Is Shopify free? What it actually costs in 2026
No free tier. It is a paid product.
Basic runs about $39/month, Shopify $105, Advanced $399, with Plus quoted in the thousands. The subscription is rarely the real cost. Transaction fees are: card rates around 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, and an additional 0.5% to 2% on top if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments. Apps add up quickly — a mature store commonly runs $200 to $500 a month in third-party subscriptions. Figures checked 2026-08-07.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you are under roughly $500k a year, where the platform fee is small against the engineering you would otherwise fund. Stay if your team has no developer — the open alternatives all assume one. Stay if the app ecosystem is doing real work for you, because reproducing five apps is a project. And stay if checkout conversion is your business: Shopify's checkout is among the best-converting on the internet and that is worth paying for.
What you are locked into
High, and concentrated in the theme and app layer. Products, customers and orders export as CSV without much trouble. What does not move is everything built around them — Liquid templates, app configurations, the checkout customisations, and the URL structure your SEO depends on. Redirect planning is the step most migrations underestimate, and it is where the traffic loss happens.
If you would rather not pay: Medusa
Medusa
A headless commerce engine in TypeScript, MIT, no revenue share.
Free and open source. You pay for hosting and the developers who build the storefront.
See all 5 Shopify alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Shopify before you commit. More e-commerce platforms decisions on Macrostack.