The Shopify subscription is the smallest line in most stores' budgets. The real money goes into the theme, the product data, the apps and the work that turns a template into a shop that sells.
Shopify's own fees (UK, October 2026)
From Shopify's UK pricing page:
| Plan | Monthly billing | Yearly billing | Online card rate | Fee if you use another payment provider |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | £25/mo | £19/mo | 2% + 25p | 2% |
| Grow | £65/mo | £49/mo | 1.7% + 25p | 1% |
| Advanced | £344/mo | £259/mo | 1.5% + 25p | 0.6% |
| Plus | from £1,800/mo | — | 1.3% + 25p | 0.2% |
The last column matters. If you take payments through a provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own percentage on top of that provider's fees — 2% of every sale on Basic. On a shop turning over £10,000 a month that is £200 a month, more than a plan upgrade costs.
What the build costs
Project Cost Estimator, which models costs from published rate benchmarks (it quotes an accuracy band of ±18%), puts a UK Shopify website at:
- Freelancer: £900–£3,750
- Agency: £2,250–£9,000
- Hourly rates: £46–£116
- Themes: free, up to around £12,000 for a fully custom one
- Apps: £40–£300 a month
Those are for typical stores. Stores with subscriptions, B2B pricing, large catalogues or integrations into accounting and stock systems sit above that range.
What moves the price
- Theme customisation or a custom theme. Adjusting a good paid theme is a fraction of the cost of building one from scratch, and usually enough.
- Product data. Hundreds of products with variants, photos and descriptions take time to load properly — and good descriptions are what search engines and AI assistants read.
- Apps versus custom code. An app is fast to add but is a monthly cost forever, and ten apps can slow a store down. Sometimes a small piece of custom code is cheaper over two years.
- Integrations. Sending orders to Xero or QuickBooks, or customers to HubSpot, saves hours of re-keying every week.
- Migration. Moving from another platform means products, customers, orders and — most importantly — redirects from every old URL, or the search traffic is lost.
Keeping the running costs down
- Use Shopify Payments where you can, to avoid the third-party transaction fee.
- Audit apps every few months; uninstall the ones nobody uses.
- Pay yearly once you know the plan is right — it saves about a quarter on Basic.
Not sure Shopify is the right platform at all? We compare it with WordPress in Shopify vs WordPress for a UK shop.
Sources
- Pricing — Shopify UK, checked 2 October 2026
- Shopify Website Cost in the United Kingdom — Project Cost Estimator, 2026