How Much A Shopify Website Costs To Build

A Shopify website with its own domain starts at $357 for the first year: the Basic plan (opens in new tab) at $348 paid yearly, a domain from $9 a year (opens in new tab), and a free theme you set up yourself, before card fees. Everything above that comes from how the site gets built, which apps it runs and who looks after it. The plan fee only becomes the big number at Shopify Plus.

So how much does a Shopify website cost once you pay someone to build it? Clutch, a directory of development firms, puts Shopify projects reviewed on its site (opens in new tab) typically below $10,000. Freelancers and agencies set their own fees, so there’s no standard price list for a custom theme or a Plus build. What you can do is work out which kind of build your store needs, price the parts that are published, and get quotes for the rest.

Each row below is a different kind of project. The third column holds the costs anyone can look up, and the last column is what moves the quote.

Your scope decides which row you’re in. Write down what the store has to do that a theme can’t, and you’ll usually land on one of them before you talk to anyone.

Plan prices are public, and these are the US list prices. Shopify’s plans (opens in new tab) have no setup fee, and paying yearly saves about 25% on Basic, Grow and Advanced. Plus (opens in new tab) starts at $2,300 a month. Pricing can differ depending on where your business is based, so check the page for your country before you set a budget.

Hosting and SSL come with every plan (opens in new tab), so you won’t budget for them separately.

Set those numbers against a build. On a $10,000 project, a year of Basic is about 3.5% of the project and a year of Grow is about 9.5%. Plus is where that flips: at $27,600 a year, the plan can cost more than Clutch’s typical Shopify project.

Clutch says most ecommerce website development reviewed on its site (opens in new tab) cost less than $10,000, while the average ecommerce project on Clutch is $51,943.13. Both figures cover all platforms, and an average that far above the typical project means a smaller group of very large projects is pulling it up.

So how much does it cost to build a Shopify website? On Clutch’s numbers, a typical reviewed Shopify project comes in under $10,000, and ecommerce projects as a whole can run far above that. Most projects sit under $10,000 and a few run far above it, so your scope tells you more than the platform name does.

Clutch is a directory, so its figures come from reviews of the firms it lists and the rates those firms post. It isn’t a survey of what stores paid.

Start at the cheapest build that does the job and move up only when you can name what the cheaper one can’t do.

Theme Store prices are the easiest part of this budget. Free themes (opens in new tab) cost nothing, Horizon (opens in new tab) and Dawn among them. Paid themes run from about $100 (opens in new tab) to $500 (opens in new tab).

A theme is a one-time payment, not a subscription. A paid theme like Impulse (opens in new tab) comes with a lifetime license for your store with no expiration, and you only pay when you publish it. That lets you try it before you spend anything.

The price of launching the store yourself is your time. Every hour you spend learning the theme editor and sorting out apps is an hour you aren’t spending on your product or your customers, so count it when you compare this row with a quote.

This is the build most small stores should price first. You keep the $0 to $500 theme and pay for someone else’s hours to configure it, load your products and connect your apps.

The Horizon theme is a good test of whether you need more than this. It’s free, and you build pages from sections and blocks in the theme editor without code. If your store fits inside that, your money goes to setup and content, and you don’t need custom development.

A custom theme is designed and coded for your store. Our custom theme work starts from blank files with no marketplace template underneath, and it covers the theme’s structure, performance, product pages, collection filtering and structured data for search.

That’s why this row costs more than theme setup: you’re paying for design and development hours where the other rows pay for configuration. It’s worth it in three cases. Your design is part of what you sell, your catalog needs logic that blocks can’t handle, or an integration needs code in the theme itself.

If none of those describe your store, a theme will likely do the job for much less.

A Shopify Plus build adds two things to a standard plan build: a monthly fee of at least $2,300 and features that need their own development work.

What Plus adds (opens in new tab) over Advanced includes a fully customizable checkout, unlimited staff accounts, unlimited B2B catalogs and priority 24/7 phone support, and the plan table (opens in new tab) lists up to 9 free expansion stores. Plus runs on a term (opens in new tab): $2,300 a month on 3 years or $2,500 a month on 1 year, and more complex, higher-volume businesses might also pay a variable platform fee based on revenue. You can cancel when the term ends. Before you budget for it, name the feature you need, because a store that doesn’t need one of these can run a very good site on a lower plan.

A headless build means Shopify keeps your products, orders and checkout while you build and maintain the storefront yourself, hosted on Shopify’s Oxygen or on your own servers. It costs more because the work a theme handles becomes your project: the storefront, an editing tool for your team, analytics, and a plan for every app that used to show up in the theme.

You don’t need Plus to try it, since Basic, Grow and Advanced each allow one headless storefront (opens in new tab) and Plus allows 25. The plan is the smaller cost here too. Budget separately for development, integrations and ongoing maintenance, because that last line stays on your books for as long as the site runs.

If you’re migrating from another platform, that’s a separate line on top of the build. A migration moves your URLs and redirects, your customer accounts and order history, your products and content, and your integrations with tools like Klaviyo. A larger catalog, more customer data and more integrations mean more work.

Ask for this line on its own in any quote. It’s a different job from the design and build, and you can’t compare two proposals if it’s folded into one number.

How much does a Shopify expert cost? Rates are set by the person or firm, and they spread widely. On Clutch, ecommerce development firms list an average of $25 to $49 an hour (opens in new tab), with some firms listing $150 to $199 an hour, and minimum project sizes run from $1,000 to $50,000. That’s a global directory, so the averages aren’t a going US rate.

Shopify’s own partner directory (opens in new tab) shows prices from about $10 to $1,000 alongside partners who ask you to contact them. Those prices don’t say which service they cover, so they aren’t build prices.

To see the spread, take 100 hours, a number picked only to show the math. At $25 to $49 an hour it’s $2,500 to $4,900, and at $150 to $199 it’s $15,000 to $19,900. Hours aren’t equal across firms, though, so a low hourly rate doesn’t guarantee a low project price. Ask for a fixed price against a written scope and compare those totals.

How much does a Shopify store cost once it’s live? Your build is mostly a one-time bill. Your plan, apps, card fees, domain and developer time come back every year, and apps and card fees are the lines that grow with the business.

App pricing follows your size, and each app measures it differently. Klaviyo (opens in new tab) is free up to 250 active profiles, then $20 a month for 251 to 500 contacts, and that climbs as your list grows. Judge.me (opens in new tab) has a free plan and a $15 a month plan. Loox (opens in new tab) charges $49.99 a month for 300 orders plus $50 for each additional 300, and its Unlimited plan is $299.99.

Subscription apps add a cut of each sale. Recharge (opens in new tab) starts at $25 a month with no transaction fees for your first 50 subscribers. Its $99 a month Starter plan charges 1.49% + 19¢ per transaction, so 1,000 orders at $50 comes to $1,034 for the month.

The table below adds up the published costs for three sample stores, at list prices with twelve monthly payments. This is an illustration, not a typical stack, and it leaves out any build fee, card fees and developer time. The apps on the second row are Klaviyo at $20, Judge.me at $15 and Recharge at $25 a month. The third row swaps Recharge to Starter, before its transaction fees.

Those totals include a $9 domain, and domain renewal pricing may differ from what you first paid. In the second and third rows, the apps cost more than the plan.

Developer time is the line with no standard price. Themes need changes, apps need replacing and new campaigns need new pages, so ask anyone quoting your build what support costs after launch. Get that answer before you sign.

Card rates drop as plans go up, so it’s fair to ask whether the savings cover the bigger fee. On a $100 online order with a standard card through Shopify Payments (opens in new tab), the fee is $3.20 on Basic, $3.00 on Grow, $2.80 on Advanced and $2.55 on Plus (opens in new tab).

Those rates alone rarely justify an upgrade. Going by plan fees paid yearly, standard online card rates and every sale running through Shopify Payments, moving from Basic to Grow pays back at about $300,000 a year in online card sales. Grow to Advanced pays back at about $1.32 million, and Advanced to Plus at about $9.6 million on the 3-year price, before any variable platform fee. Upgrade for a feature you need, such as Grow’s 5 staff accounts or Advanced’s live third-party shipping rates.

Using an outside payment provider changes this math. Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, on top of what the provider charges. On $100,000 a year in sales, that’s $2,000 on Basic.

Two quotes only compare if they price the same work. Give each freelancer or agency the same written list before you ask for a number:

Then add the published lines yourself: the plan, the theme and a year of apps at the size you expect to be in twelve months. That total is your real Shopify website cost for the first year, and it’s the number to weigh against what the site has to earn.

If that list has things on it no theme can do, a custom build is probably your row. Our custom Shopify theme development page shows what the build includes and how the project runs, and you can start there with a free Growth Audit.