Shopify vs WooCommerce: The Real Cost Comparison

Shopify starts at $29/mo and WooCommerce is free, which makes the comparison look settled before it starts. It isn't. Both numbers are misleading, and the honest comparison depends on transaction volume more than anything else.

Shopify's real cost is the subscription plus payment fees plus apps. The base plan's 2.9% + 30¢ per online transaction is standard card processing, but Shopify adds an extra fee on top (0.5-2% depending on plan) if you use any payment processor other than Shopify Payments. Apps are the quiet multiplier: reviews, subscriptions, advanced shipping, and email each tend to be their own monthly subscription, and a typical growing store runs $50-200/mo in apps on top of the plan. What you get for all that is genuinely complete: hosting, security, PCI compliance, and checkout are entirely Shopify's problem.

WooCommerce's real cost is hosting plus extensions plus your time. The software is free, but the store isn't. Hosting a store that's actually fast costs $10-30/mo (see our WooCommerce hosting guide), premium extensions run $50-300/year each, and someone has to apply updates, maintain backups, and own security, because a store is a bigger target than a blog. Payment processing via Stripe or PayPal costs the same 2.9% + 30¢, with no platform surcharge on top, which is where the economics start tilting.

At low volume, Shopify usually wins on total cost of ownership: a few hundred dollars a year buys freedom from all operational work, and WooCommerce's hosting-plus-extensions floor isn't much cheaper anyway. As volume grows, WooCommerce wins on margin: no platform transaction surcharge, no per-feature app rent, and hosting costs that grow slower than revenue. The crossover point for most stores is somewhere in the low tens of thousands of dollars in monthly sales, earlier if you need many features that are paid apps on Shopify.

The tiebreakers that aren't about money: Shopify if nobody on the team wants to touch servers, ever. WooCommerce if you need checkout customization Shopify doesn't allow, content-heavy commerce (it's WordPress underneath), or data ownership without platform lock-in.

The Tech Stack Wizard at /tech-stack compares store platforms against what you're building, and our WooCommerce hosting guide covers the self-hosted path in detail.