What Shopify Actually Costs, Market by Market

Ask what Shopify costs and you'll usually get the American answer: $39 a month and 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction. That answer is correct in exactly one country. Everywhere else, the subscription is different, the processing rates are different, the payment methods your customers actually use are priced differently, and sometimes even the currency your invoice arrives in is a surprise.

We spent this week verifying Shopify's published pricing for 24 markets, straight from Shopify's own pricing pages, and built a fee calculator around the results. Along the way we found enough oddities that they deserved writing up. If you sell in one of these markets, some of these will change how you think about your margins.

The three costs everyone mixes up

Every Shopify store pays up to three separate things, and most fee conversations blur them together.

The subscription is the fixed monthly fee, and it only matters in proportion to your volume. At 50 orders a month, a Basic plan works out to a meaningful cost per order. At 500, it's a rounding error, and the processing rate is everything.

Payment processing is the percentage plus a fixed fee on every sale. This is where markets differ wildly, and where the plan you choose actually changes your unit economics: higher plans carry lower rates in every market we checked.

The third-party transaction fee is the one that surprises people: if you process payments through anything other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own charge on top of your gateway's, from 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus. In every market where Shopify Payments is available, that fee alone usually settles the which-gateway argument.

What this is not: total cost of ownership

Worth being straight about scope before the numbers. Everything above, and everything in the calculator, covers what Shopify itself charges you. That is not what your store costs to run.

A real total cost of ownership includes the apps (most stores we audit run five to ten paid ones, and the subscriptions quietly climb past the Shopify plan itself), the theme or the build, the email and SMS platform, reviews and loyalty tools, product photography and ad creative, currency conversion when you sell across borders, chargebacks, shipping and packaging and the returns nobody budgets for, and the hours someone on your team spends maintaining all of it. Depending on the store, the Shopify line item can be one of the smaller numbers on that list.

We are planning a separate piece on what a genuine total cost of ownership looks like for an ecommerce site, because almost nobody prices it honestly before they build. This article and the calculator handle one layer of it properly: the platform fees. Keep the two questions separate and both get easier to answer.

The strangest things we found, by country

The UAE bills you in dollars. Shopify's UAE plans are priced in USD ($32, $92, $399), while your processing fees settle in dirhams. Because the dirham is pegged at 3.67, the maths is stable, but plenty of merchants here have set up budgets in AED and then wondered why the card statement disagrees. Shopify Payments in the UAE is also still in early access, online only, with payouts taking at least five business days. Full detail on the UAE page.

Italy has the widest foreign-card penalty we've seen anywhere. A domestic card costs an Italian store 1.9% on Basic. A card issued abroad, or any Amex, costs 3.6%. On a €60 order that's €1.39 against €2.41 in fees, nearly double, on the same plan for the same product. An Italian store doing meaningful export volume should model those orders separately or the margin picture flatters itself. See Italy.

Belgium's Bancontact is nearly free. Shopify prices Belgium's dominant debit scheme at a flat €0.39 per transaction with no percentage at all. On a €45 order, that's €0.39 through Bancontact against €1.69 for an international card. For a Belgium-facing store, the checkout mix moves margin more than the plan choice does. See Belgium.

Denmark's MobilePay undercuts cards. Local wallets usually cost more than cards; in Denmark it's the opposite. MobilePay runs at 1.6% plus 1 kr on Basic against 1.9% plus 1.80 kr for a standard card, roughly 23% cheaper on a 300 kr order. Since MobilePay is the wallet most Danish shoppers reach for anyway, this is free margin. See Denmark.

Sweden's Swish is locked behind Plus. The payment method most Swedish shoppers expect at checkout is only available through Shopify Payments on the Plus plan. Merchants moving from local platforms find this out late. Klarna covers part of the gap at a flat 2.99%. See Sweden.

Spain's annual discount is the deepest. Most markets knock roughly a quarter off for annual billing. Spain's Basic plan drops from €32 to €22, over 30%. If a Spanish store is staying on Shopify, annual billing is the first saving worth taking. See Spain.

A worked example: 200 orders a month in the UAE

Take a UAE store selling at AED 150, doing 200 orders a month on the Grow plan billed annually (AED 253 a month at the peg).

A domestic card order costs 2.8% plus AED 1.00 in processing, which is AED 5.20. The plan fee spread across 200 orders adds AED 1.27. Total: AED 6.47 per order, or 4.3% of the sale.

The same order paid with a foreign card runs at 3.8%, so AED 6.70 in processing and AED 7.97 all in, 5.3% of the sale. If a third of your customers pay with international cards, and in the UAE many do, your blended rate is meaningfully higher than the headline number you planned around.

That is the whole reason the calculator exists: it runs your actual price, volume, plan and payment mix through each market's real rates, then shows net profit per order, break-even price and how much you can spend on ads before an order loses money.

Why so many fee calculators are quietly wrong

Here's the trap we fell into and climbed back out of. Shopify's pricing pages come in two kinds. Most markets pin their local pricing: Norway shows kroner and Poland shows zloty no matter where you browse from. But a handful, including Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Spain, render whatever currency matches the visitor's location. Browse the Italian pricing page from London and you'll see British pounds and UK rates presented as if they were Italian.

Which means any fee tool built by scraping those pages from one country is publishing that country's rates under everyone else's flag. We verified the four visitor-relative markets from local connections rather than guessing, and every one of them turned out to differ from what a remote fetch showed. If you're comparing fee numbers across sites and they disagree, this is usually why.

The honest caveat cuts both ways: Shopify adjusts pricing from time to time. Every country page in our calculator shows the date its rates were last verified against Shopify's own published figures, and if you spot something that's drifted, tell us and we'll fix it the same day.

What to do with all this

If you're already selling: check your own market's page and put your real payment mix into the calculator. Most merchants know their processing rate but have never worked out their blended rate across domestic cards, foreign cards and local methods, and that blend is the number that decides whether your ad spend maths is honest.

If you're choosing a plan: ignore the subscription until you've done the volume maths. The rate difference between plans repays the higher subscription at a specific order count, different in every market, and the calculator finds that crossover for you.

And if you're selling into one of the markets above, the local payment method question deserves ten minutes of your attention. In Belgium and Denmark especially, the difference between a good and bad checkout mix is bigger than the difference between any two plans.

Open the Shopify fee calculator and pick your market. Twenty-four countries, every rate sourced and dated.