Which Shopify plan should you choose? A developer's take
Choosing on monthly price alone is how merchants end up paying more. The transaction fee decides this more often than the subscription does.
7 min read · Store setup ·
Choosing a Shopify plan looks like a pricing question and is actually a maths question. The subscription difference between plans is small. The transaction-fee difference is not, and at even modest turnover it reverses the answer you'd get from the price list.
What actually differs between plans
Ignore the marketing grid for a moment. The things that materially change how you build and run a store:
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Platform transaction fee | Charged when you use an external gateway. Falls as the plan rises. Usually the deciding number. |
| Staff accounts | Caps how many people can work in the admin with their own login. |
| Reporting depth | Lower plans give you basics; deeper analysis needs a higher tier or an export. |
| Shopify Functions and checkout extensions | The supported way to change checkout behaviour — see checkout extensibility. Availability is tier-dependent. |
| B2B features | Company accounts, catalogues and price lists sit at the top of the range. |
| Checkout customisation | Meaningful control over checkout is a Plus-level capability. |
The transaction fee maths
If you use Shopify Payments where it's available, the platform transaction fee doesn't apply and this section is moot. If you use an external gateway — because Shopify Payments isn't offered in your country, or you chose otherwise — you pay a percentage of every order to Shopify on top of the gateway's own fee.
Work it out on your own numbers:
- Take your expected monthly turnover.
- Multiply by the transaction fee percentage on each plan you're considering.
- Add the plan's monthly cost.
- Compare the totals.
The result surprises people. At €30,000 a month, a one-percentage-point difference is €300 — comfortably more than the gap between two plans. Payment gateways covers picking the gateway itself, and what a store really costs to run puts the plan in context with apps and everything else.
When to start low and move up
Almost always. Start on the plan that covers what you need this quarter and move when the maths says so. Shopify makes upgrading trivial and there's no technical migration involved. What you should not do is buy a high tier "for the features" before you have the turnover — the features you're paying for are usually ones you won't implement for a year.
The exception is if you already know you need checkout logic or B2B on day one. Those are architectural, and building around their absence and then rebuilding is more expensive than the plan difference.
Annual billing
Paying annually saves a meaningful percentage. Do it once you're confident the platform is right for you — not in month one, when the honest answer might still be that Shopify isn't the right choice.
What the plan does not fix
A higher plan does not make your store faster, does not reduce app subscription creep, and does not give you features your theme can't render. Those are build problems, and no tier solves them.
Choose the plan on the transaction fee at your turnover, not on the feature grid. Then revisit it every six months — the right answer changes as you grow, and nobody sends you a reminder.
Is this the problem you’re looking at?
Send me the link to your store and a line about what is going wrong. You get a straight answer within one business day — no pitch, no obligation.
[email protected]Or see what I do around Shopify: services, work beyond the theme, selected work.