Is Shopify free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —3-day trial, then $1 a month for 3 months
• —Card processing is charged on every plan — 2.9% + 30¢ online on Basic

Where the wall is

Month four, when $1 becomes $39 — and the per-transaction fee, which is the cost people miss when they compare Shopify to a self-hosted store with a payment processor of their own.

After that: Basic $39 a month or $29 billed yearly (2.9% + 30¢ online); Grow $105 / $79 (2.7% + 30¢); Advanced $399 / $299 (2.5% + 30¢); Plus from $2,300 a month (2.25% + 30¢).

Can you self-host Shopify? No — cloud only

Shopify is hosted only. Medusa, Saleor and WooCommerce are the self-hosted stores compared here; WooCommerce is the one a non-developer can run.

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