WooCommerce vs Shopify Pricing: What Each Really Costs at $25K, $250K, and $1M

WooCommerce vs Shopify pricing comes down to one variable most comparisons skip: labor. Shopify’s software runs $29–$399 a month and takes 2.5–2.9% + 30¢ per card sale. WooCommerce’s software is free. Add hosting, extensions, apps, and someone to keep it all working, and Shopify is often the cheaper store — until you already employ engineers.

Below are three stores priced line by line at September 2026 published rates: one starting out at $25,000 a year, one at $250,000, and one at $1M. Every vendor number is linked. Every number that is not a vendor number is labeled an assumption, because pretending an app bill or an agency retainer is a published price is how these comparisons go wrong.

The list prices, before we total anything

Shopify publishes four tiers: Basic at $39 a month billed monthly or $29 billed annually, Grow at $105 or $79, Advanced at $399 or $299, and Plus starting at $2,300 a month (Shopify pricing, Plus pricing). The plan fee buys hosting, TLS, PCI scope, CDN, and updates — Shopify’s problem, not yours. Shopify Payments card rates fall as you move up: 2.9% + 30¢ online on Basic, 2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced. Process through a different gateway and Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, and 0.2% on Plus, waived when Shopify Payments is your sole provider (Shopify help). Themes are free or a one-time $220–$420 (Shopify Theme Store).

WooCommerce charges nothing for the software and states a 0% revenue share (WooCommerce pricing); the plugin is GPL with 7+ million active installations (WordPress.org). What you pay for is hosting, extensions, processing, and time. WooCommerce puts hosting at $25–$350 a month for most stores and extensions at $29–$299 a year each. WooPayments and Stripe both publish 2.9% + 30¢ for US domestic cards (WooPayments fees, Stripe).

Labor is the line with no list price, so we anchor it: Codeable publishes $80–$120 an hour plus a 17.5% platform fee (Codeable). The $25,000 table uses that marketplace rate, $100 × 1.175 = $117.50; the $250,000 and $1M tables use a flat $100 an hour, assuming a store those sizes buys time direct rather than through a marketplace. The hours are stated in every case, and the hours are the assumption that matters.

Starting out: $25,000 a year, 500 orders

WooCommerce wins on cash here by roughly $500 a year, a gap smaller than one afternoon of downtime. What Shopify’s $348 buys at this size is the absence of a decision: no host to choose, no update to schedule, no plugin conflict to diagnose at 11pm. If your time is worth more than $40 an hour, the arithmetic already favors Shopify even though the total says otherwise.

The middle: $250,000 a year, 3,125 orders

At this size the store has features: subscriptions or a loyalty motion, marketing automation, product options, and shipping rules that go beyond flat rate. Marketing SaaS such as email and SMS is excluded from both columns because you pay the same vendor either way.

This is the size where the honest answer stops flattering WooCommerce. Shopify’s Grow card rate is 0.2 points lower than the published WooPayments and Stripe rate — $500 a year on its own — and the two stacks land within $760 of each other before anyone touches maintenance. Once maintenance is a real invoice, Shopify is roughly $2,700 a year cheaper on these assumptions.

$1M a year, and where the arithmetic flips

10,000 orders at a $100 average. Both columns assume the platform’s own processor at published rates.

Read the last two rows together, because they are the whole post. Buying engineering by the hour, Shopify Advanced is about $5,900 a year cheaper at $1M — genuinely the better deal, and the apps are somebody else’s uptime problem. If you already have engineers, or an agency on retainer for reasons that have nothing to do with hosting, WooCommerce is about $6,100 a year cheaper. Both of those conclusions ride entirely on the second-to-last row — the maintenance assumption — which is what the next section is about.

The assumption that decides it: the maintenance ratio

Both the $250,000 and the $1M conclusions rest on one number nobody publishes: that WooCommerce needs roughly twice the bought hours Shopify does. That is editorial judgment, not a finding — no vendor publishes a maintenance-hours benchmark and we found no credible independent one. It is also the largest lever in the model: at $1M the 2× assumption is a $12,000 swing, more than double the $5,852 gap it produces. The assumption is deciding the answer, so test it.

Before any labor, WooCommerce is $6,148 a year cheaper at $1M ($35,040 against $41,188). At $100 an hour, one extra hour a month costs $1,200 a year, so WooCommerce can absorb 5.1 more hours a month before it loses. Against Shopify’s assumed 10, the flip point is 15.1 WooCommerce hours a month — a ratio of 1.51×, not 2×. Below that WooCommerce is cheaper; above it, Shopify is. Or: if Shopify really needs 14.9 hours a month, the two are level with WooCommerce still at 20. At $250,000 the non-labor gap is only $760, so the flip comes at 2.7 hours against 2 — a ratio of 1.36×. Shopify’s win at $250,000 is the more robust of the two.

Shopify’s labor line is not zero, which is why this is a judgment and not a fact. Someone configures the apps and reconciles the ones whose settings collide, maintains Liquid in the theme, builds the API integrations to the ERP and the 3PL, and redoes that work when an app is deprecated or repriced. None of it invoices from Shopify; all of it lands on somebody’s calendar. The ratio is a claim about the difference between two non-zero numbers.

That difference exists for a structural reason: a ceiling. On Shopify, functionality no app provides has three exits — accept it, commission a custom app, or move up. Standard checkout customization is available from Basic, but “advanced checkout customization features are available only on the Shopify Plus plan” (Shopify help). On WooCommerce the same requirement is developer time against an open codebase: always possible, never free, yours to maintain afterwards. That is a real trade, not a flaw — the closed surface is exactly why Shopify’s maintenance hours are lower. There is less of it you are permitted to break.

It is also why AI assistance does not move the two platforms equally. WooCommerce is PHP on a server you control: an agent can read the codebase, reproduce a bug on staging, write the fix, run the tests, and open a pull request a human reviews. On Shopify an agent can work on Liquid and call the Admin API, but it cannot read or change platform internals, cannot touch checkout logic below Plus, and cannot fix an app’s behavior — the remedy there is a support ticket, a different app, or a custom app. The constraint that keeps Shopify’s hours low is the same one that stops an AI from removing them. So AI compresses the labor line on both platforms and further on WooCommerce, pushing on exactly the ratio these conclusions rest on.

Two limits, because that is easy to oversell. It is directional, not measured — we assert no multiplier, and the best available evidence cuts against us: METR’s randomized trial of 16 experienced open-source developers across 246 tasks in their own repositories found them 19% slower with early-2025 AI tools while believing they were 20% faster, and METR is explicit that it studied one narrow population (METR). And labor never reaches zero: someone reviews the diff, owns the deploy, and answers for it when checkout breaks. Unreviewed AI changes shipped at a live store are how stores break, not how they get cheaper.

The ratio does not settle how each stack behaves over time. Shopify’s app subscriptions are usage-priced and its plan tiers step; WooCommerce’s extension licenses are flat annual fees. We modeled the same $1M store over five years at 15% growth in a companion post: the base case still favors Shopify by about $23,800, and WooCommerce wins two of the three scenarios, including the one where you negotiate your own card processing. Detail in WooCommerce vs Shopify five-year cost.

The third option: when neither fits a high-traffic store

The tables above assume you buy WooCommerce maintenance by the hour, which is the worst way to buy it. Past roughly $1M in GMV, the expensive events are not invoices — they are a checkout regression that runs for a week, or a launch that takes the site down. That is the band Urumi is built for: managed WooCommerce hosting for $1M–$50M GMV stores, with three AIs on top. Revenue AI watches checkout, cart, pricing, and payments around the clock; prices every regression in dollars and ships the fix as a PR. It replaces the retainer line in the third table with a platform line, and it is priced for stores where an hour of broken checkout costs more than a month of hosting. That is the division of labor the sensitivity analysis above points at: the AI does the work, a human owns the judgment, and every change is tested and one click from rollback. Do Amore ran the same comparison and stayed on WooCommerce: they saved $251.5K over three years against a fragmented stack and avoided an estimated ~$940K Shopify Plus rebuild. Urumi publishes its own load-test results on the WooCommerce performance benchmark page: a 236 ms median cart response and a 321 ms median checkout with the edge cache disabled. Already have a team or an agency? They ship faster with the grunt work covered. See managed WooCommerce hosting.

Frequently asked questions

Is WooCommerce cheaper than Shopify?

On software, always: WooCommerce is free and takes a 0% revenue share, while Shopify is $29–$399 a month. On total cost, only sometimes. At $25,000 a year WooCommerce runs about $500 less; at $250,000 and $1M it costs more once you pay someone to maintain it, and less if that person is already on your payroll. Over five years the base case still favors Shopify, and WooCommerce only wins if you negotiate your own card processing or Shopify moves you to Plus.

What are Shopify’s transaction fees if I don’t use Shopify Payments?

Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, and 0.2% on Plus to every order processed through a third-party gateway, on top of whatever that gateway charges (Shopify pricing). The fee is waived when Shopify Payments is your sole payment provider. WooCommerce adds nothing to your processor’s rate.

How much does it cost to run a WooCommerce store per month?

WooCommerce publishes $25–$350 a month for hosting and $29–$299 a year per extension. On the tables above a $250,000 store lands near $1,285 a month all-in including processing and bought maintenance, and a $1M store near $4,920 — with card processing, not hosting, the largest line in both.

Does Shopify charge a percentage of sales?

Not as a revenue share on the plan itself, but yes in effect through payments: Shopify Payments charges 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow, and 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced for online cards. Shopify publishes no volume threshold, but higher-volume Plus customers move to a variable platform fee based on revenue (Shopify Plus pricing).

If you are choosing rather than costing, start with the head-to-head at WooCommerce vs Shopify. If you want the multi-year picture, it is modeled at WooCommerce vs Shopify five-year cost. If you are already past $1M and modeling a three-year horizon, the enterprise version of this analysis is at Shopify Plus vs WooCommerce: three-year cost, and the operational side is covered in how to scale WooCommerce for high traffic.

Last reviewed September 2026. Competitor details come from their public pages on the dates linked; check them before you buy.