Which Shopify Plan Should You Be On? The Arithmetic

Deciding which Shopify plan you should be on is presented as a judgement call, and it mostly is not. Three of the four upgrades resolve to one division, because every step up the ladder trades a fixed increase in subscription for exactly 0.2 percentage points off your card rate. Divide the first by the second and you have the revenue at which the swap pays for itself.

Below are those numbers, checked against the published rates on 20 September 2026, plus the handful of reasons that legitimately override them.

The rates the maths runs on

All figures assume annual billing where it exists, US standard cards, and Shopify Payments as the processor. Change any of those and the crossovers move, so run your own numbers if your situation differs — particularly if you take a lot of American Express or sell abroad, where the effective rate is materially higher.

Starter to Basic: about $1,143 a month

Plan gap $24, rate gap 2.1 points. $24 ÷ 0.021 = $1,143 in monthly sales. This is the one crossover that is not close, because the rate difference is enormous — 5% against 2.9% — and the plan difference is small. Cross it and Basic is cheaper while also giving you an actual storefront, which Starter cannot.

Basic to Grow: $25,000 a month

Plan gap $50, rate gap 0.2 points. $50 ÷ 0.002 = $25,000 in monthly card revenue. This is the crossover everybody gets wrong, and the error is expensive in both directions.

Take a store doing $4,000 a month across 80 orders. On Basic it pays $29 of plan, $116 of processing and $24 of per-order fees — $169. On Grow the same store pays $79, $108 and $24 — $211. Grow costs $42 a month more for an identical set of sales. You would need to be six times larger before the rate saving swallowed the subscription increase.

Grow to Advanced: $110,000 a month

Plan gap $220, rate gap 0.2 points again. $220 ÷ 0.002 = $110,000 in monthly card revenue. At that scale a merchant is usually being courted for a Plus conversation anyway, which is why Advanced is more often bought for its shipping capability than for its rate.

Advanced to Plus: not an arithmetic question

Plus starts around $2,300 a month against Advanced's $299. Even a generous quarter-point rate improvement would need roughly $800,000 a month in card revenue to cover a $2,000 subscription gap. Nobody sensible buys Plus on rate. They buy the contract: up to ten stores, unlimited staff, and checkout surfaces — payment customisation, delivery customisation, order routing — that non-Plus merchants simply cannot reach.

The three reasons to ignore all of this

Arithmetic answers the rate question. It does not answer the business question, and three operational needs legitimately justify upgrading early.

Staff accounts. Basic includes one login. Not one plus an owner — one. The day a second person needs to process refunds, you are either sharing a password on a system that moves money or you are paying for Grow. Grow's five accounts are worth $50 a month to almost any business with employees, and nobody should feel clever about staying on Basic instead.

Carrier-calculated shipping. Advanced is the lowest tier that quotes live carrier rates at checkout rather than rate tables you maintain. If you ship heavy, bulky or highly variable items, under-charging for postage will cost more than the plan gap long before $110,000 a month.

Shipping discounts and reporting. These improve up the ladder, and for a high-volume, low-margin catalogue the label savings alone can tip the decision.

Annual billing is a bigger lever than the tier

Before agonising over which tier, check which billing cycle you are on, because the saving there is larger than most upgrades are worth. Annual billing removes 25% from Basic, Grow and Advanced: $39 becomes $29, $105 becomes $79, $399 becomes $299.

On Basic that is $120 a year for a decision that takes one click. To put it in proportion, the entire rate advantage of moving from Basic to Grow is worth $8 a month at $4,000 of revenue — so committing to annual billing on your existing plan saves more than upgrading would, and costs less. The only argument against it is genuine uncertainty about whether you will still be trading in twelve months, which for a first-year store is a fair concern and for an established one usually is not.

What annual billing does not do is change your rate. Processing is charged identically either way, which is why a store with real volume should treat the billing cycle as a small, easy win rather than a strategy.

The upgrade nobody mentions: leaving your gateway

Before changing tier, check which processor you are on. If you are not using Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 2.0% on Basic, 1.0% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced or 0.2% on Plus, on top of your gateway's own fees. On a $4,000-a-month Basic store that is $80 a month — more than the entire Basic-to-Grow subscription gap, and it buys nothing at all.

Switching to Shopify Payments, where it is available to you, is almost always a bigger saving than any plan change you are contemplating. The full mechanics are in our guide to Shopify Payments and the gateway surcharge.

The short version

1. Under about $1,143 a month in sales: Starter, or reconsider the platform.
2. $1,143 to $25,000: Basic on annual billing, unless you need a second staff login.
3. Need more than one staff account at any revenue: Grow, booked as a staffing cost.
4. Past $25,000: Grow pays for itself on rate alone.
5. Need live carrier shipping rates, or past $110,000: Advanced.
6. Plus when the contract terms are the product you want.

Recheck this annually rather than monthly. Plan-hopping costs more in attention than it saves in fees, and Shopify's prices move often enough that last year's answer deserves a fresh division. The wider question of whether to be on the platform at all is covered in the full Shopify review.