Shopify's pricing looks simple until you add up the whole stack. There is a monthly subscription, per-transaction card fees, a penalty if you use your own payment gateway, and a surcharge on international cards. Sellers who budget on the headline “2.9% + 30¢” alone routinely miss half of what they are actually paying. Here is every layer, at rates published October 2026, with the math that tells you which plan to be on.
Start with the subscription, because it is the only fee you pay before a single sale. Basic is $39/month ($29/month on annual billing), Grow is $105/month ($79 annual), Advanced is $399/month ($299 annual), and Plus starts around $2,300/month. Choosing a tier is mostly a volume math problem: moving from Basic to Grow costs $66 more per month and buys 0.2 percentage points off the card rate (2.9% down to 2.7%). Divide $66 by 0.002 and you get $33,000/month in sales — below that, Basic is cheaper; above it, Grow pays for itself. The same logic prices the Grow-to-Advanced jump at about $147,000/month. The extra features are real, but the card-rate savings are what fund them.
The card rates themselves, with Shopify Payments, are where the per-order money goes. Basic: 2.9% + $0.30 per online transaction. Grow: 2.7% + $0.30. Advanced: 2.5% + $0.30. Notice the fixed 30 cents: on a $10 order it adds a full 3% before the percentage even starts, while on a $100 order it is a negligible 0.3%. Low-price stores feel the fixed fee far more than the percentage — this is the structural reason selling $5 items on Shopify is brutally hard. In-person sales through Shopify POS run 2.6% + $0.10 on Basic, and any card from outside your home country adds 1% on top of the base rate.
Then there is the fee sellers discover too late: the third-party gateway penalty. If you process payments through your own gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, or 0.6% on Advanced — and that is on top of whatever the gateway itself charges you. Take a $55 order on Basic routed through an outside gateway: the gateway takes roughly 2.9% + $0.30 (about $1.90) and Shopify takes another 2% ($1.10) for the privilege of not using its payments. The identical order through Shopify Payments costs $1.90 total. On tight margins, that penalty alone can erase your profit.
Full worked example: you sell a $50 item, the buyer pays $5 shipping, domestic US card, Basic plan with Shopify Payments. The fee base is the $55 total the buyer paid: 2.9% × $55 = $1.60, plus the $0.30 fixed fee = $1.90. Fees ate 3.45% of the order — roughly half a point above the headline rate, because the fixed cents do not scale with price. The $39 subscription lives outside per-order math: at 200 orders a month it is $0.20 per order, at 20 orders it is $1.95 per order. For early-stage stores the subscription is the bigger lever — which makes annual billing ($29/month on Basic) one of the cheapest optimizations available.
Three situational costs to fold into your sheet. First, international cards: the extra 1% turns that $55 example into $2.45 when the buyer is outside the US — a $0.55 difference that matters at scale on cross-border stores. Second, paid apps: not a Shopify fee, but the average store runs several, and they belong in the same cost column or your “fees” number will lie to you. Third, plan changes: Shopify adjusts its schedule periodically, and every adjustment changes your per-product math — keep each product's net profit per sale at current rates in a simple sheet rather than trusting last year's spreadsheet.
Two closing disciplines. First, match the plan to your volume using the break-even math above, not the feature list — most stores under $33,000/month are cheapest on Basic, and upgrading early just buys a bigger subscription. Second, recompute the stack per product whenever anything changes: price, plan, gateway, or buyer geography all move the number. The Shopify Fee Calculator runs the subscription, card rate, gateway penalty, and international surcharge from your inputs, and the Shopify Profit Calculator subtracts your product costs too, so you see the real net per sale before you price it.