Shopify vs WooCommerce Pricing: Real Total Cost Compared

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Quick answer

Shopify sells predictability. $39, $105, or $399 a month on monthly billing, with hosting and SSL included. Bandwidth isn’t metered, and there’s no revenue ceiling. WooCommerce sells the opposite: a $0 platform fee and 0% revenue share, and you pay for hosting ($25–$350/month) plus extensions ($29–$299/year each). BigCommerce sits between them, and it carries the clause with the sharpest teeth of the three: plan tiers measured against trailing-twelve-month GMV, with automatic upgrades once you grow past the cap. Read the subscription price as an entry fee, not the bill.

Table of contents

What each platform charges for the software itself

Shopify and BigCommerce sell you a subscription. WooCommerce gives away the software and sells you everything around it. Hosting is yours to buy. So are extensions, and so is the card processing on top. That one structural difference explains most of the disagreements you’ll find in this comparison.

Here is what each vendor publishes for its own US plans, read on 2026-09-22:

Plan Billed monthly Billed yearly
Shopify Basic $39/mo $29/mo
Shopify Grow $105/mo $79/mo
Shopify Advanced $399/mo $299/mo
Shopify Plus Starts at $2,300/mo Not published
BigCommerce Core $39/mo $29/mo
BigCommerce Growth $105/mo $79/mo
BigCommerce Scale $399/mo $299/mo
BigCommerce Performance Not published Starts at $1,499/mo, billed annually
WooCommerce core platform $0 $0
WooCommerce hosting (third party) $25–$350/mo –
WooCommerce extensions – $29–$299 per extension, per year

Three things stand out. Shopify and BigCommerce publish identical headline numbers for their first three tiers: $39, $105, or $399 billed monthly, or $29, $79, or $299 billed yearly. BigCommerce’s cheaper tiers are capped by revenue; Shopify’s are not. And WooCommerce’s $0 is genuine but narrow. The pricing page states “0% revenue share” for the core platform, while naming where your money does go instead: hosting, extensions, card processing.

One caution if you shop around: vendor comparison tables don’t always agree with vendor pricing pages, because they quote different billing bases. WooCommerce’s own table lists Shopify Basic at “$29/mo”, an annual-billing figure, while Shopify’s page shows $39/mo on monthly billing. Neither is wrong. They’re different plans of the same plan.

If you’re already leaning away from Shopify, the alternatives comparison in our Shopify alternatives breakdown covers which platforms actually fit different store types.

The total cost model: subscription, transactions, hosting, overage

Subscription price is the smallest honest number in ecommerce software. The bill has four parts: the subscription, the card processing rate, the hosting and extensions layer, and the overage clauses that fire when you cross a threshold nobody advertised on the homepage.

Here is the model at $50,000 in annual sales, roughly $4,200 a month:

Cost line Shopify WooCommerce BigCommerce
Subscription Grow: $79/mo billed yearly, $948/yr $0 platform fee Growth: $79/mo billed yearly, $948/yr
Card processing (published rate) 2.7% + 30¢ (Shopify Payments, Grow) 2.9% + 30¢ (WooPayments) 2.89% + 29¢ (plan rate for US businesses)
Fee if you don’t use the in-house processor 1% third-party transaction fee (Grow) None 1.0% Open Payment Provider fee (Growth)
Hosting Included, unlimited bandwidth $25–$350/mo Included
Extensions and apps App costs not published on the pricing page $29–$299/yr per extension App costs not published on the pricing page
Overage clause 50 synced marketplace orders/mo free, then 1% up to $99/mo None published Automatic upgrade above $100K trailing-12-month GMV

At this revenue level the percentage components are close enough to be a rounding argument. On the percentage alone, 2.7% of $50,000 is $1,350, 2.89% is $1,445, and 2.9% is $1,450. The 30¢-per-order piece is where low average order values sting, and it grows with order count rather than revenue, so a store selling $12 items pays it many more times than a store selling $400 items for the same GMV.

The real gap at $50,000 a year is the fourth column. Shopify Basic charges 2.9% + 30¢, the same headline rate as WooPayments. WooCommerce charges nothing on top. BigCommerce charges a 1.0% Open Payment Provider fee on Growth if you use a processor outside its embedded list. That last line is the one I’d check against my own payment stack before picking a plan.

Where the subscription math flips: Shopify’s card-rate break-even

Shopify’s tiers differ in more than size. Each one buys a lower card rate. Reading Shopify’s own comparison table, standard online card rates run 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow, 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced, and 2.25% + 30¢ on Plus.

That means you can calculate exactly when an upgrade pays for itself, using nothing but published numbers.

Basic to Grow, billed yearly: the subscription rises from $29 to $79, a $50 monthly increase, or $600 a year. The card rate falls 0.2 points. $600 ÷ 0.002 = $300,000. You need to process roughly $300,000 a year in card volume before Grow’s lower rate covers its higher subscription. On monthly billing the same jump costs $66 a month, or $792 a year, which pushes break-even to about $396,000.

Grow to Advanced, billed yearly: $79 to $299 is $220 a month, $2,640 a year, against another 0.2-point drop. Break-even lands near $1,320,000 in annual card volume.

The arithmetic assumes you use Shopify Payments, because the card rates above are Shopify Payments rates. If you use an outside processor instead, you pay the third-party transaction fee, and the tier math changes completely: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. At $50,000 a year, moving Basic to Grow cuts that fee from $1,000 to $500. Nothing in the marketing copy states it that plainly. It’s in the feature table on the pricing page, though.

Hosting, extensions, and the labor WooCommerce doesn’t quote

WooCommerce’s version of this argument is that the savings are real but deferred. The platform is free. The store is not.

WooCommerce’s pricing page lists hosting at “$25–$350/month for most stores, but scales with traffic and performance needs,” and extensions at “$29–$299/year per extension to enhance your store.” Those are honest ranges, since WooCommerce can’t know your stack. But the top of the hosting range is $4,200 a year, which is more than Shopify Grow costs at $79 a month. And the extension range is per extension, not per store.

WooCommerce also publishes total-cost-of-ownership samples on that same page, sourced from its agency partner StuntCoders. They are not small numbers:

Sample store First-year cost Ongoing annual cost Payment fees included
Luxury goods brand, Europe, $2M revenue ~$139,000 ~$89,500 ~$50,000/yr
Regulated medical retailer, Europe, $10M revenue ~$267,000 ~$237,000 ~$200,000/yr
Subscription coffee brand, US, $300M revenue ~$5,334,000 ~$5,214,000 ~$5,100,000/yr

Those figures include development ($60,000–$200,000 in the first year) and ongoing maintenance (up to $100,000 a year). If you’re running a Shopify-scale storefront of a few hundred thousand dollars a year, most of that engineering line is aspirational rather than mandatory. You can launch WooCommerce with a managed host and a handful of extensions, and plenty of stores do. But the samples are the honest counterweight to the “$0 platform fee” headline: the fee is zero because the labor is yours.

WooCommerce’s structural advantage shows up in the same table. Product variant limits? “Unlimited,” it says. Localisation: “$0, can sell in unlimited markets,” and revenue share: “None.” BigCommerce Core, by contrast, carries a plan cap that upgrades automatically. Reading that row on the same page shows how differently the two vendors think about growth.

If you’re weighing a move in the other direction, our migration checklist for Shopify to WooCommerce covers what actually transfers and what you rebuild from scratch.

Hidden fees and overage clauses, platform by platform

This is where the three platforms diverge most, and it’s the section worth reading twice.

Clause Shopify WooCommerce BigCommerce
Revenue ceiling per plan None published None: “unlimited products, orders, and APIs” Core: $30K trailing-12-month GMV. Growth: $100K. Scale: $33,333/month
What happens above the cap – – Core and Growth auto-upgrade to the next plan. Scale charges a 0.9% overage rate on GMV above $33,333/month. At $2M trailing-12-month GMV the account auto-upgrades to Performance
Fee for using an outside payment processor 2% (Basic), 1% (Grow), 0.6% (Advanced), 0.2% (Plus) None 2.0% (Core), 1.0% (Growth), 0.6% (Scale), 0.0% with a contract (Performance)
Order-sync cap 50 synced marketplace orders/month free; over that, 1% up to $99/month Not applicable Not applicable
Extra storefronts Not published as a line item Not applicable $30/mo on Core (max 3), $50/mo on Growth (max 5), $100/mo on Scale (max 8)
Contract Plus: 1- or 3-year terms; cancellation only when the term commitment expires None Core, Growth, and Scale: no contract. Performance: contract
How GMV is defined Not defined on the pricing page Not applicable Gross order value minus 10%, with eligible sales including product price net of discounts, plus taxes and shipping

BigCommerce’s clause is the one that changes budgets. Two details matter. First, the cap is measured on trailing twelve months, so December’s spike can trigger a January upgrade. Second, BigCommerce defines GMV as gross order value minus 10%, and counts taxes and shipping as eligible sales. The page says plainly that “This number may differ from what you track in your own records. That difference is expected, not an error.” A store doing $1,000,000 in gross sales is measured on roughly $900,000, or about $75,000 a month. On Scale’s $33,333/month cap, that leaves roughly $41,667 a month above the line, which at the published 0.9% is around $375 a month, or $4,500 a year, on top of the $299 monthly subscription. Grow past $2M and you’re moved to Performance, which is contract-based with custom pricing starting at $1,499 a month billed annually.

Shopify’s clauses are smaller but two are easy to miss. The marketplace order cap is firm: 50 synced orders a month free, then 1% up to $99/month, on every tier. And Shopify Payments, which unlocks the card rates quoted above, isn’t available everywhere. The pricing page says it “is available only in certain countries,” and that payment options can differ by where your business is based. If you can’t use it, the third-party transaction fee applies instead, and on Basic that’s 2% of the order.

Also worth flagging because the vendors disagree with each other: WooCommerce’s comparison table lists the Shopify Plus card rate at 2.4% + $0.30, while Shopify’s own table lists 2.25% + 30¢. The same page reports a revenue share of 0.25% on Shopify Plus monthly sales over $800,000; Shopify’s pricing page doesn’t state that figure at all. Both rows come from WooCommerce, a competitor. That’s the one number I wouldn’t take from either page. Check the Shopify Plus contract directly before modelling it.

Which platform costs less at your revenue level

Under $100,000 a year, WooCommerce plus a mid-range host is the lowest fixed cost of the three, and Shopify Basic at $29 a month billed yearly is close behind once you price the hosting and the admin time. BigCommerce Growth is priced the same as Shopify Grow at this level, and its $100K trailing-12-month ceiling is a real constraint if you expect to double.

Between $100,000 and $400,000 a year, Shopify Grow and BigCommerce Scale are the two plans that make sense, and the deciding question is your payment stack. Shopify Grow’s 2.7% + 30¢ only applies with Shopify Payments; on an outside processor the 1% third-party fee is worse than BigCommerce Scale’s 0.6%. WooCommerce starts to win on raw cost here if you already have WordPress skills in-house, because the platform fee stays at zero while the SaaS subscription crosses $1,000 a year.

Above $400,000 a year, every platform’s cost becomes a percentage of revenue rather than a line item, and the 0.2-point differences in card rates are worth more than the subscription tiers. That’s the point where the honest answer is to model your own numbers instead of comparing plans. It’s also where WooCommerce’s engineering samples stop looking absurd.

Our verdict

For most stores billing under $100,000 a year, Shopify Basic on annual billing is the lowest-effort option and WooCommerce is the lowest-cost one, and the choice between them is a question about your time, not your money. WooCommerce’s $0 platform fee is real, and so is the hosting and extension bill underneath it.

BigCommerce is the one to read carefully. Its pricing looks identical to Shopify’s at every tier: $29, $79, $299. But two structural clauses sit on top. There’s an Open Payment Provider fee of 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale if you use an outside processor, plus hard trailing-12-month GMV caps that trigger automatic upgrades. Neither Shopify nor WooCommerce publishes a revenue ceiling.

If you want a single recommendation: pick WooCommerce if you have WordPress experience and sell under $400,000 a year. Pick Shopify if you don’t want to think about hosting. And read BigCommerce’s GMV definition before you commit, because that’s the clause that decides whether its identical headline price stays identical.

How we researched this

  • We have not run a store on these platforms. Every figure below comes from the vendors’ own published pricing pages, which we link and date.
  • We captured all three pricing pages on 2026-09-22 through a US exit IP with an en-US locale, because Shopify serves different currencies and prices depending on where the request originates. Every figure here is the US version.
  • Plan prices, card rates, third-party and open-processor fees, and revenue caps come from the vendors’ own feature tables on their pricing pages, not from marketing copy.
  • Where two vendors disagree about the same number, we say so and attribute each figure rather than picking one. Where a vendor doesn’t publish a figure, we say that instead of estimating.
  • Our full methodology, including how we handle vendor-reported numbers, is on the how we research page.

Sources

  • https://www.shopify.com/pricing (accessed 2026-09-22)
  • https://woocommerce.com/pricing/ (accessed 2026-09-22)
  • https://www.bigcommerce.com/pricing/ (accessed 2026-09-22)

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