What it costs to run an online store per month

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By Jason Feng, Founder & Researcher. See how this review was researched.

Quick answer

A small store doing $10,000 a month in sales pays $352 to $374 a month to keep the lights on, depending on whether it self-hosts. Run Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments and Omnisend Standard if you sell under $50,000 a month and nobody on your team maintains a WordPress install.

Table of contents

By Jason Feng · 2026-10-21

A small store doing $10,000 a month in sales pays $352 to $374 a month to keep the lights on, depending on whether it self-hosts. Almost all of that is card processing. The four line items that make up the bill get quoted separately and almost never added together, which is why the totals get guessed at.

Those four are the platform subscription, the hosting bill, the email bill, and card processing. This article builds the total from published prices and shows where the money actually goes. This is a research-based review. Every figure comes from the vendors’ own published pricing pages, which we link and date.

We captured the Shopify, Hostinger, Kinsta, Omnisend, GetResponse and Klaviyo pricing pages on 2026-10-21 through a US exit IP with an `en-US` locale. All of these vendors serve different currencies and plan lineups depending on where the request originates, so every price here is the US version.

Where a page would not render for an automated request, this article marks the gap instead of estimating. Totals are our arithmetic on published rates, and the assumptions behind each one are stated next to the table.

What it costs to run an online store per month
What it costs to run an online store per month

Most cost guides list ten line items and rank none of them. In practice four lines carry nearly all the weight for a store under $50,000 a month in sales: the platform subscription that provides the storefront and checkout, the server bill if you self-host, the email tool, and card processing.

The remaining costs are real but smaller at this size: a domain, apps or extensions, and ad spend. Ads are the largest variable in most stores and the least predictable, which is why they sit outside this model rather than inside it with a fake number attached.

The structural point is that three of the four lines are roughly fixed and one is proportional. That means the cheapest possible stack is not the one with the lowest subscription. It is the one where the proportional line is lowest for your volume, because at $50,000 a month a 0.2-point difference in card rate is $100, and a $10 difference in hosting is $10.

Shopify publishes two columns, monthly and yearly, and the yearly column is about 25% cheaper for the same plan.

Plan Billed monthly Billed yearly Card rate with Shopify Payments Third-party transaction fee
Basic $39/mo $29/mo 2.9% + 30¢ 2%
Grow $105/mo $79/mo 2.7% + 30¢ 1%
Advanced $399/mo [DATA NOT VERIFIED: Shopify pricing page shows $359/mo annually in the 2026-10-21 fetch, $299 in an earlier fetch] 2.5% + 30¢ 0.6%
Plus $2,300/mo from Not published 2.25% + 30¢ 0.2%

Two promotions matter for a first-year budget. Shopify advertises `$1/month for 3 months` after a three-day free trial, which cuts the first quarter to $3 rather than $87 on Basic. POS Pro, for in-person selling, adds $89 a month per location.

The alternative is a self-hosted store. WooCommerce carries no platform fee and no revenue share, which is why hosting becomes the platform line in that stack. You own the maintenance, and extensions replacing Shopify’s built-in features bill per year, per extension.

For a single small store the arithmetic usually favors Shopify Basic at $29 a month billed yearly over a self-hosted stack, because $29 buys the storefront, the checkout and the server together, and a $2.49 hosting bill buys only the last of those three. The exception is a store with a developer on hand and a processor it already has good rates with, which is the case our WooCommerce vs Shopify fee comparison works through in detail.

If you are on Shopify, hosting is inside the subscription and this line is $0. That is a reallocation rather than a discount, and it is why $29 looks expensive next to a $2.49 hosting plan.

If you self-host, the range is wide and the promotional pricing is steep. Hostinger’s WordPress tiers, captured 2026-10-21:

Tier Promotional rate Upfront for 48 months Renewal rate
Entry $2.49/mo $119.52 $10.99/mo
Middle $3.49/mo $167.52 $16.99/mo
Top $7.99/mo $383.52 $27.99/mo

The line that belongs in a monthly budget is $10.99, not $2.49. The promotional rate is a 48-month prepay, so a model built on it describes the first four years only. On a six-year view the entry plan averages $5.32 a month, and $10.99 is what to plan against once the term ends.

Managed WordPress hosting sits at the other end. Kinsta Business Launch is $35 a month, or $350 billed annually with the first month at $0, and includes one WordPress install, 20GB of monthly bandwidth, 10GB of storage and 14 days of backup retention. Extra sites are $30 a month each, extra disk is $20 a month per 20GB.

Hosting option Monthly figure for a budget What it includes
Shopify (any plan) $0 separate Storefront, checkout, server, CDN
Hostinger entry $10.99 (renewal) Self-managed WordPress hosting
Hostinger middle $16.99 (renewal) Self-managed, more resources
Kinsta Launch $29.17 ($350/yr) Managed WordPress, backups, staging
Cloudways [DATA NOT VERIFIED: Cloudways pricing pages redirect to a status page for automated requests] Cloud-provider billing by server spec

Cloudways bills by cloud provider and server specification rather than a fixed plan, which can be cheaper at steady load and more expensive at a spiky one. Without a captured price it does not belong in a total.

Email pricing is set by contact count, not revenue, which makes it the line most likely to surprise a growing store.

Omnisend publishes three tiers and a per-message SMS rate:

Tier Price Included
Free $0/mo 250 contacts, 500 emails a month
Standard $11.20/mo Email marketing for growing stores
Pro $41.30/mo High-volume sending with SMS
SMS $0.007/SMS Billed per message

Omnisend bills for subscribers and non-subscribers who received automated messages, and not for unsubscribed contacts. That matters if you import a list before cleaning it.

GetResponse’s three tiers, monthly and annual:

Tier Monthly Annual (per month)
Starter $19/mo $15.58/mo
Marketer $59/mo $48.38/mo
Creator $69/mo $56.58/mo

Klaviyo’s plan prices could not be captured. [DATA NOT VERIFIED: Klaviyo pricing page is JS-rendered and structured data exposes only the Free tier at $0.00 for up to 250 active profiles. Embedded price fields 20.00 and 35.00 cannot be matched to a tier, so no Klaviyo plan price appears here.] What is verifiable is the billing model: active profiles plus usage across email sends, SMS and Composer, with separate $5 monthly allowances for mobile messages and Composer. A Klaviyo budget needs your own profile count, not a headline.

Kit publishes a Free plan at $0 and Creator Pro at $99 a month billed annually. [DATA NOT VERIFIED: Kit pricing page blocks automated access; tier ladder not confirmed.]

The practical budget rule: at under 500 contacts, Omnisend Free or $11.20 Standard covers a small store’s needs. Between 500 and 2,500 contacts the GetResponse Starter annual rate of $15.58 is the predictable option. Above that, every one of these tools reprices by tier and the only honest approach is to enter your own list size on each pricing page. Our email marketing monthly cost breakdown runs that comparison across four vendors.

Processing is where a monthly total stops being a subscription exercise at all.

Shopify Payments runs 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow and 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced. If you use an outside processor instead, Shopify charges a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced on top of whatever that processor charges.

The 30¢ component means average order value changes your bill without changing your sales. On $10,000 a month at a $75 average order you process 133 orders and pay $40 in fixed fees; at $25 you process 400 and pay $120 on identical revenue. That $80 gap is invisible in a percentage comparison.

At $10,000 a month in card sales, Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments costs $290 + 133 orders × $0.30 = $329.90. The same volume through Stripe on Shopify Basic costs Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢ ($329.90) plus the 2% Shopify fee ($200), or $529.90. That $200 gap is the single largest avoidable line in this article, and it only exists if you route around Shopify Payments.

Three complete monthly builds, all at $10,000 in monthly card sales and a $75 average order. Hosting is annual where the vendor offers it, and email is the entry paid tier.

Cost line Build A: Shopify + Omnisend Build B: Shopify + GetResponse Build C: self-hosted WooCommerce
Platform Shopify Basic, $29/mo yearly Shopify Basic, $29/mo yearly $0 platform fee
Hosting Included Included Hostinger entry, $10.99 renewal
Email Omnisend Standard, $11.20 GetResponse Starter, $15.58 annual Omnisend Standard, $11.20
Card processing 2.9% + 30¢ on 133 orders = $329.90 $329.90 2.90% + $0.30, same volume = $329.90
Domain Not in this model Not in this model Not in this model
Monthly total $370 $374 $352
Annual total $4,441 $4,494 $4,225

Self-hosting wins the third column by $18 a month, by swapping the platform subscription for a renewal-rate hosting bill. That $18 does not pay for updates, backups or plugin conflicts, and it assumes no paid extension.

Now change one assumption. If the self-hosted store uses a managed host instead of a $10.99 plan, the totals invert:

Cost line Build A: Shopify + Omnisend Build D: WooCommerce on Kinsta + Omnisend
Platform or hosting $29 $29.17 (Kinsta Launch, $350/yr)
Email $11.20 $11.20
Card processing $329.90 $329.90
Monthly total $370 $370

The two land on the same dollar. $29 a month is roughly what managed hosting costs at the entry tier, so the subscription and the hosting bill are the same size. The difference is what each includes, and Shopify’s $29 includes a checkout that Kinsta’s does not.

One more variable, because it decides these comparisons at higher volume. At $50,000 a month with a $75 average order, 667 orders cost $1,650 on Basic’s 2.9% + 30¢ and $1,550 on Grow’s 2.7% + 30¢, so the $50 tier upgrade saves $100 a month against a $50 premium. At $250,000 a month the percentage alone separates further: 2.9% is $7,250 against Advanced’s 2.5% at $6,250, and that $1,000 gap dwarfs every subscription line here.

A domain costs money and is not in any table above. So do apps and extensions: a self-hosted store that needs subscriptions, reviews and tax extensions pays three annual fees that a Shopify store pays inside its subscription or through the app store. Neither pricing page lets us total a realistic extension bill without knowing the store, so this model treats extensions as $0, which is optimistic for WooCommerce.

Ad spend is the largest line in most stores under $50,000 a month and the least predictable. It is also the only line where a cheap stack can hurt: a $2.49 host that buckles under a campaign loses more sales than the hosting saved.

Payment disputes are billed per event, not per month. Any store with meaningful volume sees chargebacks, and the fee attaches to the processor, not the platform.

Shopify’s `$1/month for 3 months` cuts $87 off year one on Basic, and Hostinger’s promotional rate is a four-year prepay. A plan built on either reads low in month thirteen.

What does a small Shopify store cost per month in total?

At $10,000 a month in card sales with a $75 average order, Shopify Basic billed yearly plus Omnisend Standard plus Shopify Payments comes to about $370 a month. That is $29 platform, $11.20 email and $329.90 processing. It excludes the domain, apps and ads. At $50,000 a month on Grow it is roughly $1,640, almost all processing.

Is self-hosted WordPress actually cheaper than Shopify?

At the entry tier, barely. A Hostinger renewal at $10.99 plus Omnisend at $11.20 plus WooPayments at 2.90% + $0.30 came to $352 a month against Shopify’s $370 in our model, an $18 gap. Move to managed hosting at $29.17 a month and the two are identical. The saving disappears once you need a paid extension or pay for maintenance.

Which line grows fastest as the store grows?

Card processing, by a wide margin, because it is the only line charged as a percentage of sales. Platform, hosting and email move in steps tied to plan tiers and contact counts, not to revenue. At $250,000 a month, processing is over 90% of the total bill in every build in this article.

How much should I budget for email marketing?

Under 500 contacts, $0 to $11.20 a month covers a small store with Omnisend. Between 500 and 2,500 contacts, GetResponse Starter at $15.58 a month on annual billing is the predictable choice. Klaviyo’s plan prices are not published in a form we could capture, so a Klaviyo budget has to be built from your own profile count on its pricing page.

Do I need to pay for hosting if I use Shopify?

No. Shopify’s subscription includes the storefront, checkout and servers, so there is no separate hosting bill. That is why comparing Shopify’s $29 to a $2.49 hosting plan is a category error: the $2.49 buys a server, and the $29 buys a server plus the software that turns it into a store.

Run Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments and Omnisend Standard if you sell under $50,000 a month and nobody on your team maintains a WordPress install. At $370 a month on $10,000 in sales, platform and email together are $40 and the rest is the cost of accepting money. That ratio is the argument.

Self-host only for a reason beyond price: a processor with better rates than Shopify Payments, a feature set needing deep WordPress customization, or content and store on one domain without a second subscription. Saving $18 a month is not one of those, and neither is dodging a $29 subscription by taking on backups yourself. Our breakdown of what it costs to set a store up covers the one-time side, a different budget.

Neither matters much once card volume makes the platform tier the wrong lever. Past $250,000 a month the gap between 2.9% and 2.5% is $1,000 a month, and the subscription matters far less than the rate attached to it. That is the calculation in our guide to Shopify’s transaction fees.

https://www.shopify.com/pricing (accessed 2026-10-21)

https://www.hostinger.com/wordpress-hosting (accessed 2026-10-21)

https://kinsta.com/pricing/ (accessed 2026-10-21)

https://www.omnisend.com/pricing/ (accessed 2026-10-21)

https://www.getresponse.com/pricing (accessed 2026-10-21)

https://www.klaviyo.com/pricing (accessed 2026-10-21)

https://kit.com/pricing (accessed 2026-10-21)

https://www.cloudways.com/en/pricing.php (accessed 2026-10-21)

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By Jason Feng, Founder & Researcher. See how this review was researched.

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