Shopify advertises a €29/month plan and lets you believe that's what your store will cost. By the time you hit €50k in annual revenue, you're paying somewhere between €2,400 and €4,200 per year — to a platform you don't own. Over three years and growing revenue, that's the price of a custom store you'd actually own.
This article isn't an opinion piece. It's the arithmetic.
The advertised price vs. the real bill
Shopify Basic is €29/month — €348/year. That's the headline. Here's what gets added before checkout works:
- Transaction fees — 2% on every sale if you use any payment provider other than Shopify Payments. Even with Shopify Payments, processing fees (1.5–2.9% + €0.25) apply, and you pay a 0.5–1% surcharge on Plus plans.
- Apps — almost no real Shopify store runs without paid apps. Email (Klaviyo: €45+/mo), reviews (Judge.me: €15/mo), upsell (ReConvert: €30/mo), advanced shipping (€20/mo), custom fields (€10/mo). A typical store runs €100–€250/month in apps.
- Theme premium features — anything beyond a basic theme means custom Liquid work. Even small changes cost €500–€2,000 per change at agency rates.
- Multi-language / multi-currency — Shopify Markets is included on Basic but real multilingual UX needs an app (Langify, Weglot: €15–€50/mo).
- Email marketing volume tier — Klaviyo pricing scales with contact list size. Past 10k contacts you're looking at €250+/month.
The actual three-year bill at €50k annual revenue
Conservative scenario: €50k/year revenue, modest app stack, no Plus plan.
Three-year total: €10,144.
That's a conservative estimate. At €100k revenue, transaction fees double. At €200k revenue, you're usually pushed into Shopify Plus at €2,300/month minimum, plus 0.4% Plus fees.
Compared with a self-hosted headless store
For the same €50k store, here's what the headless alternative looks like:
Three-year total: €2,450.
Difference: €7,694 over three years. That gap widens as your revenue grows, because the headless side stays flat while Shopify's side scales with sales.
For a full apples-to-apples comparison with WooCommerce, Wix, and Webflow, see the full platform comparison →
The four hidden costs nobody calculates
Beyond the line items above, four costs hide in the Shopify model:
1. The app tax compounds. Every new feature you want = new app = new monthly fee. After two years, most audited Shopify stores are paying for 12–18 apps. Half of them duplicate functionality that should be native.
2. Theme lock-in is real. Shopify themes use Liquid, a templating language you cannot use anywhere else. When you eventually migrate, you start the front-end from scratch. Industry quotes for Shopify-to-headless migrations typically land in the €8,000–€15,000 range specifically because of this. Here's why that lock-in costs even more when you sell the business →
3. Customer data sits inside Shopify's vault. Your email list, your order history, your customer segments — Shopify lets you export some of it. The behavioural data (browsing, cart abandonment patterns, attribution paths) is largely inaccessible to you. The day you migrate, you lose it.
4. Performance costs you ads ROI. Shopify themes typically Lighthouse-score around 70 on mobile. That's roughly 25% slower than a tuned headless build. Slow pages cost conversions, which cost ad ROAS, which costs ad budget. On a €5k/month ad spend, a 10% conversion lift from page speed is €6,000/year in recovered revenue. That number isn't on any pricing page.
When Shopify still makes sense
I'm not anti-Shopify. For stores under €30k/year revenue with no developer relationship, Shopify Basic is genuinely the right call — the simplicity dominates the cost calculation. The cliff comes at scale, when the percentage-based costs start to eat real money.
What to do if you're already on Shopify
If you're on Shopify today and the numbers above make you uncomfortable, you have three paths:
- Stay and optimise — switch to Shopify Payments (drops the 2% fee), audit and cut redundant apps, upgrade theme to a faster modern one. Realistic savings: 15–25%.
- Move to WooCommerce — cheaper monthly, but you trade subscription cost for plugin maintenance burden. Often a lateral move.
- Move to headless — biggest upfront cost, biggest long-term saving, and no platform lock-in at the next migration. The migration service I run starts at €1,200 →
FAQ
Is Shopify Plus worth it at higher revenue? Past €1M/year, Plus features (B2B, multi-store, checkout customisation, dedicated support) start to justify the €2,300/month floor. Below that, you're paying for capacity you don't need.
Can I really avoid Shopify's 2% transaction fee? Yes — by using Shopify Payments instead of an external processor. But Shopify Payments isn't available in every country and isn't always the best rate for your bank. Many EU merchants pay the 2% because Shopify Payments doesn't fit.
What about Shopify's free trial and €1/month promotions? They're real but they end. After 3 months you're at full price, and the trial doesn't include the apps you'll need to make the store actually function.
How long does it take to migrate from Shopify? A standard 200-product store with a custom design migrates to headless in 3–5 weeks, including SEO redirect mapping, customer data import, and analytics history preservation.
Next steps
If your annual revenue is over €60k and growing, the math on Shopify versus self-hosted stops being a debate and starts being arithmetic. The migration service → handles the full move including 301 redirects, customer data, and analytics history. Send your domain — I'll come back with a fixed quote within 24 hours.