Shopify vs Shopify Plus: when the upgrade pays off

Shopify Plus costs $2,300 a month on a three-year term or $2,500 on a one-year term. Advanced is $399 a month on monthly billing. The upgrade pays off when you need something only Plus does: custom UI in the information, shipping and payment steps of checkout, your own Shopify Functions, more than 3 B2B catalogs, or expansion stores.

What does each plan cost?

Shopify's pricing page lists Advanced at $399 a month on monthly billing and Plus "from $2,300". The Help Center page on the Plus plan gives the full terms by currency:

Those prices are for standard setups. The same Help Center page says more complex, higher-volume businesses may pay a variable platform fee based on revenue instead, with different rates for B2B and direct-to-consumer orders. Shopify doesn't publish that rate, so get a quote before you build a business case on the fixed price.

Plus is also a commitment. The pricing page FAQ says that on a one-year or three-year Plus subscription you can cancel when the term commitment expires, so treat it like a contract. The same FAQ notes that pricing can differ depending on where your business is based, so check the page for your own country before you compare.

What do you get on Plus that Advanced doesn't have?

Staff, locations, expansion stores, API limits and headless storefronts come from the comparison table on Shopify's pricing page. Plus also includes Launchpad for scheduling launches and promotions, 20 POS Pro locations, and unlimited staging stores, according to the Help Center page linked above.

The checkout rows matter most to shoppers. On Plus you can add your own fields, messages and upsells inside the information, shipping and payment steps, and go beyond the editor's styling with the Checkout Branding API. On the other plans, custom UI is limited to the Thank you and Order status pages.

Any store can install a public app that contains functions, so most discount, delivery and payment rules don't need Plus at all. For Functions, Plus matters when you want your own custom app for logic no public app covers, or a Cart Transform that changes line prices.

Some smaller Plus features decide it for particular businesses. If you sell made-to-order or pre-order products, Plus can authorise Visa, Mastercard and American Express payments for up to 30 days instead of the standard 7, with a 1.75% charge when you capture after day 7. Plus also lets you suppress specific Shopify notification emails, keep up to 100 themes in the account, and store up to 1 TB of files per store.

What's on every plan now?

B2B is on Basic, Grow and Advanced. Companies, company locations, net payment terms, quantity rules and quantity price breaks all work below Plus, according to Shopify's B2B features by plan. The limits sit in three places: 3 active catalog assignments, no catalogs assigned directly to a company, and no deposits or partial payments. Order minimums for B2B buyers don't need Plus either, because a public app can enforce them with a cart and checkout validation function on any plan.

Selling abroad isn't a Plus feature on its own. Every plan includes unlimited country and region markets, and Advanced adds theme customisation by market. On Plus you can also customise Checkout Blocks for each market.

Shopify Scripts are gone. Editing and publishing stopped on April 15, 2026, and every Script stopped running on June 30, 2026 (Shopify developer changelog). Their replacement, Shopify Functions, reaches every plan through public apps. The old checkout.liquid layout, which only Plus stores could use, is no longer supported on any checkout page (shopify.dev).

When does Plus pay off?

These are the situations where I'd tell a client the fee is worth it:

1. You need custom fields, messages or upsells inside the information, shipping or payment steps of checkout.
2. Your discount, delivery or payment rules are specific enough that no public app fits, and you want them in your own custom app built on Functions.
3. You sell wholesale with a price list per company, or you take deposits and partial payments on B2B orders.
4. You run several storefronts for regions or brands, and up to 9 free expansion stores replace separate subscriptions. Each live expansion store still needs its own theme licence.
5. You run big product drops and want Launchpad to schedule them, with Plus-only high-volume checkout and bot protection behind it.
6. You're moving a very large catalogue. Plus raises the redirect limit to 20 million, and Shopify's variant upload limit of 10,000 new variants a day for stores with 500,000 or more variants doesn't apply to Plus.

If none of these describe your store, Advanced will do the job.

Do the sums before you sign

On monthly billing, Plus costs $1,901 to $2,101 a month more than Advanced, which is $22,812 to $25,212 a year. Put a monthly figure on the Plus-only feature you want. For a checkout field, estimate the extra orders it brings. For a workaround you'd otherwise pay a developer to maintain, price the hours. At my rate of $45 an hour, $1,901 is about 42 hours of development a month (what developers charge in 2026).

If the feature can't get near that number, stay on Advanced and spend the difference on the store itself. And if your revenue puts you on the variable platform fee, redo the sum with Shopify's quote, because the fixed price no longer applies.

What I've built on Plus

I did Shopify Plus theme customisation, subscription features and performance tuning for John Masters Organics' UK store in 2023 and 2024. At Louise Carter I built checkout customisations with checkout UI extensions and Shopify Functions, alongside the theme work that got the flagship store to a Lighthouse performance score of 98.

This year I wrote a growth plan for a B2B wholesale store with more than 8,000 products. It covered collection-page performance, reorder flows, and per-unit and case pricing (it's part of my audit write-up). On a wholesale store like that, per-unit and case pricing doesn't need Plus on its own, because quantity rules (minimum, maximum and increment) and quantity price breaks are on every plan. Plus starts to matter when each wholesale customer needs its own catalog, or when the business takes deposits and partial payments.

When you don't need Plus

If you need up to 15 staff accounts, a few automatic discounts or tiered shipping rules, Advanced and public apps cover it. Advanced also has live third-party shipping rates and theme customisation by market. The plan change itself is handled with Shopify, so you only need a developer for the features you build on top of it.

There's also a case for a team over a single developer. If the move to Plus comes with an ERP integration, several expansion stores and a full redesign at the same time, an agency may suit you better. Shopify runs a Plus Partner programme for that kind of project, and I also work white-label for agencies. Freelancer or agency goes through the trade-offs.

If you're weighing the upgrade, my Shopify Plus development page covers checkout extensions and Functions, with starting prices and a note on B2B.