The real cost of a Shopify store in the UK (2026)

Shopify's UK pricing page says £25 a month, and that number is true the way a car's list price is true. The store you actually run costs more (sometimes a little, often a lot) and the difference comes from three places the pricing page does not dwell on: gateway surcharges, the app stack, and staff-account limits that quietly decide which plan you are allowed to be on. Here is the itemised version, against published prices checked on 10 June 2026, with a note on when to make the move. Disclosure first: we build Orbit Commerce, and it comes up in the comparison below.

The plans themselves

Shopify's standard UK plans are Basic at £25 a month, Grow at £65 and Advanced at £344, or £19, £49 and £259 a month if you pay for the year up front. Above them sits Shopify Plus from around £1,800 a month, which matters even if you never buy it, because that is where checkout customisation lives: on the standard plans, the core checkout steps are not yours to change.

The first hidden cost is not a price but a limit: Basic includes no staff accounts at all. The £25 plan is for an owner working alone. The moment you hire someone who needs their own login, you are a £65-a-month business regardless of whether you wanted anything else Grow offers. Grow includes 5 staff accounts and Advanced 15, so a growing team can find itself climbing plans for seats rather than features.

Card fees, and the surcharge in the small print

The headline UK online card rates are reasonable: 2% + 25p on Basic, 1.7% + 25p on Grow, 1.5% + 25p on Advanced. (Tier for tier, those are identical to Orbit's published rates for UK personal cards, so the headline numbers decide nothing.)

The small print is what it costs to use anyone else. Take payments through any gateway other than Shopify Payments and Shopify adds a surcharge of 2% of every order on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced: on top of whatever that gateway charges you itself. On £5,000 a month of sales, a Basic store using a third-party gateway hands over an extra £100 a month for the privilege of routing its own payments. If you are happy inside Shopify Payments you will never see this line; if you ever have a reason to leave it (a specific provider, a niche payment method) it becomes one of the largest items on the bill. For what Stripe, PayPal and Square charge in their own right, see what it really costs to take payments on a UK online shop.

The app stack

Shopify ships a capable core and sells much of the rest through its app store. Subscriptions are the clearest example: selling on a recurring basis means installing a subscription app, and some of them add per-order fees. Features in the same family, the things most growing stores eventually want, follow the same pattern, and the costs stack monthly.

In practice, a lean app stack adds £40–£100 a month, and established merchants commonly report more than £150 a month in apps alone. Add a paid theme at $100–$450 (one-off, at least) and the £25 store is gone. None of these apps is a scam, most are good software, but they are part of the real monthly cost, and they do not appear anywhere on the pricing page you compared platforms with. If you dropship, our guide to dropshipping in the UK without Shopify adds up that app stack for a dropshipping shop.

The same shop on a flat plan

Here is a worked example we keep coming back to: £5,000 a month in sales, roughly 200 orders, a small team, selling subscriptions.

On Shopify, Basic will not do because of the staff-account rule, so the shop sits on Grow at £49 a month billed yearly. A subscriptions app adds around £78 a month plus its per-order fees, and card fees at 1.7% + 25p come to about £135. Total: about £262 a month before any other apps.

The same shop on Orbit's Team plan, billed yearly, is £64 a month: with 10 staff accounts, subscription plans, gift cards, abandoned-cart recovery and reporting included in the plan. Card fees at the same 1.7% + 25p are the same £135. Total: £199 a month. Roughly £750 a year of difference, on a shop this size, before counting any further apps, and the gap widens at the top end, where Advanced is £344 against Pro at £249.

Costs are not the only ceiling worth knowing about, while you are comparing. Shopify caps each product at 250 media items and three options, and those limits arrive without warning the day your catalogue gets serious. Orbit takes up to 2,000 media files on a product (and your library is bounded by your plan's storage, from 100GB on Solo up to 1TB), which is a strange thing to discover you care about until the day you do.

When to make the move

Timing matters as much as the sum. If you are in your busiest weeks of the year, move once they are over. If you have paid ahead on a yearly Shopify plan with plenty of it left to run, rehearse the move on Orbit's 14-day trial now and switch when the renewal comes round.

Costing your own shop

The exercise that actually settles this takes twenty minutes. Count the people who need logins, and find the cheapest plan that seats them. List every app you would pay for, with the real tier you would need, not the free tier you would outgrow. Check whether you would use Shopify Payments or pay the surcharge. Then put your monthly order count and average order value through the card rates. That number, not the £25, is what the store costs, and it is the only fair number to compare anything against.

Orbit's side of that comparison is short by design: Solo at £25, Team at £85, Pro at £249, a 14-day trial with no card required, unlimited products on every plan, and subscription plans, gift cards and cart recovery in the plan rather than on the app bill. Card rates published for every plan and card type, with no surcharges layered on top. The full feature-by-feature version is on the Orbit vs Shopify page. Run your own shop's numbers through both columns and let the spreadsheet pick, and if it picks the move, the migration guide covers the whole job step by step.