Cost of setting up an online store: the one-time bill

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

Quick answer

Setting up an online store costs either $3 or $119.52 before you buy anything to sell. Choose a hosted platform with the $1 promotion if you are testing a product idea with fewer than 100 orders a month.

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By Jason Feng · 2026-10-21

Setting up an online store costs either $3 or $119.52 before you buy anything to sell. The first figure is three months of Shopify Basic at the promotional $1 rate that follows a 3-day free trial. The second is four years of Hostinger’s entry WordPress plan, paid in one go. Neither includes a domain, a theme, a product photo, or a single unit of inventory, so both are floors rather than budgets.

The distinction that decides the real number is one-time versus recurring. Most setup-cost articles blend the two into a single headline figure, which hides the part that decides whether you are still trading in month thirteen. A paid theme is a one-time cost. The hosting renewal that lands after the promotional term is not, and on Hostinger’s published numbers it arrives at 4.4 times the price you signed up at.

This is a research-based review. Every figure comes from the vendors’ own published pricing pages, which we link and date at the bottom of this page. All pages were captured on 2026-10-21 through a US exit IP (199.237.109.149) with an en-US locale, because Shopify and Hostinger serve different currencies and promotional prices depending on where a request originates. Totals described as our arithmetic are computed from published rates under assumptions printed next to them. Where a vendor publishes nothing, this article says so rather than filling the gap with a round number.

Cost of setting up an online store: the one-time bill
Cost of setting up an online store: the one-time bill

Three tests separate a setup cost from an operating cost. You pay it before the store can take an order. You pay it once, or for a fixed term you choose at signing. It does not scale with sales.

Domain registration passes the first test and fails the second, because it renews every year. Hosting passes the first and third, and fails the second unless you prepay a multi-year term. First inventory passes all three on paper, and it is the line that most often eats the budget, because it is the one item where no vendor price list applies.

Prepaid hosting needs its own warning. Hostinger’s entry plan is advertised at $2.49 a month, and the four-year total on the pricing page is $119.52. That is 48 months of service bought at once. The cash leaves your account in week one, so it belongs in a setup budget, but the service is consumed monthly and the renewal rate is $10.99 a month. Treat it as a setup cost for cash flow and a recurring cost for planning, and the rest of this page will read correctly.

The table separates what a vendor publishes from what it does not. Two lines carry a verified number. The rest do not, and I am not going to invent them.

Line item Published figure Status
Platform, first 3 months Shopify: $1/month for 3 months, after a 3-day free trial Verified
Hosting, prepaid term Hostinger entry: $119.52 for 4 years, or $2.49/mo Verified
Domain registration No figure captured [DATA NOT VERIFIED: domain registrar prices were not captured in the 2026-10-21 data set]
Paid theme No figure captured [DATA NOT VERIFIED: theme marketplace prices were not captured in the 2026-10-21 data set]
Product photography No figure captured [DATA NOT VERIFIED: no vendor-published price applies to this line]
First inventory Quoted by your supplier Not a vendor price
Launch ad budget No figure captured [DATA NOT VERIFIED: ad platform costs were not captured in the 2026-10-21 data set]

Those two lines are alternatives, not additions: $3 buys a quarter on Shopify, $119.52 buys four years on Hostinger. Either way the verified platform spend stays under $125, which is the honest floor for a store with somewhere to run and nothing to sell. A store launching with 40 SKUs at a $30 landed cost carries $1,200 in inventory before the first ad runs, and that number is arithmetic on your supplier quote. It is the single largest setup line for most physical-goods stores, and it is also the most recoverable, because unsold stock can be sold later at a lower price.

Paid themes belong in the same category as photography. Shopify ships free themes and its marketplace sells paid ones, but the price depends on which theme you pick, so any single figure printed here would describe someone else’s store. Choose the theme first, then read its listing.

Every vendor in this comparison discounts for prepayment, and the discount is big enough that comparing monthly prices across platforms produces the wrong ranking.

Item Monthly billing Annual billing What changes later
Shopify Basic $39/mo $29/mo ($348 a year) Stays flat; no renewal increase published
Shopify Grow $105/mo $79/mo Stays flat; POS Pro adds $89/mo per location
Hostinger entry $2.49/mo promotional $119.52 for 4 years Renews at $10.99/mo
Kinsta Launch $35/mo $350 billed annually First month is $0; extra site $30/mo
Omnisend Standard $11.20/mo No term total published Free tier stops at 250 contacts
GetResponse Starter $19/mo $15.58/mo Price steps up with list size

Three comparisons fall out of that table. Shopify charges $468 for a year of Basic on monthly billing and $348 on yearly billing, a $120 difference for the same features. Kinsta’s Launch plan costs $420 a year on monthly billing and $350 on annual; with the first month waived, the monthly route bills $385 for twelve months. Hostinger’s promotional price is not a discount on a subscription but a discount on a term: 48 months at $2.49 is $119.52, while 48 months at the renewal rate of $10.99 would be $527.52.

That last figure is the one to keep in view. Hostinger’s page states “Up to 82% off” and also states “Renews at $10.99/mo.” Both are true, and they describe different years of the same account.

The platform decision changes which lines exist at all, so here are three builds using only verified prices.

Build one, hosted platform. Shopify at $1 a month for three months costs $3 in platform fees for the quarter. Email can run on Omnisend’s free tier, which allows 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, at $0. From month four the plan bills at $29 a month on the yearly term or $39 on the monthly term. Cash out in the first 90 days: $3, plus whatever you spend on a domain and inventory.

Build two, self-hosted WordPress. Hostinger’s entry plan costs $119.52 up front for 48 months, and the platform itself carries no subscription. Card processing is billed by whichever gateway you connect, and the rate comparison lives in our WooCommerce versus Shopify fee breakdown. Cash out in the first 90 days: $119.52, with no platform bill until 2030.

Build three, managed WordPress. Kinsta’s Launch plan bills $0 for the first month and $350 for the year after that on annual billing. The plan covers one WordPress install, 20GB of bandwidth a month, 10GB of storage, 125GB of CDN traffic, and 14 days of backup retention. A second store adds $30 a month, which is the line that surprises people opening two brands at once. If you are weighing that against the cheap end of the market, our cheapest ecommerce hosting comparison runs the three-year totals.

None of the three includes a theme, a domain, photography, or stock. Those lines are identical across builds, which is why they belong in a separate budget rather than in the platform comparison.

Option Monthly billing Annual (as billed) Line to budget that is not in the headline
Shopify Basic $39/mo $29/mo, $348 a year 2% extra on orders paid through an outside processor
Shopify Grow $105/mo $79/mo POS Pro at $89/mo for each physical location
Hostinger entry WordPress $2.49/mo promotional $119.52 for 4 years Renews at $10.99/mo after the term
Kinsta Launch $35/mo $350 billed annually $30/mo per extra site, $20/mo per extra 20GB
Omnisend Standard $11.20/mo No term total published Free tier caps at 250 contacts and 500 emails

The fourth column is the one that decides a first-year budget. A Shopify Basic store that uses Stripe instead of Shopify Payments pays 2% of every order to Shopify on top of the processor’s rate, and that charge scales with revenue rather than with costs. On $10,000 in monthly sales it is $200 a month, which is more than six times the subscription. Our Shopify transaction fee guide works through the mechanics.

Renewal timing is the first trap. Hostinger’s $2.49 rate applies to the term you buy, and the account renews at $10.99. A four-year prepay at $119.52 avoids four renewal increases and saves $408 against paying the renewal rate for the same 48 months. If you plan to close the store inside a year, the prepay is a $119.52 bet on a business that has not opened yet.

Add-on pricing is the second. Kinsta’s Launch plan covers one install, and the pricing page lists $30 a month for an additional site and $20 a month for an additional 20GB of disk. A second store on the same account therefore adds $30 a month to a $30 base, which doubles the platform line without changing the headline price.

Credits are the third. Shopify lists up to $5,000 in credits on Basic, $7,500 on Grow, and $10,000 on Advanced. Those are earned against sales, so they are a rebate on future revenue, not a discount you can apply to the first invoice. A setup budget written as if the credits were cash comes up short in month one.

List-size ceilings are the fourth. Omnisend’s free tier allows 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, and Klaviyo’s free tier allows 250 active profiles. A launch that collects 600 addresses in the first quarter moves onto a paid plan whether or not it has revenue: Omnisend Standard starts at $11.20 a month, GetResponse Starter at $19 a month or $15.58 on annual billing. Omnisend’s page also shows first-period discounts of $48.00 to $33.60 and $177.00 to $123.90 without stating which term each maps to, so treat the discounted figure as a first-invoice number rather than a run rate.

App subscriptions are the fifth, and the one I can quantify least. Shopify apps and WordPress plugins are priced individually, and no figure for them was captured in this data set, so a realistic app budget has to come from the specific apps you install. The pattern to watch is per-app monthly pricing that survives after the feature stops being used.

The sixth is the cost that follows the setup: rent, payment fees, email, and apps continue every month. Our monthly cost to run an online store breaks that side down, and the total there is usually larger than everything on this page within two years.

How much does it cost to set up an online store from zero?

The cheap end of the verified range is $3 for three months of Shopify Basic at the promotional $1 rate, or $119.52 for four years of Hostinger’s entry plan paid up front. Those are two routes, not two line items on one bill, and both cover a platform and a server only. Add a domain, a theme, photography, and inventory, and the total depends on your product. For a 40-SKU store at $30 landed cost, inventory alone is $1,200.

Is a domain name a one-time cost?

No. Registration is an annual subscription even though it is usually filed under setup. The registrar price was not captured in this data set, so I am not quoting one. Budget it as a yearly line that renews whether or not the store trades, and register it in the store’s name rather than a contractor’s.

Can I launch using only free plans?

For a short test, yes. Shopify runs a 3-day free trial before the $1 promotion, Kinsta waives the first month, Omnisend’s free tier allows 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, and Kit has a $0 plan. The limits arrive quickly: 500 emails a month is roughly two campaigns to a 250-person list, and Kinsta’s free month is one month.

Is prepaying four years of hosting cheaper?

At Hostinger’s published numbers, yes by a wide margin. The four-year total is $119.52, while the same 48 months at the $10.99 renewal rate would be $527.52, a difference of $408. The trade is commitment: the money is spent before the store earns anything, and the plan is tied to one host for four years.

When should I start paying for email?

When the free tier’s send limit binds, not when the list starts growing. Omnisend’s free plan sends 500 emails a month, so a 250-contact list exhausts it in two sends. At that point Standard costs $11.20 a month, and GetResponse Starter costs $19 monthly or $15.58 on annual billing. Below that threshold, paid email buys features rather than capacity.

Choose a hosted platform with the $1 promotion if you are testing a product idea with fewer than 100 orders a month. The setup cash is $3 plus your inventory, the store is live the same week, and you can stop the subscription without a four-year commitment. Put the saved money into product photography, which is the line that actually moves conversion.

Choose prepaid WordPress hosting if you already know what you are selling and intend to keep the store for three years or more. $119.52 for 48 months is the lowest verified hosting cost in this data set, and the absence of a platform subscription means your costs do not rise with revenue. Choose Kinsta instead if traffic spikes are likely and you would rather pay $350 a year for managed infrastructure than debug a server during a launch.

Skip both if you cannot fund the inventory line. A $122.52 setup on a store with no stock and no ad budget produces a live site and no orders, and the recurring costs from month four will keep arriving. The setup figure is the smallest number in this article, and treating it as the budget is the mistake that closes stores.

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

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

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

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