For a $5M-$10M/year merchant still on Advanced (not yet Plus), what's the realistic full monthly spend including apps, processing, and a part-time freelance developer?
A $5M to $10M merchant on Advanced pays $299 per month on annual billing or $399 monthly, plus 2.5% and 30 cents per online card transaction, plus Shopify Tax at 0.35% of US orders above $100,000 and capped at $5,000 a year (shopify.com/pricing and Shopify Help Center, September 2026). Developer cost has no published rate.
The published half of your bill
| Component | Published figure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Advanced plan | $299/month billed annually, $399/month billed monthly | shopify.com/pricing, Sep 2026 |
| Online card processing | "Card rates from 2.5% + 30¢ USD" | Rate is a floor. Amex, international and premium cards can differ |
| In-person | 2.4% + 10¢ | Only if you have retail |
| Third-party processor | 0.6% of GMV, on top of the processor's own fee | $0 if you use Shopify Payments |
| Shopify Tax | 0.35% of US orders, above a $100,000 threshold, max $0.99 per order, max $5,000 per year per region | Shopify Help Center, Sep 2026 |
| Currency conversion | 1.5% for US stores, 2% elsewhere | Only on sales outside your payout currency |
| Chargeback | $15 USD in the US, refunded if you win | Shopify Help Center, Sep 2026 |
The number that surprises people: average order value moves your processing rate
The 30 cents is fixed, so it is a different percentage of every order. Same published rate, four very different effective costs:
| Your AOV | 2.5% | Plus 30¢ as a percentage | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| $40 | 2.50% | 0.75% | 3.25% |
| $75 | 2.50% | 0.40% | 2.90% |
| $120 | 2.50% | 0.25% | 2.75% |
| $200 | 2.50% | 0.15% | 2.65% |
A $40-AOV brand at $7.5M a year pays roughly 0.6 points more of revenue in processing than a $200-AOV brand at the same revenue, from an identical published rate. That is about $45,000 a year. No plan change fixes it and no negotiation reaches it. Basket size does.
Worked example at $7.5M a year and $120 AOV: $625,000 a month, 5,208 orders. Card percentage 2.5% × $625,000 = $15,625. Fixed fees 5,208 × $0.30 = $1,562. Processing total roughly $17,187 a month, against a $299 plan fee. Processing is fifty-seven times the plan fee. Any cost conversation that starts with the plan fee has started in the wrong place.
The half we will not price: the freelance developer
There is no published rate for Shopify freelance development that we are willing to cite. Shopify does not publish partner rates. The directories do not publish billed rates. Every figure circulating as a benchmark is either a survey of advertised rates or a vendor's own rate card presented as a market.
So price it yourself, like this:
- Count the last twelve months of dev requests from your ticket system or your inbox. Not hours, requests.
- Sort them into three buckets: break-fix, small change, and project. Most Advanced-plan stores find break-fix is the majority by count and the minority by cost.
- Get three quotes on the same written list of five real past requests. Same list, same scope, three suppliers. The spread you get back is your actual market rate, and it is specific to your theme, your stack and your timezone.
- Convert to a monthly retainer only after step 3. A retainer priced before you know the request volume is a number somebody made up, whichever side made it up.
The line most $5M to $10M stores under-count
App overages. App Store listings publish an included allowance and an overage rate, and the overage is what grows with your order volume. Gorgias, as a published example, includes 5,000 tickets in its $900 a month Advanced plan and charges $36 per additional 100 (App Store listing, September 2026). Your bill grows with support volume whether or not you install another app.
When NOT to worry about this number
- When you are below the Shopify Tax threshold. The first $100,000 of taxable sales carries no Shopify Tax fee, and the annual cap is $5,000 per region. This is rarely the line worth optimizing.
- When the plan fee is the thing being debated. At $625,000 a month, $100 of monthly plan difference is 0.016% of revenue. Payment rates and app overages are two orders of magnitude larger.
- When nobody has read the last twelve Shopify invoices. Everything above is a published rate. Your invoice is the fact.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Price the processing and the app overages first, price the developer last, and price the plan fee never. The ordering is the whole discipline, and it is the reverse of how these conversations usually start.
- What we’ve seen: In cost audits, the largest recoverable line at this revenue band is almost never the plan and almost always a usage-metered app whose allowance was set at a traffic level the store passed two years ago.
- Where we disagree: The category publishes a "realistic full monthly spend" for this profile, as a single figure, with no basket-size input. Basket size moves the effective processing rate by more than half a point, so a figure that ignores AOV is not realistic for anybody. We will not publish one.
- What this page adds: that average order value, not plan or app count, sets the effective processing rate at this band, and by how much, which the parent's flat-percentage arithmetic at $500K a month does not surface.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records