Shopify plan break-even calculator

A higher Shopify plan costs more every month and charges less on every sale — which means there's exactly one sales volume where the two effects cancel out. Below it, the cheaper plan wins outright. Above it, the lower rate saves more than the higher subscription costs. This finds that number for your actual numbers, not a generic example.

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Below the break-even volume, the lower subscription cost of the current plan wins outright, since there isn't enough sales volume for the rate difference to matter. Above it, the accumulated rate savings on every sale outweigh the higher subscription price, and the upgrade pays for itself and then some. The crossover point is the only number that actually answers "should I upgrade" — the subscription price comparison alone can't.

This is exactly the same shape of question as any other break-even calculation — a fixed cost that has to be covered before a per-unit saving turns into a net benefit — just applied to a software subscription decision instead of a product launch or a hiring decision. The math doesn't change; only what counts as the fixed cost and the per-unit rate does.

Four standard tiers make up the 2026 lineup, each raising the subscription cost and lowering the online processing rate as you move up.

Grow is shown with an approximate cost because Shopify renamed this tier from simply "Shopify" to "Grow" during 2026, and sources published across that transition don't fully agree on the exact current monthly figure — the rate structure (2.7% + $0.30) is consistently reported, but the subscription price is worth confirming directly on Shopify's own pricing page or in your account before making a decision. Every plan-cost field in the calculator above is fully editable for exactly this reason — treat the defaults as a starting point, not a guarantee.

One detail holds constant across every standard tier: the $0.30 flat per-transaction fee for online Shopify Payments never changes. Upgrading only ever lowers the percentage portion of the rate, never the flat portion — which is part of why the break-even formula above only needs the rate spread, not the flat fee, to find the crossover volume.

In-person rates, for stores running Shopify POS, follow the same downward pattern as online rates but sit lower across the board, since card-present transactions carry less fraud risk than card-not-present ones.

A store doing meaningful in-person volume through Shopify POS should blend the two rates by revenue mix rather than using the online-only figures by default — a shop doing half its sales in-store and half online effectively faces a rate roughly halfway between the two columns above, which changes the break-even volume calculated from it.

Plus sits apart from the other three tiers structurally, not just on price. Below roughly $1M in annual GMV, Plus rarely makes sense regardless of the fee math, since its flat monthly cost alone dwarfs what Advanced would cost at that volume. Above that range, some Plus contracts shift from a flat monthly fee to a variable fee of roughly 0.35-0.40% of direct-to-consumer sales once volume exceeds a base threshold — a genuinely different pricing model from the flat-subscription structure the break-even formula above assumes, and one that needs its own separate calculation against a merchant's actual negotiated contract terms rather than the generic figures used here.

Shopify's cost structure is fundamentally different from a marketplace like Etsy or Amazon, not just cheaper or more expensive — it charges a fixed monthly subscription plus a processing fee, with no referral fee or marketplace commission on the sale itself.

On a like-for-like $30 sale, Shopify's combined processing fee comes to roughly $1.17 — about 3.9% of the sale — versus the $3.30 Etsy's full fee stack takes on the same sale in the Etsy fee calculator worked example, or the 15%+ referral fee alone that Amazon charges before any FBA fulfillment cost is added. The trade-off is real, not free: Etsy and Amazon supply built-in buyer traffic that a Shopify store has to generate itself, usually through paid ads or SEO that cost money Shopify's lower per-sale fee doesn't include. The lower percentage take is the reward for doing the marketing yourself rather than paying a marketplace to do it, not a straightforward discount on the identical product.

Stores using PayPal, Stripe, or another processor instead of Shopify Payments face a second cost layer the break-even formula above doesn't capture on its own: a surcharge Shopify adds on top of whatever the external processor already charges — roughly 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, and 0.15% on Plus.

A store running $10,000/month through an external gateway on Basic pays $10,000 × 2% = $200/month in surcharge alone, on top of whatever PayPal or Stripe itself charges. The same $10,000/month on Grow costs $10,000 × 1% = $100/month in surcharge — a $100/month saving that exists independently of the rate-only break-even calculated above, and one that can justify an upgrade well before the Shopify Payments volume alone would.

The surcharge drops fast across tiers, and every step up shrinks it further even as the base processing rate improvement (2.9% → 2.7% → 2.5%) grows smaller. A store doing significant volume through PayPal specifically — rather than Shopify Payments — often clears the case for upgrading well before the Shopify-Payments-only break-even volume would suggest on its own, since this surcharge stacks on top of, not instead of, whatever the external processor is already charging.

A store with meaningful external-gateway volume should treat the break-even formula above as a floor, not the full picture — running the external-gateway surcharge savings as a separate calculation and adding it to the rate-based savings gives the complete upgrade case, which is often stronger than the Shopify Payments math alone suggests.

Annual billing lowers both plans' subscription cost by a similar proportion — typically 20-25% — which shifts the crossover volume without changing the basic shape of the decision.

Take Basic at $29/month (annual) against Grow at roughly $79/month (annual), the same 2.9%-versus-2.7% rate spread as before. Break-even volume: ($79 − $29) ÷ ((2.9% − 2.7%) ÷ 100) = $50 ÷ 0.002 = $25,000/month — noticeably lower than the $33,000/month break-even on monthly billing. Because annual billing shrinks the dollar gap between the two subscription costs ($66/month on monthly billing versus $50/month on annual) while the rate spread stays exactly the same, a smaller sales volume is now enough to make the rate savings outweigh the smaller subscription difference.

The practical takeaway: a store already committed to annual billing should run the break-even calculation with its actual annual-billed costs, not the monthly sticker prices, since using the wrong pair of numbers overstates how much sales volume is needed to justify the upgrade. The calculator above accepts either figure directly in the plan-cost fields — whichever matches how the store is actually billed is the correct one to enter.

There's one wrinkle worth flagging: annual billing locks in the subscription cost for a full year, which removes the flexibility to downgrade quickly if volume drops after committing to the higher tier. A store weighing annual billing on a plan it just upgraded to should have reasonable confidence the higher volume is sustained, not a one-quarter spike, before trading monthly flexibility for the annual discount.

Crossing the break-even volume is necessary but not sufficient on its own — a few situations make the math technically favorable while the upgrade still isn't the right call yet.

The "barely past the line" case is worth seeing in real numbers. At $33,500/month — just $500 above the $33,000 break-even calculated earlier — Basic costs $39 + ($33,500 × 2.9%) = $1,010.50, and Grow costs $105 + ($33,500 × 2.7%) = $1,009.50. Upgrading saves exactly $1.00 a month. A single slower week that drops volume back under $33,000 flips that trivial saving into a real loss, which is why treating the break-even line as a hard trigger, rather than a threshold to clear with room to spare, tends to produce upgrades that don't hold up past the first quiet month.

The same formula runs cleanly in reverse for a downgrade check. A store that scaled onto Grow during a strong season at $50,000/month has since settled into a steady $15,000/month — well under the $33,000 break-even line. At that volume, Grow costs $105 + ($15,000 × 2.7%) = $510/month, while Basic would cost $39 + ($15,000 × 2.9%) = $474/month. Staying on Grow is quietly costing this store $36/month it doesn't need to spend, a gap that's easy to miss once a plan upgrade feels like a permanent, one-way decision rather than something worth re-checking after volume changes in either direction.

Run your own numbers above, free, or compare platform costs with the Etsy fee calculator.