Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month.
Here is what you are actually buying.
Most of that price is permission. Permission to run your own logic inside checkout, permission to talk to a human quickly, permission to stop stacking paid apps. WebForger Plus gives you the same three things at the price of a managed retainer, on a platform where the feature you need gets built rather than rented.
All four figures are published by Shopify and were checked on 9 September 2026. Sources are linked in the pricing table below.
What Shopify actually publishes, and what it does not.
Half the Shopify Plus comparisons online quote a variable fee percentage as if it were official. It is not. Here is the line between what Shopify prints on its own pages and what only circulates through agencies, because the difference matters when you take these numbers into a budget meeting.
Benchmark date 9 September 2026. If you have seen a specific variable fee percentage quoted with confidence, check whether the source is Shopify or an agency writing about Shopify. We only work from the first kind.
At $2,300 a month, a large part of what you buy is the right to write your own logic.
This is the part that surprises growing merchants. It is not that Shopify below Plus lacks a way to customise checkout. It is that below Plus, the customisation has to belong to somebody else.
"All plans: Except as noted in individual API pages, stores on any plan can use public apps that are distributed through the Shopify App Store and contain functions. Shopify Plus: Only stores on a Shopify Plus plan can use custom apps that contain Shopify Function APIs." Shopify developer documentation, shopify.dev/docs/api/functions, read 9 September 2026
Read that twice, because it is the whole pricing logic of the tier. Shopify Functions are how you change what the cart, the discounts, the payment methods and the shipping options actually do. A public app from the App Store can carry them on any plan. Your own app, built for your business, carrying your own rules, cannot, unless you are on Plus. The same shape repeats in checkout branding: the Checkout Branding API, Checkout Blocks and custom form field values set through the API are Plus only, per Shopify's own help centre, while the App Store route stays open to everyone.
So the merchant on Advanced who needs one specific rule, a shipping restriction on a hazardous SKU, a payment method hidden for trade customers, a bundle price that only exists on Tuesdays, has two doors. Door one is find an app that happens to do it and pay for it monthly, forever, and accept whatever it does not do. Door two is go to Plus. There is no door where you simply write the rule.
Your logic has to be somebody else's product first
- Custom apps carrying Shopify Function APIs require the Plus plan
- Checkout Branding API and Checkout Blocks are Plus only
- The workaround is renting an app that approximates the rule you wanted
- Once on Plus, the build itself is still quoted separately by a Plus Partner
The rule you describe becomes a platform feature
- You describe the behaviour you need in plain English, in a ticket
- Feature requests from Plus clients go into the platform build queue with priority
- No plan gate between you and your own checkout behaviour
- Unlimited agent edits to the site itself, not billed per change
The one line worth remembering: on Shopify, a feature is a monthly rent. On WebForger, a feature is something that grows out of what you asked for.
On Shopify, attention is a plan tier. That is the honest reason people upgrade.
Shopify publishes priority 24/7 phone support as a Plus plan feature. Below Plus, you are in the general support queue. Everything beyond that, the named launch engineer and the merchant success manager that agencies describe, is real but is not something Shopify prints a specification for.
This is the part of the Plus price that merchants defend most strongly, and they are right to. When a checkout bug is costing you orders on a Friday afternoon, the difference between a queue and a phone number is worth real money. The question is not whether that access is valuable. It obviously is. The question is what it should cost, and whether it should be bundled to a platform tier at all.
WebForger takes the opposite structure. The account manager and the priority queue are not attached to a platform plan you buy separately. They come with a managed retainer, SEO or advertising, because those are the engagements where we are already inside your numbers every week. If we are running your search campaigns, we already know your margin, your seasonality and which product pages carry the revenue. Support given from that position is not a ticket triage, it is somebody who already has the context.
The practical shape of it: unlimited agent edits to your site. Not four changes a month, not a change request form with a quote attached. If you want the hero rewritten, a landing page for a campaign, a category restructured or seasonal pricing blocks swapped in, you ask, and it gets done. That precedent is already running on client stores, and it is the single most used part of the arrangement.
Nobody quotes you the app stack, so count it yourself.
We are not going to argue about ecosystem size. Shopify's App Store is enormous and that is a genuine strength. We are only going to argue about the money, because the app stack is the line that never appears in the Plus proposal and then appears on your card every month for five years.
There is no official Shopify figure for what a merchant spends on apps. The best available data is third party modelling, and it should be labelled as such. One 2026 analysis built on Storeleads data across roughly 3.59 million active stores puts monthly app spend at $50 to $300 for stores under $1M in revenue and $1,000 to $3,500 for stores between $1M and $5M, while noting the numbers are modelled from published app pricing tiers rather than actual billing, with a stated accuracy of plus or minus 25 percent.
So do not take anyone's average, including that one. Count your own. Below is the stack a brand at the point of considering Plus almost always has. Fill in what you actually pay. The middle column is a deliberately conservative $100 per app per month, which is roughly the point where app spend starts needing an approval conversation.
Six paid apps at a conservative $100 each is $600 a month, or $7,200 a year, before the platform fee. Your real number is probably higher, because app pricing tiers step up with order volume.
The number that actually decides it.
Platform fee at Shopify's published floor, apps at our conservative estimate, development quoted separately in both cases. Currency is USD.
Shopify figures are the published floor, verified 9 September 2026, and exclude payment processing on both sides because you pay a card processor either way. App estimate is ours and deliberately conservative. Swap in your own numbers before you decide anything.
Shopify Plus is the right answer for a real set of businesses. Check whether you are one.
A comparison page that says the competitor is wrong about everything is not a comparison, it is an advert. Here is the honest boundary, and if you are on the wrong side of it we will say so on the first call rather than after the invoice.
Stay on Shopify Plus if
Talk to us if
If a smaller store is what you actually have, the plain Shopify alternative comparison is the more useful page. This one is written for the moment somebody puts a Plus quote in front of you.
Where your store actually runs.
WebForger stores are served as static HTML from a global edge network, which is why product pages start fast rather than being optimised back to fast later. Checkout runs on your own Stripe account, connected directly, with no WebForger percentage added on top of standard card processing. Buy now pay later methods such as Afterpay come through Stripe in the normal way.
For clients with unusual traffic profiles, the platform can place a site on dedicated resources, its own worker and its own database, rather than shared capacity. That is switched on per client when the numbers justify it, not sold as a badge. We are not going to make claims about flash sale peaks we have not measured, and you should be sceptical of anyone who quotes you a concurrency number without a load test attached.
What moving a real Shopify catalogue looked like.
A New Zealand handbag and accessories retailer, running on Shopify, with a catalogue large enough that everyone assumed the migration was the hard part. It was not. The hard part was everything they had been renting.
The interesting part came after launch. Their review app, their photo review wall, their abandoned cart emails, their store credit and their discount rules had all been separate monthly subscriptions. On the new platform each of those is either a platform app carried at no monthly fee, or part of the commerce core. When they asked for things that did not exist yet, promotional badges across product cards, a product picker for editors, order editing with a balance invoice, a merchant side draft order, those became platform features rather than a bespoke bill.
That is the pattern we are describing when we say features grow rather than get rented. Nine separate capabilities have entered the platform that way, each triggered by one client asking for something their old store could do and this one could not yet. Every other client on the platform got them at the same time, at no extra cost, which is exactly what a monthly app subscription can never do for you.
The questions that come up when a Plus quote is on the table.
How much does Shopify Plus cost in 2026?
What is actually exclusive to Shopify Plus?
Is WebForger a replacement for Shopify Plus at enterprise scale?
What does WebForger Plus cost?
What happens when I need a feature that does not exist yet?
Can I keep my payment processing and my domain?
How many apps do Shopify merchants really pay for?
Is migrating off Shopify disruptive?
Before you sign a three year Plus term, price the alternative.
Same customisation freedom, same close support, and an app bill of zero, at the price of a managed retainer. Tell us what your Plus quote is trying to unlock and we will tell you honestly whether we can do it.