How much does Shopify cost in the UK in 2026?

The Basic plan is £19 a month if you pay for a year up front, which is £228 a year, or £25 month by month, which is £300. The Grow plan is £49 a month paid yearly. On top of the plan, Shopify's card rate on Basic takes 2% plus 25p from every online sale. The advertised prices do not say whether tax is included, so check what lands on your first bill.

How much does Shopify cost per month?

£25 a month for Basic if you pay monthly, or £19 a month if you commit to a year up front. Grow is £65 monthly or £49 on the yearly basis, and Advanced is £344 or £259 the same way. There is also an introductory offer of £1 a month for the first three months, after a three-day free trial - the full price starts in month four.

Does it cost money to sell on Shopify?

Yes, twice. You pay the monthly plan whether you sell anything or not, and then a card fee comes off each sale - on the Basic plan, 2% plus 25p for an online payment through Shopify's own card system. Take payment through an outside provider instead and Shopify charges an extra fee on top of that provider's own. A quiet month still costs the full subscription.

How much does it cost to build a Shopify website?

The plan is only the start. Ready-made themes are sold separately as one-off purchases, many everyday features come as apps with their own monthly subscriptions, and hiring a Shopify expert to set things up is a market of its own. A simple store can be built on the free theme without spending more, but most stores end up carrying a few paid apps, and it is the apps that quietly grow the bill.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Shopify for a small shop?

If you run a serious inventory-led store, Shopify is built for exactly that and is hard to beat. If your shop is part of a wider site - a maker or a small business selling some of what they do - Bernard is £400 a year flat for the site and the shop together, takes 0% of your sales, and the move onto it is included. What you see is what you pay, and your web address stays in your own name.

Report · 26 August 2026

Shopify 2026 pricing, explained - what a small shop really pays

Shopify is very good at being a shop. The pricing takes more working out than the adverts suggest, because the real bill has three parts: the plan, the card fees, and the apps. Only the first one is on the pricing page in big letters.

Here is the whole bill, set out the way Bernard sets out a quote. Every line, and no surprises at the van.

What Shopify charges in 2026

There are three plans that matter for a small shop, and a fourth that does not. The Basic plan is nineteen pounds a month if you pay for the year up front, or twenty-five pounds month by month. Grow is forty-nine pounds a month on the yearly basis, sixty-five paid monthly. Advanced is two hundred and fifty-nine pounds a month paid yearly, and Shopify Plus starts at £1,800 a month and is for businesses with a payroll, not a kitchen table.

Most small shops live on Basic, and Basic paid yearly is £228 for the year. The same plan paid month by month is £300. That £72 gap is simply the price of not committing.

New signups get a three-day free trial and then an offer of £1 a month for the first three months. It is a genuine discount, and it is also how the first months feel cheaper than the arrangement you have actually entered. The full price begins in month four, so judge the plan by the month-four number, not the month-one number.

One thing the pricing page does not say is whether those figures include VAT. It is not stated either way, which is worth knowing in itself: check what actually lands on your first bill before you plan around the advertised number.

The card fees are the half of it

Every sale on Shopify pays a card fee. On Basic, an online payment through Shopify's own card system costs 2% plus 25p. On Grow it is 1.7% plus 25p, and on Advanced 1.5% plus 25p. Selling in person through their card reader is a little cheaper. Take your payments through an outside provider instead - your own card machine, a different processor - and Shopify charges an additional fee on top of whatever that provider takes.

Card processing costs money everywhere; no platform makes it free. But it changes what the plan really costs, because the fee scales with your takings. A shop selling £500 a month online in twenty orders pays about £15 a month in card fees on Basic - roughly £180 a year, most of a second subscription, sitting on top of the £228 plan. The busier the shop, the bigger that line gets, which is worth knowing before you compare Shopify's monthly figure with anything else's.

Then come the apps

The plan buys the shop itself. A surprising amount of the everyday - review widgets, better search, some marketing tools, certain delivery arrangements - arrives as apps from Shopify's app store, each with its own small monthly subscription, and ready-made themes are one-off purchases on top. None of these numbers can be quoted here honestly because every shop picks a different basket. The pattern is the thing to know: the bill starts at the plan and grows by app, a few pounds at a time, and nobody sends you a total.

If you want the fuller argument about subscription creep across all these platforms, it is in Do you really need all these website subscriptions?.

So what does a small Shopify shop really cost?

For a small shop on Basic, paying yearly, taking £500 a month online:

The yearly bill	Shopify Basic	Bernard, site and shop
The plan, paid yearly	£228	£400
Card fees on £6,000 of sales	about £180	Stripe's own card rate; Bernard adds nothing and takes 0%
Themes and apps	£0 to a few hundred, shop by shop	included
The move onto the platform	your time, or an expert's fee	included

Two honest readings of that table. If the shop is the business - real inventory, real volume, fulfilment, the works - Shopify's tooling earns its bill and Bernard is not trying to compete with it; that is what Shopify is for, and this is us saying so. If the shop is part of the business - a potter selling pots from the same site that shows the workshops, a teacher selling a course alongside - then you are paying a shop-first platform's prices for a website with a till in it, and the flat £400 with nothing coming off your sales is usually the smaller and calmer number.

The question underneath the price

The plans are rent. Stop paying and the shop closes; the £1-a-month months, the yearly commitment, the apps, all of it is a running cost for as long as you trade. That is not a criticism - it is true of every hosted platform including Bernard - but it means the comparison that matters is the yearly total against the yearly total, with the card fees in, not one advert's monthly figure against another's.

And whichever way you go, keep your web address in your own name. It is the one part of a shop that is genuinely hard to get back, and a platform holding it is a lock-in no price comparison shows.

Paste your current address and Bernard will measure up, free, and show you the new place before you decide anything.

Questions people ask

How much does Shopify cost in the UK in 2026?: The Basic plan is £19 a month if you pay for a year up front, which is £228 a year, or £25 month by month, which is £300. The Grow plan is £49 a month paid yearly. On top of the plan, Shopify's card rate on Basic takes 2% plus 25p from every online sale. The advertised prices do not say whether tax is included, so check what lands on your first bill.
How much does Shopify cost per month?: £25 a month for Basic if you pay monthly, or £19 a month if you commit to a year up front. Grow is £65 monthly or £49 on the yearly basis, and Advanced is £344 or £259 the same way. There is also an introductory offer of £1 a month for the first three months, after a three-day free trial - the full price starts in month four.
Does it cost money to sell on Shopify?: Yes, twice. You pay the monthly plan whether you sell anything or not, and then a card fee comes off each sale - on the Basic plan, 2% plus 25p for an online payment through Shopify's own card system. Take payment through an outside provider instead and Shopify charges an extra fee on top of that provider's own. A quiet month still costs the full subscription.
How much does it cost to build a Shopify website?: The plan is only the start. Ready-made themes are sold separately as one-off purchases, many everyday features come as apps with their own monthly subscriptions, and hiring a Shopify expert to set things up is a market of its own. A simple store can be built on the free theme without spending more, but most stores end up carrying a few paid apps, and it is the apps that quietly grow the bill.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Shopify for a small shop?: If you run a serious inventory-led store, Shopify is built for exactly that and is hard to beat. If your shop is part of a wider site - a maker or a small business selling some of what they do - Bernard is £400 a year flat for the site and the shop together, takes 0% of your sales, and the move onto it is included. What you see is what you pay, and your web address stays in your own name.