September 3, 2024
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By Ivan Tryhub, CEO & Co-founder, SPLIT Development
When founders ask us about Shopify Plus, the first question is almost always the monthly fee. It is the easiest number to find. It is also the smallest part of the decision.
The real budget for a Plus move sits in the build. How much data comes across, how much of the theme gets rebuilt, which apps survive and what happens at checkout decide the final number far more than the subscription does. This article breaks down where the money goes when a growing DTC brand decides to migrate to Shopify Plus, where those budgets tend to overrun, and how to scope the project so the figure you approve is close to the figure you pay.
Shopify publishes its Plus pricing. On a three-year term the plan costs $2,300 per month, and a one-year term starts at $2,500 per month, according to the Shopify Plus pricing page. Higher-volume businesses move to a variable platform fee tied to revenue and business model, which Shopify quotes through its sales team. Brands that keep a third-party payment processor instead of Shopify Payments pay an extra 0.20% per transaction.
That is the platform. The store you run on it is a separate line in the budget. Founders still comparing platforms can start with this guide to Shopify versus WooCommerce.
The build is a one-off project paid to whoever handles the migration. At our agency a Shopify Plus build starts from $12,000, which is the public pricing we list on Clutch. Where a project lands above that starting point depends on the four areas in the next section.
We recommend founders keep these two numbers apart in every conversation with their finance team. The licence is a recurring operating cost you can model years ahead. The build is a capital project with scope risk attached, and scope is where most surprises come from.
When we quote a Plus migration, we price four areas separately. Any partner offering Shopify development services should be able to show you the same split, because it tells you which of your own decisions move the total.
Products, variants, customers and order history move across with standard migration tools. Cost rises with custom fields. If your current store keeps ingredient lists, size tables or compliance text in custom attributes, each field has to be mapped to Shopify metafields by someone who understands why it exists. Subscription data is the most sensitive piece. A subscription that breaks during migration is recurring revenue you have to win back one customer at a time.
Brands coming from another platform can read how a Magento to Shopify migration process works.
A Plus migration is often the point where brands stop patching an old theme. Rebuilding on Online Store 2.0 sections costs more up front. In return, the marketing team can build new landing pages without a developer, and that saving shows up every month after launch.
Every app on the current store needs a decision: keep it, replace it, rebuild it as custom code or drop it. Brands that have grown for several years usually carry apps nobody on the team remembers installing. Each one adds a monthly fee and some weight to the front end.
Plus gives access to Checkout Extensibility and Shopify Functions for custom discounts, payment rules and shipping logic. Customisations built on the old checkout.liquid file do not carry over. They have to be rebuilt with the new tools, so a brand with heavy checkout logic should expect this area to take a real share of the budget.
Overruns rarely come from one big mistake. They come from a few predictable gaps that nobody priced at the start.
No discovery phase. A fixed quote written before anyone has audited the URLs, apps and custom fields is a guess. The real scope appears during the build, and it arrives as change requests.
Subscriptions treated as ordinary data. Moving active subscriptions needs a rehearsal on a staging store, a cutover plan and a rollback option. Skipping that work to save time costs more if something breaks on launch day.
Redirects left until the end. Every URL that earns traffic or backlinks needs a 301 redirect in place before launch. When redirect mapping is rushed in the final week, rankings pay for it later.
Redesign requests during development. Once a team sees the new store taking shape, new ideas follow. Each one is reasonable on its own. Together they push the project past its budget and its launch date.
Internal time. Content updates, product data cleanup and testing all need hours from your own team. Founders who budget only for the agency often find their people stretched across the project and their day jobs.
SPLIT Development is a Shopify agency for beauty and fashion brands, with offices in Estonia and the United States. We have worked with Shopify since 2019. Our clients include Suntouched, a Canadian haircare brand, ISMYLOVA, a luxury boutique in the United States, Klova, a sleep and wellness brand running on Shopify Plus, and Meroda Cosmetics, a Dutch makeup brand with five regional stores.
Our scoping follows the same order on every project. We start with an audit of the current store: URL inventory, app stack, custom fields, checkout logic and what actually drives revenue. The written scope then prices each of the four areas above separately. Anything the client adds later is quoted as its own change, so the original budget stays readable. Subscription migrations are rehearsed on staging before the live cutover. You can see how we structure this work on our Shopify Plus development page.
Klova is a good example of why the rehearsal matters. The brand moved from Online Store 1.0 to 2.0 on Shopify Plus while customers held active subscriptions through Recharge. Those subscriptions kept running through the move. After launch, Klova reported a 4% lift in conversion, and the store's page speed score went from 7 to 30.
The budget for that project was driven by subscriptions and the theme rebuild, not by the platform fee. That is the pattern we see on most Plus moves.
Meroda Cosmetics shows the same pattern at a larger scale. We support its five Shopify stores for the EU, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, and rebuilt them on Online Store 2.0 with improvements to the cart and checkout. Across the group, average order value rose 22% and abandoned carts fell 31%.
Shopify Plus costs $2,300 per month on a three-year term and starts at $2,500 per month on a one-year term, according to Shopify's pricing page. Higher-volume businesses move to a variable platform fee based on revenue, and stores using a third-party payment processor pay an extra 0.20% per transaction.
A Shopify Plus migration usually covers data transfer and cleanup, metafield mapping, a theme rebuild or redesign, app replacement, checkout customisation with Checkout Extensibility, 301 redirects and full testing before launch. The exact scope depends on how customised the current store is.
Shopify Plus is Shopify's plan for high-volume and complex businesses. It adds checkout customisation through Checkout Extensibility, advanced B2B features such as unlimited catalogues, unlimited staff accounts, up to nine expansion stores and priority 24/7 support. The core admin and theme system are the same as on standard Shopify plans.
Yes, active subscriptions can be kept when moving to Shopify Plus if the migration is planned for them. That means mapping subscription data in advance, rehearsing the move on a staging store and scheduling the cutover so no billing cycle is missed.
The most common causes are a quote written without a discovery audit, subscriptions handled as ordinary data, redirect mapping left to the final week, redesign ideas added during development and underestimated internal time from the brand's own team.
