistic negotiated US rate, not a published one. Replace it with your actual quote.
• Third-party gateway platform fees: 2% / 1% / 0.6% / 0.2% (Basic / Grow / Advanced / Plus). The gateway's own processing charge is excluded on both sides of the comparison since you pay it either way.

Rates last verified against shopify.com/pricing in July 2026. Shopify changes pricing; if the defaults have drifted, edit them — the math holds. For the strategic half of the decision (the part the spreadsheet can't answer), read our Shopify Plus vs Shopify decision framework or put the question to our Shopify Enterprise Agency team.