Shopify Free Trial: 3 Days, Then $1 a Month, Then the Real Price

The Shopify free trial is three days long, needs no card to start, and is followed by an offer of $1 a month for three months on the plan you pick. That is the shelf tag as shopify.com/pricing printed it on 18 Oct 2026. From month four, the plan bills at its standard price: $39 a month for Basic, $105 for Grow and $399 for Advanced on monthly billing.

So the real first-year cost of a Shopify store is not $3. On Basic with monthly billing it is $354. This entry runs the till from day one to month twelve on each plan, lists what you cannot do until you pick a plan, and separates the real longer trials from the ones that only exist on coupon pages.

The offer as Shopify states it today

The pricing page and its FAQ, read on 18 Oct 2026, say three things about the trial. The free period is 3 days, with no credit card required. After it, "most plans start at just $1 per month for the first 3 months, then switch to standard monthly pricing." And the trial cannot be extended: the help centre's free-trial guide says so in one line.

The help centre adds the detail that changes how you should use those three days. The trial starts when you sign up, not when you start building. Sign up on a Friday evening to look around and the clock has mostly run by Monday.

Which plans the $1 months cover is stated by exclusion. The help centre's billing guide names Plus as a plan the promotion does not cover. Basic, Grow and Advanced are the plans the trial lets you test.

What the three free days and the $1 months include

During the three free days you get the full admin: products, collections, themes, settings, apps and payment setup. You can switch between Basic, Grow and Advanced while you look, and the help centre says the switch takes effect immediately with no charge until the trial ends.

The $1 months are not a trial. They are a paid plan at a promotional price, which means the store can take orders. Change tier during those months and Shopify bills a prorated amount at the promotional price, keeps the original promo end date, and charges the new plan's standard rate once the promotion ends.

One trap is easy to miss. Apps you install during the free days can carry their own charges, and the help centre says those land on your first invoice after the trial ends. A $1 month can arrive with a $30 app line beside it.

What you cannot do until you pick a plan

A trial store opens in private mode, or with checkout inactive. The free-trial guide gives two switches for letting customers buy, turning off private mode or activating checkout by choosing a paid plan, and it adds that taking orders at all needs a payment provider set up.

In practice, treat the free days as a build-and-look period. You cannot run a real sale, take a test order from a stranger, or put the store in front of an advertising budget. Plan to spend the three days on the work that decides whether Shopify fits: catalogue structure, theme choice and the checkout settings you care about. What can and cannot be changed in checkout is posted in our entry on Shopify's checkout limits.

Your first-year bill, month by month

The table posts the plan prices we read on 18 Oct 2026. Monthly billing is the price the promotion rolls onto. The annual column needs a warning on the shelf: on 18 Oct the page showed Grow at $89 and Advanced at $359 a month on yearly billing, while the same page showed $79 and $299 earlier in October, and a pricing tracker has logged the two figures flipping back and forth. Treat those two annual figures as unsettled and read them again at checkout.

The arithmetic is plain: three $1 months, then nine months at the monthly price. On Basic that is $3 plus 9 × $39. The promotion saves $114 against twelve full months of Basic at $39, which is real money, but it is a discount on a quarter of the first year, not on the year.

If you move to annual billing during the promotion, the help centre says the change takes effect when the promotion ends: you keep paying $1 a month, then the full annual amount is charged up front. On Basic that is $348 at month four, for twelve months of service from that date.

Card processing is outside all of these totals. On Basic, Shopify Payments takes 2.9% plus 30 cents on each standard online card (pricing page, 18 Oct 2026), and every sale pays it from the first order onward.

Card, eligibility and countries

The three free days need an email address and no card. Choosing a plan for the $1 months is when billing details come in, because from that point you are a paying customer at a promotional price.

The help centre says trial length and promotional pricing "are subject to change and might vary by store location", and that what you get is set by when you create the account. That is the honest answer to the trial-length questions people search: the offer you see on the signup page on the day you sign up is the one that applies to you.

Shopify also advertises a credits programme on the same page, described as 1% of sales back as subscription credits, capped at up to $5,000, $7,500 or $10,000 depending on plan. We could not read its terms on 18 Oct 2026, so it is left out of the arithmetic above.

Cancelling before you are charged full price

The exit depends on whether you have chosen a plan.

• No plan chosen yet. Nothing to do. The help centre says the account is frozen at the end of the trial, and the store is paused until you pick a plan.
• Plan chosen, still in the free days. You have to deactivate the store yourself to avoid the plan charge. Choosing a plan early does not shorten the trial, but it does mean the charge will come unless you cancel.
• In the $1 months. You can deactivate at any time. Shopify states that charges from the promotional period are not refundable, and any outstanding balance is charged on cancellation.

Pause and Build, the cheaper holding plan, is not an option during the free trial: the help centre lists being past the trial and on a paid plan as requirements. Shopify's refund rule for subscriptions is strict across the board; the deactivation guide points to its terms of service, which allow no refunds on plan fees.

Is a longer trial real?

Partly. Searches for 90-day and 120-day Shopify trials are mostly describing the $1 months, which add up to about 90 days at $3 in total. They are a paid promotion, not a free trial, and the store can sell during them.

There is one genuinely longer free trial in Shopify's own documentation. Stores created with an AI tool, such as the Stripe Projects command-line tool, or through a vibe-coding partner, start with a free trial that the help centre puts at 4 months as of 18 Oct 2026. That applies to stores created that way, and the same page notes that some of them start directly on a paid plan instead.

Anything else, such as a code that extends the standard trial, runs into Shopify's own sentence: it is not possible to extend the duration of the free trial period.

Using the trial well

Three days is short, so arrive with the catalogue ready. Load real products, pick a theme, set up payments and shipping, and decide your plan before day three. If you then take the $1 months, you are paying $1 to test the store with real orders, which is the most useful thing the promotion buys.

Before you choose a tier, run the tier crossover division, and price the app stack you are about to install with what Shopify apps actually cost. The full verdict on the platform is in our Shopify review. When you are ready to start the clock, you can open a Shopify trial here.