Of the thirteen agencies in our Shopify Plus agency comparison, two print a price on their own website. We are one of them, so this guide can do what most pricing articles cannot: show you real numbers, say where every one of them comes from, and explain what moves a Plus build from the bottom of the range to the top. Where a figure is ours, it says so. Where it is Shopify’s, it links to Shopify’s pricing page. Nothing here is a “typical industry range” invented to fill a table.
Key takeaways
- A Shopify Plus project has five cost lines, not one: the platform fee, the build, the apps the build depends on, the integrations, and what keeps it running. Most quotes cover only the second.
- Shopify’s own pricing page puts the Plus plan at US$2,300 a month on a three-year term, US$2,500 a month on a one-year term, or a variable platform fee for more complex businesses.
- Our published build ranges are $50,000 to $100,000 for a Plus build and $100,000 to $200,000 for a Plus build with integrations, with anything larger scoped as a custom quote. Those are fixed-scope prices, set in writing before work starts.
- What moves a build across that range is not design. It is integrations, data, markets and checkout logic — the things that are decided in discovery and are invisible on a mood board.
The five cost lines
1. The platform
Shopify Plus is a subscription to Shopify, paid to Shopify, and no agency controls it. Shopify’s pricing page currently lists Plus starting at US$2,300 per month on a three-year term or US$2,500 per month on a one-year term, with a variable platform fee based on revenue for more complex, higher-volume businesses, and payment-processing rates that vary by region. Over a three-year term the platform alone is roughly $83,000 before processing, which is why the question of whether you need Plus at all deserves an honest answer — Plus versus Advanced is that answer.
2. The build
This is the line agencies quote. It covers architecture, theme and storefront development, product and content structure, checkout configuration, testing and launch. It is also the line with the widest spread in the market, for one reason: agencies price different things and call them the same name. A “Plus build” from one shop is a theme customised on a Plus plan; from another it is a custom storefront with a migration, three integrations and a B2B channel. Until you have a written scope, two quotes are not comparable.
Our ranges, from the packages page: a Plus build is $50,000 to $100,000; a Plus build with integrations is $100,000 to $200,000; anything above that is scoped and priced as its own document. Each package lists what is included and what is not, and the price does not change once it is signed. For a rough figure for your own store before any call, the price calculator works from the same scope inputs.
3. The apps
A Plus store runs on a stack of subscriptions the build assumes: reviews, subscriptions, search and merchandising, email and SMS, loyalty, returns. They are billed monthly by their vendors, they scale with your order volume, and a build that depends on them without saying so hands you a second invoice after launch. Ask every agency for the app list with monthly costs as part of the quote. Our subscription, review and search app guides list what each one charges.
4. The integrations
This is where budgets double. An ERP, a 3PL, a POS estate, a booking system, a subscription engine with its own billing, a marketplace feed — each is a piece of engineering with its own testing and its own failure modes. On Gene Juarez, the Shopify Plus store had to book salon appointments through Zenoti as well as sell product; that integration was the project, and it is why several agencies had declined the work. Integrations are the reason our second package starts where the first one ends.
5. What keeps it running
Shopify ships changes every quarter; checkout alone has moved to extensibility in the last two years. Your store needs someone who owns those changes. Agencies price this as a retainer, a block of hours, or not at all. Ours are on the retainers page, with the response times written down — development, performance, CRO experimentation and support. Whatever an agency’s model is, get the number for year one into the same document as the build.
What moves a quote from $50k to $200k
| Factor | Bottom of the range | Top of the range |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Already on Shopify; moving to Plus | Migrating from Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Salesforce with years of orders and customers |
| Catalogue | Under 500 SKUs, one currency | Thousands of SKUs, variants, bundles, B2B price lists |
| Integrations | Standard apps only | ERP, 3PL, POS, booking or subscription engines with two-way sync |
| Markets | One country | Multiple markets with duties, languages and local payment methods |
| Checkout | Branding and standard extensibility apps | Custom checkout functions, validation rules, wholesale flows |
| Storefront | Customised theme | Custom theme, or headless on Hydrogen or Next.js |
| Content and data | Provided clean, on time | Needs cleaning, mapping, rewriting |
Two of these factors — starting point and integrations — decide most of the price on their own. If you are already on Shopify with clean data and standard apps, the bottom of the range is realistic. If you are migrating with an ERP, plan for the top of the second package before anyone has drawn a screen.
How the other agencies price
Twelve of the thirteen agencies we compared do not print build prices, and that is a choice rather than an oversight: most price per project after discovery, some bill time and materials against a rate card, and a few sell discovery first as a paid piece of work whose output is the quote. The one other agency that prints figures, Bigfolio, shows “starting at” tiers of $2,500 and $3,000 on its homepage. None of this makes an unpublished price a bad price — several of those agencies are excellent — but it does mean you will not know your number until after the first call, and it is why question four in our hiring guide is the one to ask first: will you put the scope and the price in writing before the contract?
How to read a quote
- Look for the exclusions list. A quote without one is a quote for everything and nothing. Ours list what is out of scope by name.
- Find the app and platform lines. If they are not there, add them yourself before comparing. A $60,000 build with $2,300 a month of platform and $900 a month of apps is a $98,000 first year.
- Ask what a change costs. Fixed scope does not mean nothing changes; it means changes are priced as new work, in writing, rather than absorbed and then billed.
- Check who is doing it. A price attached to a named senior engineer means something different from the same price attached to “our team”.
Where to go from here
Run the price calculator for a first figure on your own store. Read the packages to see what a written scope looks like. And if you are choosing between agencies, the 12-agency comparison and the 14 questions are the rest of this series. The Shopify Plus development page has the full scope of what we build.
