Shopify Pricing UK: Every Plan, Fee and Extra Cost Explained

Key Takeaways

• Shopify Basic costs £25 a month in the UK, or £19 a month billed yearly; Grow costs £65 or £49, Advanced £344 or £259, and Shopify Plus starts at £1,950 a month on a one year term or £1,800 on a three year term.
• Shopify Payments charges 2% + 25p per standard online card payment on Basic, 1.7% + 25p on Grow, 1.5% + 25p on Advanced and 1.3% + 25p on Plus, which is 65p, 59p, 55p or 51p on a £20 sale.
• Taking payments through another provider adds Shopify's third party transaction fee of 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% by plan, on top of that provider's own charges, and the fee is not returned when you refund an order.
• On yearly billing, Grow's lower card rate covers its extra cost over Basic at about £10,000 of card sales a month through Shopify Payments, or about £3,000 a month with another payment provider.
• Across Why Matters client stores this year, monthly spend on Basic and Grow was broadly similar, and the biggest bills belonged to stores running Klaviyo and Recharge: some pay over £800 a month for Klaviyo alone, and most Recharge clients are on its $499 a month Plus plan.
• Shopify currently offers 3 days free and then £1 a month for 3 months on most plans, but a store needs a paid plan before customers can check out.

Quick Answer

Shopify costs £25 a month for Basic in the UK, or £19 a month billed yearly, rising to £65 (£49 yearly) for Grow and £344 (£259 yearly) for Advanced, while Shopify Plus starts at £1,800 a month on a three year term. On top of the plan, Shopify Payments takes 2% + 25p from each standard online card payment on Basic, falling to 1.3% + 25p on Plus, and stores that use another payment provider pay an extra third party transaction fee. Most stores also pay for apps, email marketing and sometimes a premium theme or developer help, so the real monthly cost is usually well above the plan price.

Table of Contents

• How Much Does Shopify Cost a Month in the UK?
• What Are Shopify's Card Rates and Transaction Fees?
• Is Shopify Free to Use?
• What Else Will You Pay For?
• How Much Does Shopify Take From a £20 Sale?
• Which Shopify Plan Should You Choose?
• When Does a Higher Shopify Plan Pay for Itself?
• When Is Shopify Plus Worth It?
• Why Matters Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts
• Related Articles

The plan price is the figure everyone quotes, and it is rarely the figure that surprises a store owner. A UK Shopify store pays for its plan and its card processing and, in most cases, a stack of apps, an email platform, a theme, a domain and some outside help, and the plan you pick changes what Shopify takes from every card sale. That means a dearer plan can work out cheaper once sales are high enough, and two stores on the same plan can have very different monthly bills.

We checked every Shopify price and rate in this guide against Shopify's UK pricing pages and Help Center on 1 October 2026, and added what our own client stores actually spend. Shopify changes its offers, plan names and rates regularly, so check its pricing page again before you commit to a plan.

How Much Does Shopify Cost a Month in the UK?

Shopify sells four main plans in the UK, and each is cheaper per month when you pay for a year upfront. The table shows the published UK prices, where the yearly figure is the effective monthly cost of paying annually, and the kind of store each plan is built for.

Prices come from Shopify's UK pricing page and Shopify Plus pricing, both checked on 1 October 2026. Basic includes no additional staff accounts and Plus includes unlimited ones. The pricing page also lists two items that are easy to miss: POS Pro, for selling in a physical shop, at £69 a month per location on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and an Agentic plan at £0 a month for selling only in AI chat channels. Shopify also advertises credits it describes as 1% back on sales, capped at £3,500 on Basic, £5,500 on Grow, £7,000 on Advanced and £10,000 on Plus, so read the terms in your admin before counting on them.

How Much Does Yearly Billing Save?

Paying yearly saves £72 a year on Basic (£300 against £228), £192 on Grow (£780 against £588) and £1,020 on Advanced (£4,128 against £3,108), roughly a quarter of the monthly price in each case. The catch is cash flow: Shopify's Help Center confirms that yearly billing charges the full year upfront, so a new store choosing Basic pays £228 on day one, before it knows whether the plan suits. For a brand new store, monthly billing keeps your options open until the first few months of sales show which plan fits.

Do Shopify's UK Prices Include VAT?

Shopify's UK pricing page shows its plan prices in pounds without saying whether VAT is included. Whether VAT is added to your Shopify bill depends on where your business is based and the tax registration details held in your billing settings, so check the tax lines on your first invoice rather than adding or removing 20% from the headline price. If you are VAT registered, ask your accountant how to treat Shopify's fees on your VAT return.

What Are Shopify's Card Rates and Transaction Fees?

Two different charges get called Shopify transaction fees, and they work differently. The first is the card processing fee that Shopify Payments takes from each payment. The second is Shopify's third party transaction fee, which applies when a payment goes through another provider instead, and it is the one that catches people out.

These are the standard UK card rates on Shopify's pricing page. Amex and international cards cost more, at 3.1% + 25p on Basic falling to 2.3% + 25p on Plus, and Klarna costs 4.99% + 30p on Basic, Grow and Advanced or 3.79% + 30p on Plus. A store with many overseas, Amex or Klarna customers therefore pays noticeably more than the headline rate suggests, which is worth checking in your payouts before you compare plans.

When Do Third Party Transaction Fees Apply?

Shopify charges this fee on top of whatever the other provider charges, and works it out on the whole order: product prices after discounts, plus tax and shipping. It is not returned when you refund an order. With Shopify Payments active, the fee is waived on payments through Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments, PayPal Express Checkout and manual methods such as bank transfer, and point of sale orders are exempt, according to Shopify's Help Center.

One newer rule catches people out. For stores created on or after 12 May 2025, the part of an order paid with store credit or a gift card attracts the fee even with Shopify Payments, unless the store is on Plus and uses Shopify Payments as its only provider. This is why we compare Shopify payment gateways on total cost rather than on a provider's headline rate.

Is Shopify Free to Use?

Shopify is free to try, but not free to run as a live store. On 1 October 2026, Shopify's UK pricing page offered 3 days free, then £1 a month for 3 months on most plans. During the trial the store is in private mode or its checkout is inactive, and customers can only buy once you choose a paid plan. If the trial ends without a plan, Shopify pauses the store until you pick one, and app charges run up during the trial appear on your first invoice, according to Shopify's free trial guide.

The nearest thing to a free plan is the Agentic plan at £0 a month, which makes your products available to AI shopping channels through Shopify and charges only when you make a sale, at card rates from 2% + 25p online. It is built for selling in AI channels rather than running a full online store, so it suits brands that want to test those channels. Our agentic commerce guide explains how AI shopping channels work for Shopify stores.

What Else Will You Pay For?

The plan is the predictable part of the bill. What varies between two stores on the same plan is everything around it: apps, email marketing, themes, domains, in person selling and outside help. In our client base that variation is far bigger than the gap between Basic and Grow, so we cost the actual software stack rather than adding a generic £50 or £100 a month to a business plan.

Where each cost appears matters when you read your accounts. Your monthly Shopify bill carries the plan, charges for most App Store apps, third party transaction fees, extra Shopify Messaging emails and any theme or domain bought through Shopify. Shopify Payments card fees never appear on that bill, because they come out of each payment before it reaches your bank, and some apps, Recharge among them, may bill you separately, as do agencies and freelancers.

Apps

There is no useful average app cost, because the range is enormous. On the Shopify App Store, Judge.me reviews has a free plan and a $15 a month Awesome plan, while Recharge's listing starts at $25 a month for your first 50 subscribers, then $99 a month plus 1.49% + 19¢ per transaction on Starter and $499 a month plus 1.34% + 19¢ on Plus, all checked on 1 October 2026. Usage fees like these mean a subscription app's real cost rises with your revenue, so model it at next year's volume rather than this month's.

Audit the stack every quarter as well. An unused £20 a month app left running for two years costs £480 for nothing, and overlapping apps for reviews, bundles, upsells and loyalty are an easy place for waste to hide. Our guide to the best Shopify apps covers which jobs are worth paying for, and our Shopify app statistics show how merchants use them.

Email Marketing

Shopify's own email tool, now called Shopify Messaging, includes 10,000 free emails a month on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, then charges $1 per 1,000 extra emails up to 300,000, $0.65 per 1,000 beyond that and $0.55 beyond 750,000. Abandoned checkout automations are always free and do not count towards the allowance, according to Shopify's Messaging pricing. For a small list it is the cheapest route by some distance.

Specialist platforms cost more as your list grows, and email is where we see the biggest bills. Some of our clients pay over £800 a month for Klaviyo alone. For stores where email drives a large share of revenue that can be money well spent, since across 198 client stores email is a median 30% of revenue, and our guide to benchmarking your Shopify email revenue shows how to check. Where the bill outgrows the return, flat priced tools exist: Spoks, a Shopify only email and SMS platform, says it charges a flat $35 a month whatever the size of your list, free under 1,000 contacts, with SMS credits on top.

Themes

You do not need to buy a theme. Horizon, Shopify's current generation of free themes, is a strong starting point for most new stores, and the Shopify Theme Store lists around two dozen free themes in total. When we checked in September 2026, most premium themes cost $250 to $500 as a one off purchase, with a handful from about $150. Shopify also lets you install and fully customise a premium theme and pay only when you publish it, so you can test one properly before spending anything, and our guide to choosing a Shopify theme covers how to decide.

Domains, In Person Selling and Marketplaces

Every store gets a free myshopify.com address, and you can connect a domain you already own or buy one through Shopify, where the yearly price depends on the extension. Selling in a shop adds POS Pro at £69 a month per location if you need staff roles and permissions, in store inventory tools and in store pickup, while casual selling at pop ups and events is included on every plan. If you sync orders from marketplaces, the first 50 synced marketplace orders each month are free, and Shopify then charges 1% capped at $99 a month.

Developer or Agency Help

Outside help is optional, but if you know you will need ongoing changes, budget for it from the start. Our own published prices are a £400 Welcome Package for new clients with 4 hours of support and an SEO health report, a £450 block of 5 hours, Run Lite at £650 a month for 10 hours, Run from £900 a month and Grow 360 from £2,000 a month, all on our Shopify packages page. Retainers start from £650 a month plus VAT and are billed one month in arrears.

The build is a separate cost from running the store. In our September 2026 review of published UK agency pricing, starting prices ran from £1,200 to £3,500 for setup and theme work, £2,500 to £20,000 for migrations, £7,500 to £30,000 for custom builds and £9,999 to £30,000 for Shopify Plus projects. Those are published starting prices from a verified sample rather than market averages; see what UK Shopify agencies publish about their pricing and our guide to what it costs to build a Shopify store.

How Much Does Shopify Take From a £20 Sale?

Here is what Shopify Payments takes from a £20 online order paid with a standard UK card, with no refund, dispute or other provider involved. Each fee is the plan's percentage of £20 plus the fixed 25p, using the rates in the table above.

On Basic, 2% of £20 is 40p, and adding the fixed 25p gives a 65p fee, leaving £19.35. On Grow, 1.7% is 34p, so the fee is 59p and £19.41 is left; on Advanced, 1.5% is 30p, so 55p and £19.45; and on Plus, 1.3% is 26p, so 51p and £19.49. The fixed 25p is more than a third of the fee on every plan, which is why stores with low order values feel card fees most and gain least from upgrading.

Using another provider changes the sums. On Basic, Shopify would add its 2% third party fee, 40p on the same order, so the other provider would need to charge less than 25p in total to beat Shopify Payments. None of these figures is profit either: VAT, stock, packaging, delivery, returns and advertising all still come out of what is left.

Which Shopify Plan Should You Choose?

The cheapest plan is not automatically the cheapest to run. The right choice depends on two things, the features and staff access you need and how much money moves through the store each month, and the sections below take each plan in turn.

Basic: For New Stores and Solo Founders

Basic is the sensible starting point for most new stores, founders testing ecommerce and anyone who does not need staff accounts. It includes a full online store and checkout, B2B selling with up to 3 catalogues, 10 inventory locations and 24/7 live chat support. Its card rate is the highest of the four plans, but while sales are modest the lower subscription more than makes up for it.

Grow: For Small Teams and Rising Sales

Grow adds up to 5 staff accounts and full data access for custom apps built on Shopify's APIs, and it cuts the standard online card rate from 2% + 25p to 1.7% + 25p. That 0.3 percentage point saving is what makes Grow worth reviewing once card sales reach about £10,000 a month on yearly billing, as the next section shows.

Advanced: For Higher Volume and International Selling

Advanced adds up to 15 staff accounts, live third party shipping rates, regional store tailoring, enhanced live chat support and higher limits on select APIs, with a 1.5% + 25p online card rate. Do not upgrade because Advanced sounds more professional; upgrade when you need those features or when the sums below say it pays.

When Does a Higher Shopify Plan Pay for Itself?

This is the most useful Shopify pricing calculation, and few guides do it. Divide the extra monthly cost of the higher plan by the drop in the percentage fee, and you get the monthly sales at which the two cancel out. The fixed 25p is the same on Basic, Grow and Advanced, so it does not affect the result.

On yearly billing, Grow costs £30 a month more than Basic and saves 0.3% on standard online card sales, so £30 divided by 0.003 gives £10,000 a month. Advanced costs £210 a month more than Grow and saves 0.2%, so the crossover is £105,000. With another payment provider, the saving is the drop in Shopify's third party fee instead, 1% from Basic to Grow and 0.4% from Grow to Advanced, which brings the crossovers down to about £3,000 and £52,500 a month. On monthly billing the gaps are wider, so the crossovers rise to about £13,333 and £139,500 with Shopify Payments, or £4,000 and £69,750 with another provider.

Treat these figures as triggers to review your plan, not instructions to upgrade at £10,001. They assume every sale is a standard online card payment, while real stores also take Amex, international cards, Klarna and in person payments at different rates, and a higher plan's features may justify it before the fee saving does.

When Is Shopify Plus Worth It?

Shopify Plus is a business case rather than a status upgrade. It starts at £1,950 a month on a one year term or £1,800 on a three year term, and larger, more complex businesses move to a variable platform fee based on revenue and business model. For that you get the lowest card rates at 1.3% + 25p online, a fully customisable checkout, unlimited B2B catalogues where other plans allow 3, unlimited staff accounts and nine expansion stores alongside your main store, with more at £250 a month each, according to Shopify Plus pricing.

The signs a store is ready are usually operational rather than financial: complex wholesale, several international stores, heavy integrations or checkout needs the other plans cannot meet. If you use a third party processor on Plus, Shopify charges 0.2% per transaction. We cover the full case, including total cost of ownership, on our Why Shopify Plus page, so this guide does not repeat it.

Why Matters Perspective

Across our client stores this year, the plan was not where costs diverged. Stores on Basic and Grow spent broadly similar amounts each month once their apps and services were added, and stores on Advanced paid significantly more, as you would expect. The clients with the biggest monthly bills were those running Klaviyo and Recharge: some pay over £800 a month for Klaviyo alone, and most of our Recharge clients are on its Plus plan at $499 a month before transaction fees.

That is not a criticism of either tool. We are a Klaviyo partner and a Recharge partner, and both earn their cost when email and subscriptions drive a large share of revenue. The question we ask every client is whether each tool still pays for itself. A smaller list that does not justify a Klaviyo bill can often run on a flat priced alternative such as Spoks, and a subscription brand that does not use Recharge Plus features such as bundles, rewards and referrals may manage on Starter. Our Recharge vs Shopify Subscriptions guide covers the subscription side in more detail.

The plan decision is the easy part. Review it when your card sales pass the thresholds above, review your app stack every quarter, and budget for the software you will need next year rather than this month. Why Matters is a Shopify Select partner with published pricing; retainers start from £650 a month plus VAT, clients are billed one month in arrears and never tied into long contracts, and every development project carries a 3 month guarantee. See our Shopify packages or get in touch for a second opinion on your costs.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Shopify cost a month in the UK?

Shopify Basic costs £25 a month, or £19 a month when billed yearly. Grow costs £65 or £49, Advanced costs £344 or £259, and Shopify Plus starts at £1,950 a month on a one year term or £1,800 on a three year term. Card fees, apps and other extras come on top of the plan.

Is Shopify free to use?

Shopify is free to try but not free to run. It currently offers 3 days free, then £1 a month for 3 months on most plans, and a store needs a paid plan before customers can check out. If the trial ends without a plan being chosen, Shopify pauses the store.

How much does Shopify take from a £20 sale?

With Shopify Payments and a standard UK card, Shopify takes 65p on Basic, 59p on Grow, 55p on Advanced and 51p on Plus. Amex, international cards and Klarna cost more. These figures leave out your own costs, such as VAT, stock and delivery.

What are Shopify's transaction fees?

Shopify Payments charges from 2% + 25p per standard online card payment on Basic down to 1.3% + 25p on Plus. If another provider processes the payment, Shopify adds a third party transaction fee of 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% depending on the plan, on top of that provider's own charges.

Does Shopify charge VAT on its fees?

Shopify's UK pricing page does not say whether its plan prices include VAT. Whether VAT appears on your Shopify bill depends on where your business is based and the tax registration details in your billing settings. Check the tax lines on your first invoice, and ask your accountant how to treat Shopify's fees on your VAT return.

Which Shopify plan is best for a small business?

Basic suits most new and small stores, because it has the lowest monthly cost and every core selling feature. Move to Grow when you need staff accounts, or when standard online card sales reach about £10,000 a month, the point at which its lower card rate covers its higher yearly price.

Does HMRC check Shopify sales?

HMRC can check a business's records, and if you are self employed you must keep records of all your sales and income. If your trading income is more than the £1,000 trading allowance in a tax year, you need to tell HMRC, whether you sell through Shopify or anywhere else. Keep your Shopify sales reports, and speak to an accountant if you are unsure.

Final Thoughts

A small UK store can run on Shopify Basic for an effective £19 a month on yearly billing, but that is never the whole bill. Add card processing, the apps you actually use, email marketing, any theme or domain purchases and the help you need, and you have the real monthly cost of running the store.

The useful question is not which plan is cheapest, but which plan gives your store the lowest sensible total cost for the features and sales volume it has today. At low volumes that is usually Basic; as card sales grow, Grow's lower rate starts to pay for itself, and Advanced does the same at much higher volumes. Always check Shopify's current UK pricing before changing plan, and if you want help deciding, see our Shopify packages or email us.

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• How Much Does It Cost to Build a Shopify Store? A Transparent Guide
• What UK Shopify Agencies Publish About Their Pricing
• Best Shopify Payment Gateways for UK Stores
• The 20 Best Shopify Apps for Every Job Your Store Needs
• How to Choose the Right Shopify Theme for Your Business
• Recharge vs Shopify Subscriptions: Which Is Right for Your Store?
• How to Benchmark Your Shopify Email Revenue
• How to Set Up a Shopify Store: A Step by Step Agency Guide