The bottom line per month
If you run one store, sell physical goods, and handle operations yourself, here is the floor as of August 2026. Shopify’s Basic plan is listed at $25 USD/month billed monthly, or $19/month billed yearly, on Shopify’s own pricing page. WooCommerce charges nothing for the plugin and takes a 0% revenue share, but WooCommerce’s own pricing page states hosting runs $25 to $350 per month for most stores and extensions run $29 to $299 per year each. So the real comparison at the entry level is about $19–$25/month on Shopify against $25/month and up on Woo — close enough that the subscription line is not what decides it. What decides it is payment processing, which extensions you end up actually needing, and whether you want to be your own sysadmin at 11pm when the checkout page starts throwing 500s.
| Shopify plan (US, Aug 2026) | Billed monthly | Billed yearly | Fee on third-party gateways |
| Basic | $25/mo | $19/mo | 2% |
| Grow | $65/mo | $49/mo | 1% |
| Advanced | $399/mo | $299/mo | 0.6% |
| Plus | from $2,300/mo | not published | 0.2% |
On the Woo side, if you want a named number instead of a range, WordPress.com lists its Business plan at $40/month billed monthly or $25/month billed yearly, and its Commerce plan at $70/month billed monthly or $45/month billed yearly, both as of 2026. Any host meeting WooCommerce’s documented requirements will run it — PHP 7.4 or newer, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.5 or newer, HTTPS, and a WordPress memory limit of at least 256MB — so those two plans are just a concrete anchor, not a recommendation. Be honest about the bottom of that $25 range, though. That is shared hosting, and a Woo store is a database-heavy application with a logged-in cart, not a brochure site. Carts and checkout pages cannot be page-cached, and uncached requests are exactly what shared plans throttle first.
How the invoice breaks down
Every store bill, on either platform, has four lines. Budget them separately or you will keep getting surprised.
- Platform subscription. Fixed and predictable. This is the only line most comparison posts talk about, and it is usually the smallest one once you are past $10k/month in sales.
- Payment processing. Variable and by far the largest. WooPayments in the US charges 2.90% + $0.30 on domestic card payments and 2.70% + $0.10 in person, per WooCommerce’s fee documentation in 2026. Put $10,000/month through it across 200 orders and that is $350 in fees — fourteen times the Basic subscription you spent a week agonizing over.
- Apps and extensions. Shopify apps bill monthly and recur forever. Woo extensions bill annually. Same money, different rhythm — Woo’s yearly renewals land as one ugly lump instead of a steady drip, and they tend to land in the same week, because you installed all of them the week you launched.
- Everything else. Domain, transactional email, theme, and on Woo, backups and a staging environment if your host does not include them. Transactional email is the line people skip: order confirmations sent by PHP mail from a shared host’s IP go to spam, and you find out when a customer emails asking whether their order went through.
Here is the thing you only learn after you actually sign up: Shopify no longer prints its own card processing rates on its public pricing page. I checked it again in August 2026 — the page lists the third-party gateway surcharge for each plan (2%, 1%, 0.6%, 0.2%) but no Shopify Payments percentage anywhere. You see your actual rate after you have an account, in the admin under Settings, then Payments, then the payment rates view, and it is broken out by card type. Standard consumer cards and premium or commercial cards are not priced the same, so your blended effective rate at the end of the month will sit above whatever single headline number a blog quoted you. Pull one real month of payout reports and divide fees by gross sales. That number is your rate. Nothing else is.
What discounts actually apply
Three things on Shopify get called discounts. One is real, one is a trial wearing a price tag, and one is arithmetic nobody is going to do on your behalf.
Annual billing. Basic drops from $25 to $19 per month, which is $72 a year, or roughly one free month. Grow saves $192, Advanced saves $1,200. The catch is that you prepay, and Shopify’s help center notes plan charges are generally non-refundable under section 5.10 of its Terms of Service. If you are still testing whether the store works, pay monthly and eat the difference. $72 is cheap insurance against locking a year of cash into a store you kill in March.
The intro offer. Shopify’s pricing page currently advertises 3 days free, then $1/month for 3 months. It discounts the subscription and only the subscription: processing fees, paid apps, and your domain all bill at full price from the first order. Treat it as a trial budget, not a cost basis. Do your unit economics on the full price, because month four shows up whether you modelled it or not.
Tier upgrades as a processing discount. If you use a third-party gateway rather than Shopify Payments, moving up a tier buys down the surcharge, and the break-even is plain arithmetic. Basic to Grow on annual billing costs $30 more per month and cuts the surcharge from 2% to 1%, so you break even at $3,000/month processed through that gateway. Grow to Advanced costs $250 more per month and cuts 1% to 0.6%, breaking even at $62,500/month. Note what this does not cover: the surcharge exists only on third-party gateways, so if you are on Shopify Payments, upgrading buys you features and nothing off your rate. Run your own number before an account rep runs it for you.
When it costs more than quoted
The quoted price assumes a domestic customer, a standard card, no dispute, and no returns. Real orders are not that tidy. On WooPayments in the US in 2026, the documented add-ons are +1.5% for international cards, +1% for currency conversion, $15 per dispute, $5 per active card reader per month, 1.5% for instant payouts, and +1% on any order containing a subscription payment processed through Stripe Billing. Cards issued in Puerto Rico trigger the international fee. Do the blend once and it stops being abstract: if a fifth of your orders are on foreign cards, you are at 3.20% before conversion, and 3.40% with it. Refunds are the quiet one. Hand the money back and the fee on the original charge does not come back with it, so a returned $80 order still cost you $2.62 in processing for revenue you no longer have.
The cash-flow trap catches new stores hardest: WooPayments holds the first payout for a 7-day waiting period after your first successful payment, and after that US accounts sit on a 2 business day pending period with daily payouts as the default. Spend $100/day on ads at launch and you have roughly $900 out the door, plus your first supplier invoice, before one dollar lands in your bank. Plan the float before you switch the ads on, not the week you notice.
On the Woo side, the recurring surprise is hosting renewal. Intro pricing is a first-term price; year two bills at rack rate. Do the only comparison that matters and multiply the renewal price by 36 months, then set that against 36 months of Shopify. Extension renewals are the same shape. Letting an extension lapse does not switch the plugin off, but it does cut you off from updates and support, which matters the week a WordPress core release breaks your checkout and the fix is sitting behind a licence you let expire.
Check these before you sign
Specific people, specific questions.
- Shopify Support, through the Help Center in your admin. Ask: what is my online card rate for each card type including premium and commercial cards, what is the dispute fee in my country, and what is my payout schedule. Ask them to point you at the rate schedule inside the Shopify Payments Terms of Service, not the marketing page.
- Your prospective host’s pre-sales chat, before you buy. Ask: what is the renewal price after the first term, what are the PHP worker and monthly visit limits, what happens when I exceed them, is staging included, and how many days of backups are retained. Get it in writing in the chat transcript — “upgrade required” and “throttled until next month” are very different answers to the overage question, and only one of them is survivable on Black Friday.
- WooCommerce.com support, for any extension you plan to depend on. Ask what the renewal price is and whether the discount you see today applies at renewal.
- Your payment processor’s sales contact, if you are not using the platform default. Ask whether the pricing is flat or interchange-plus, and whether there is a monthly minimum, PCI fee, statement fee, or separate chargeback fee.
None of this predicts what your store will earn, and platform choice is not what makes a store profitable — good stores survive bad hosting and bad stores fail on Plus. What you can do is write every fixed line down before you commit: subscription at full price, processing at your blended rate, the four extensions you already know you need, hosting at renewal price rather than intro price. Add them up, multiply by twelve, and ask whether that number is survivable in your worst plausible month. Knowing it beats discovering it in month four.
Related reading: Best Ecommerce Shipping Companies Compared: Which Carrier Fits Your Store