The short version: Shopify Basic is $29 a month billed annually or $39 billed monthly, with card rates from 2.9% plus 30 cents. The trial is 3 days free, then $1 a month for three months, so your real bill starts in month four. Add 2% of every order if you use any payment gateway other than Shopify Payments. Then add apps, which is where most cottage food budgets actually go: subscriptions, advanced pickup scheduling, bundles, and loyalty are all paid add-ons at roughly $10 to $30 a month each. A realistic first-year cost for a small food business is $1,400 to $2,000, not the $348 the headline implies, and the largest single line is usually the weekend you spend building it.
All figures came off Shopify's own pricing page in July 2026.
Start with what is actually on the page, then add what is not.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Card rate (online) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $29/mo | $39/mo | from 2.9% + 30¢ |
| Grow | $79/mo | Not published on the annual view | from 2.7% + 30¢ |
| Advanced | $299/mo | Not published on the annual view | from 2.5% + 30¢ |
| Plus | from $2,300/mo | — | Negotiated |
On top of the subscription:
Shopify Plus existing at $2,300 a month tells you who the platform is ultimately built for. That is not an argument against using it, but it does explain why so much of the product is aimed at problems a home baker does not have.
Three places, and only one of them is on the pricing page.
1. The subscription: $348 a year on Basic annual. Straightforward and predictable.
2. Processing: whatever 2.9% plus 30 cents comes to. At $2,000 a month across 100 orders that is $88 a month, or $1,056 a year. Note that this is larger than the subscription, which is true on almost every platform and which almost nobody accounts for when comparing.
3. Apps: the line nobody predicts. Shopify's subscription buys the platform, not the features people assume come with it. Common additions for a food business:
Two of those doubles your Shopify bill. Nobody warns you at signup, because at signup you do not yet know which you will want.
The app store is genuinely Shopify's greatest strength and the reason its cost is so hard to predict. Almost anything you can imagine wanting exists, which means you will never hit a wall, and it also means the platform has no incentive to build the thing you need into the base product. On a single-price tool, a missing feature is a hard no and you find out immediately. On Shopify, a missing feature is a $20 a month yes, and you find out gradually. Neither is dishonest. But one gives you a bill you can predict a year out and the other gives you a bill that grows with your own competence at using it.
If you have decided Shopify is right, a few choices materially change the number.
Point six catches people who reason about percentages without multiplying them out. A 0.2 point improvement sounds meaningful and is worth roughly $48 a year at $24,000 in sales, against $600 in extra subscription. Upgrade for the features if you need them, never for the rate at small volume.
Take a cottage food business doing $2,000 a month across 100 orders, a $20 average order.
The minimum version, no apps, Shopify Payments
The realistic version, two apps
The version where you cannot use Shopify Payments
So the honest range is roughly $1,400 to $2,400 in year one, depending on apps and payment setup. Against a $10 a month storefront with the same 2.9% plus $0.30 processing, which comes to $1,176 a year, the gap is between $228 and $1,188.
Setup time, and for a lot of vendors it is the largest line in year one.
A Shopify store is a build. You are choosing a theme, arranging sections, writing an About page, configuring shipping profiles and tax settings, setting up pickup, testing checkout, and then adjusting all of it once real orders start behaving differently from how you imagined. For someone who has not done it before, a weekend is a realistic estimate, and longer if you care how it looks.
Price that at whatever an hour of your Saturday is worth. At 16 hours and even a modest $20 an hour, that is $320 of your own time, which is roughly the entire annual subscription. It is not a reason to avoid Shopify, but it belongs in the comparison, and it never appears in one.
The SBA's guidance on calculating startup costs makes the same point in a broader context: the costs that are easiest to leave out of a plan are the ones nobody invoices you for.
Sometimes clearly yes, and it depends on one question: are you going to outgrow a simple storefront?
Shopify is worth its price when:
That last reason is legitimate and underrated. Buying the platform that scales, even while overpaying today, is a defensible call if you genuinely expect to need it. E-commerce keeps taking share of US retail, which the Census Bureau tracks in its quarterly retail e-commerce sales report, and a business that intends to grow into that has a real argument for buying room.
When your customers collect their order from you.
Shopify is built around getting a package from a warehouse to a stranger. Almost none of that machinery helps a vendor whose customers pick up at a market booth on Saturday, and several of the things that vendor genuinely needs are either apps or absent:
None of those are failings. They are just evidence that the product was designed for a different business than yours.
The tell is what you find yourself doing manually every week. On the right platform, the recurring work is making the product. On the wrong one, there is a second job underneath it: texting people about collection times, keeping a spreadsheet of who is picking up when, working out a delivery order in your head on Friday night, and a quarterly evening with your state's tax portal. None of that shows up as a cost anywhere, and all of it is what a platform built for your specific shape of business would have absorbed. If you recognize that list, the question is not whether Shopify is good. It plainly is. The question is whether you are paying it to solve a problem you do not have while doing the one you do have by hand.
That last point is worth sitting with. The fear of outgrowing a simple tool keeps a lot of small vendors on an expensive one for years before they need it. A migration you might do in eighteen months is a much smaller cost than eighteen months of paying for capability you are not using.
If your orders are mostly collected rather than shipped, you can run a week of real orders on a pickup-first storefront before committing to a build. Our full comparison of Homegrown against Shopify works the trade in detail, and Shopify alternatives for cottage food covers the wider field. If you are also weighing Square, our Square Online against Shopify comparison is the relevant one.
Basic is $29 a month billed annually or $39 billed monthly. Grow is $79 and Advanced is $299. Card rates start at 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, dropping to 2.7% on Grow and 2.5% on Advanced. The trial is 3 days free, then $1 a month for three months.
Roughly $1,400 with no apps and Shopify Payments, about $1,900 with two typical apps, and up to $2,400 if you cannot use Shopify Payments and pay the 2% surcharge. That assumes $24,000 in annual sales across 1,200 orders.
A per-order fee charged when you use a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments. It is waived entirely if you use Shopify Payments, which most US sellers can. Confirm your eligibility before assuming it will not apply.
Not to take an order. You will likely want them for subscriptions, advanced pickup scheduling, bundles, or loyalty, and those typically run $10 to $30 a month each. Budget for the two you are most likely to add rather than assuming the subscription covers everything.
It calculates rates and helps you track where you have nexus. Registering with each state, filing returns, and remitting the money are yours. That is a meaningful ongoing time cost if you sell across state lines.
It has pickup and local delivery features, and apps that extend them. What it does not do natively is manage several pickup locations with separate schedules, or plan the route for deliveries you make yourself, which is what most market vendors actually need.
If you ship nationally or plan to sell wholesale, start on Shopify. If your customers collect locally, start simpler and migrate if you outgrow it. A catalog of twenty products and a customer list moves in an afternoon, which makes starting simple much lower risk than it feels.
Shopify's honest cost for a cottage food business is somewhere between $1,400 and $2,400 in year one, plus a weekend of your time, against a headline that reads $29 a month. None of that is hidden. It is just spread across a subscription, a processing rate, an app store, and your own labor, and only the first of those is on the pricing page.
That price is worth paying if you are shipping, going wholesale, or genuinely building toward something bigger. If your customers pick up from your porch on Saturday, you are buying a national commerce platform to do a local job, and still filing your own sales tax at the end of it. The cheapest way to test that is to put your real products somewhere built for local selling and see what, if anything, is actually missing after a week of orders.
