The monthly fee Shopify advertises is the most transparent part of the bill and also the smallest. If that is all you budget for, the surprises come after launch: app subscriptions, transaction shares, theme costs, and eventually the question of who actually keeps developing the store. The market itself is real: according to the Austrian Retail Association’s eCommerce Studie Österreich (2026), Austrian consumers spend 12.3 billion euros a year shopping online, 47 percent of it with retailers abroad. We build Shopify stores for businesses in Austria, and here we lay out the whole bill – including the items that tend to be missing from quotes.

The platform itself: a monthly fee plus a share of every sale

Shopify tiers its plans, from an entry package for small catalogues up to plans for larger merchants with better rates and more staff accounts. On top comes a share of each transaction for payment processing – as with any payment provider. Worth knowing: if you process payments through an external provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify charges an additional fee on top, depending on your plan.

The exact prices change from time to time, so we deliberately name no numbers here – the current price list lives on Shopify’s site. What matters for your calculation is something else anyway: as revenue grows, the transaction share grows with it. Upgrading to a higher plan often pays off earlier than expected, because the better rates offset the higher base fee. We run these numbers before every project starts.

The theme: from template to custom design

Shopify ships free standard themes that are fine for getting started. Paid themes from the official store cost a one-off amount in the low hundreds and offer more design options. Both, however, look like thousands of other stores.

A custom-built theme is an agency project and costs several thousand euros depending on scope. Whether it pays off depends on your brand: if you sell through design and recognition, you earn the money back. If you sell standard products on price, usually not. We wrote a separate post on this trade-off – the short version: a good purchased theme with targeted adjustments is often the most sensible middle path.

Apps: the cost that grows quietly

This is where most stores develop their real cost problem. Reviews, bundles, invoicing, newsletters, search, translations: there is an app for almost everything, and almost every one bills monthly. Individually the amounts look harmless. Two years later there are eight to twelve subscriptions on the statement, and the app costs exceed the Shopify fee itself.

Our advice: go through your app list twice a year and cut whatever brings no measurable benefit. And for functions you need permanently, compare the alternatives: a private app, developed once, costs you no monthly subscription and does exactly what your business needs – beyond a certain stack of subscriptions, that is the cheaper option.

Setup and development: what agency work costs

A clean store setup on a purchased theme – structure, products, payments, shipping rules, taxes, legal texts in place – is a manageable project in the low to mid four figures. A custom theme design raises the budget considerably. The biggest variable, though, is integration: if orders should land automatically in your ERP or accounting system and stock levels flow back into the store, that is its own integration project with its own budget.

That integration looks intimidating as a line item, but it saves working time from day one: no retyping orders, no stock levels maintained in two places, no manually created invoices. With more than a handful of orders a day, it pays for itself quickly.

After launch: budget for care, don’t hope for the best

A store isn’t finished at go-live. Promotions need setting up, sections need adjusting, apps need reviewing, integrations need monitoring. You can do a lot of it yourself: a properly built theme consists of sections you can rearrange and fill in the Shopify editor without any programming. For everything underneath – code, interfaces, new features – you need someone who knows the store.

Budget a fixed monthly amount or an hourly allowance for this. We know the alternative from stores we have taken over: years without care, followed by an expensive renovation project.

The honest total

Before deciding, project every item over three years: Shopify plan, transaction shares at your expected revenue, theme, app subscriptions, setup, integration, ongoing care. Only that total is comparable – with a WooCommerce setup, with a competing quote, with doing nothing. And it shows where saving is smart (app subscriptions, oversized design) and where it gets expensive (skipping the integration and retyping orders for years instead).

What this means for your specific case can’t be read off a blog post. After one conversation about your products, order volume, and existing systems, we can give you a fixed price.

Item	Due	Order of magnitude
Shopify plan	monthly	depends on the tier, current price list on Shopify’s site
Transaction share	per sale	grows along with revenue
Purchased theme	one-off	low three figures
Custom theme design	one-off	several thousand euros
App subscriptions	monthly	often eight to twelve subscriptions after two years
Agency store setup	one-off	low to mid four figures
ERP/accounting integration	one-off plus maintenance	its own integration project
Ongoing care	monthly	fixed amount or hourly allowance