Shopify pricing in the UK 2026: what Basic, Grow and Advanced really cost once the card fees are in

Every guide to this question publishes the same table of monthly fees, and the fee is the part of the bill that matters least. Shopify charges in two places: a subscription you can see on the pricing page, and a percentage of every sale you take. The first is fixed whatever happens. The second grows with the shop, and it is the one that decides which plan is cheapest for you.

The monthly figure quoted for the yearly option is a year divided by twelve, paid up front. It is not an amount you pay each month, and cancelling halfway does not turn it into one.

That third card is the one worth sitting with, because it is specific to selling from the UK. A shop in Manchester that sends a third of its orders to Ireland, France or Germany is not paying 2% plus 25p on that third: Shopify classifies those as international transactions and charges the international rate for the region. It publishes that rate on the same page, one row under the headline one: 3.1% + 25p on Basic, 2.7% on Grow and 2.5% on Advanced, the same it charges for American Express. On Basic that is 1.1 points more per sale, so on £10,000 of card takings with a third of them from the EU the gap is about £37 a month, more than the £30 step from Basic to Grow. Put those orders in their own box in the calculator above instead of pricing the whole month at 2%.

This is the question people actually type, and it has an exact answer that no plan comparison bothers to work out. Take a single £100 order paid by card through Shopify Payments, at the rates read on 17 September 2026:

So the saving from moving up a plan is 30p on a £100 sale going from Basic to Grow, and 20p more going from Grow to Advanced. Now put that against the fee. On the yearly option, Grow costs £30 a month more than Basic. Thirty pounds divided by thirty pence is the whole answer:

Grow starts to pay for itself at about a hundred £100 sales a month, or roughly £10,000 of card takings. Below that, Basic is cheaper however the feature list reads. The same sum on the next step is harsher: Advanced costs about £210 a month more than Grow on the yearly option, and saves 20p a sale, so it needs somewhere near a thousand sales of that size before the rate alone earns it.

And the caveat that matters more than the arithmetic: this is the answer for a shop whose only reason to move is money. Basic includes no staff logins at all, so a shop with two people in the admin moves to Grow at any level of sales, and the sums above never enter into it.

One example changes the comparison entirely: a shop with modest sales and two people who both need access to the admin. On the sums above, Basic wins on cost by a distance. On staff logins it is not an option at all, because Basic includes none. That shop is on Grow from day one, and the card rate is a consolation rather than a reason.

The reverse case is just as common. Take a single-handed shop turning over £3,000 a month in thirty card sales of £100. On Basic that is 2% of £3,000 plus thirty lots of 25p, so £67.50 in card fees. On Grow the same month costs £58.50, a saving of £9 against an extra £30 of monthly fee. We would stay on Basic there and look again when takings pass five figures.

The hundred-sales threshold assumes every payment goes through Shopify Payments on a UK card. Change that assumption and the threshold moves a long way, in both directions.

The UK pricing page advertises the same offer on all three standard plans: three days free, then £1 a month for three months. It is a genuine offer and it is a good way to build a shop without paying for the months when it is not selling anything. It is also the single most common reason people are surprised by a Shopify bill.

The arithmetic is worth writing down once. Three months at £1 is £3. In the fourth month, the plan you chose starts charging what it actually costs: £25, £65 or £344 billed monthly. If you spent the offer period building rather than selling, the first real bill and the first real sales can arrive in different weeks, and that is the gap to plan for.

We would keep those four in separate lines on a single sheet rather than reaching for one monthly number, because they answer different questions. The fixed side tells you what a bad month costs. The variable side tells you what a good month costs. A shop that only knows the sum of the two cannot tell which of the two it needs to fix.