September 20, 2026 by Victoria Garland · 8 min read

Shopify vs Shopify Plus: Pricing, Features and the Break-Even Point

Most articles comparing Shopify and Shopify Plus are written to sell you Plus. We build on both, and about half the time a brand asks us whether it should upgrade, the honest answer is “not yet”. This guide covers what each plan costs today, what Plus really adds, and how to find the revenue point where it pays for itself, with a calculator you can run on your own numbers.

The Short Answer

Stay on standard Shopify. That is the right call if your store runs on themes and App Store apps, you sell from one store, and your checkout works as it ships. That describes most brands under a few million dollars a year.

Move to Plus. Do it when you hit a wall that only Plus removes: you need to change the checkout itself, run several stores under one organization, build custom discount or shipping logic as your own Functions, or run wholesale at a level the standard B2B features don’t reach. At that point the platform fee is a small line item next to what the limitation is costing you.

The card-rate saving on its own rarely justifies the jump. The rest of this post shows why.

What Is Shopify?

“Shopify” in this comparison means the three standard plans: Basic, Grow (the plan that used to be called “Shopify”) and Advanced. They run on the same platform as Plus, with the same themes, the same admin, the same App Store and the same checkout. What changes as you move up is the card rate, the number of staff accounts, reporting depth and shipping features.

What Is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is the enterprise tier. It is the same core platform with the restrictions lifted: you can customize the checkout, run expansion stores, build private Functions, and get higher API limits and organization-level admin. It is sold on a one-year or three-year contract instead of month to month.

It is not a different product and moving to it is not a replatform. Your store, theme, apps and URLs stay put.

Pricing: Shopify vs Shopify Plus

Prices below are Shopify’s list prices as we checked them in September 2026. Shopify adjusts these from time to time, so confirm on Shopify’s pricing page before you budget.

In Canadian Dollars

In US Dollars

Three things the tables don’t show.

Plus pricing is negotiated. The list price is where the conversation starts. The card rate in particular moves with your volume and your industry, so the number that matters is the one on your quote.

High-volume stores pay a percentage instead. Once revenue is large enough, Plus switches from the flat fee to a variable fee based on revenue. For budgeting, assume the flat fee holds until roughly US$575,000 a month in sales and a fraction of a percent of revenue applies after that.

The platform fee is the smaller part of the cost. Plus includes your main store and nine expansion stores, but nobody upgrades to leave the features unused. Budget for the checkout work, the B2B setup or the second store that prompted the move. That project is usually several times the first year’s fee difference.

Find Your Break-Even Point

The cost question comes down to one trade: Plus charges a higher fixed fee and a lower card rate. Somewhere on the revenue curve, the rate saving covers the fee. Enter your orders, average order value and the rates from your own Plus quote, and the chart shows where that happens. The calculator’s built-in plan prices are US list prices, so if you think in Canadian dollars, keep the comparison in one currency by entering your average order value in US dollars too.

Run it with the list prices and you will see why we tell people the card rate alone is a weak reason to upgrade. Against Advanced on annual billing, the gap in platform fees is about CA$3,000 a month and the rate difference is a quarter of a percentage point. It takes well over a million dollars a month in card sales for a quarter point to cover CA$3,000. Against Grow the crossover comes sooner, but a store doing that volume on Grow should be comparing Advanced first.

So if the cost case is what you are hoping will justify Plus, it probably won’t until you are large. What justifies it earlier is capability.

Features: What Plus Adds

Two corrections to things you will still read elsewhere.

B2B is no longer Plus-only. Shopify moved the core wholesale features down to every plan. If wholesale is your only reason for considering Plus, read our notes on Shopify B2B and wholesale first. Many brands can run it on the plan they already have.

Shopify Scripts are gone. Scripts used to be the headline Plus feature for custom discounts. They were retired in mid 2026 in favour of Functions, and Functions from App Store apps work on every plan. What stays exclusive to Plus is writing your own. If you are still carrying Scripts-era logic, our Functions migration walkthrough covers the move.

When Standard Shopify Is the Right Choice

• Your store is built from a theme and App Store apps, and nothing about the checkout is holding back sales.
• You sell in one or two markets from a single store. Shopify Markets handles multi-currency on every plan.
• Wholesale is a side channel that the core B2B features cover.
• You are under roughly CA$2 million a year. The fee would be a meaningful share of margin and the money does more work in ads, email or conversion improvements.
• You process through Shopify Payments, so the third-party gateway fee never applies.

A store in this position that feels constrained usually has a build problem, not a plan problem. A slow theme, a pile of overlapping apps or a missing integration will not improve on Plus. Custom development on the plan you have is the cheaper fix.

When Shopify Plus Makes Sense

• The checkout needs to change. Custom fields, delivery date pickers, gift options, B2B-specific steps, or upsells inside the checkout itself. This is the most common real trigger we see.
• You need more than one store. Separate stores for regions, brands or wholesale, with staff and reporting managed in one place.
• Your discount, shipping or payment logic is yours alone. When no app does what you need, a custom Function does, and that needs Plus.
• You use a third-party gateway at volume. Going from 0.6% to 0.2% on every order adds up far faster than the card rate difference. At CA$500,000 a month through an outside gateway, that gap alone is CA$2,000 a month.
• Integrations are hitting API limits. ERP, OMS and large catalog syncs run more reliably with Plus limits. If this is you, see how we approach Shopify integrations.
• Revenue is in the millions. At that level the fee is a small percentage of what flows through the store, and the restrictions cost more than the plan.

What Happens When You Upgrade

The upgrade itself is quiet. Shopify switches the plan on your existing store, so there is no data to move, no redirects to write and no ranking risk. You sign a term, your billing changes, and new options appear in the admin.

The work starts after that. A typical first ninety days on Plus looks like this: rebuild any checkout customizations as checkout extensions, move discount logic into Functions, set up the organization admin and staff permissions, then open the expansion store or B2B setup that motivated the move. Plan and scope that work before you sign, so the contract clock is not running while you figure out what to build.

If you are arriving on Plus from another platform, that is a different project. Our migration service covers moving from WooCommerce, Magento or BigCommerce straight onto Plus.

How to Decide

Write down the specific thing you cannot do today. If the answer is a feature in the Plus column above, get a quote from Shopify, run it through the calculator, and price the build alongside the fee. If the answer is vague, or it is “we feel like we’ve outgrown it”, stay where you are and fix the store.

We have been building on Shopify since 2012, on standard plans and on Plus, and we would sooner tell you to wait a year than sell you a contract you won’t use. If you want a second opinion on your numbers, our Shopify Plus agency page explains how we work, and our guide to what a Shopify Plus agency does covers how to pick one. Or tell us about your store and we will give you a straight answer.