Shopify's standard term is 3 free days, then $1/month for three billing cycles. What those ~93 days can realistically produce, phase by phase, and the verdict day 90 owes you.
March 19, 2026·Updated August 2026·16 min read·
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What Shopify's standard three-month term gives you, and how to spend it — skim first, then dive deeper.
Three free days, then three $1 cycles — the standard Shopify term runs about 93 days, and invoice four arrives at full price.
The window validates, it does not optimise — plan it to answer one question: will people buy this?
Select a plan by day 2 — Shopify does not extend or reset promotional pricing once the free days lapse.
Your term is assigned per visitor — three months is the standard number, but read what your own checkout states.
New accounts only — existing and previously cancelled stores generally do not qualify.
The clock punishes building, not spending — a store unlaunched on day 45 has burned half its runway.
What You'll Learn
1What the three-month term contains
2How to claim it, and by which day
3Who qualifies and who doesn't
4A phase plan with exit criteria
5What the 90 days cost beyond the $1
6The evidence day 90 owes you
In This Article
What the 3-Month Term Actually Is
Key takeaway
Most guides describe this offer as a price. It is more useful to read it as a calendar, because the calendar is what decides whether the offer was worth taking. Shopify's standard sign-up gives you 3 days free followed by $1/month for 3 months — three free days to build, then three billing cycles during which the store is fully live and the platform fee is a rounding error.
Those two stretches are not one continuous 90-day block, and merchants who treat them as one lose the first week. The free days end when you select a plan — you are charged the first $1 at that moment — and the three promotional cycles are counted from there, so your dates are yours rather than a calendar quarter everyone shares. Three days plus three monthly cycles is roughly 93 days, and the number that actually matters sits at the far end of it: the fourth invoice, which arrives at the standard rate for whichever plan you picked.
One nuance matters in 2026: the length of the $1/month promotion is no longer a single fixed number. Since around February 2026, Shopify builds the sign-up offer from per-visitor variables — the page reads "get your first N months for $1/mo," where Shopify assigns N to each visitor. Three months is the standard term, and the one this page is written for. If your own checkout states a different number, that is your term, and our live offer-status tracker covers the longer variants.
The $3 you save on subscription fees is the least interesting thing about this offer. What you are actually being given is a fixed, non-renewable window in which the cost of being wrong is small. Shopify does not extend or reset promotional pricing, so the window cannot be bought back later — which is why the rest of this guide is organised around what each stretch of it has to produce.
“Trial length and pricing are subject to change and might vary by store location.”
Shopify Help Center — Trying Shopify with a free trial · View source (help.shopify.com)Shopify Free Trial 2026: Start for Free + $1/Month for 3 MonthsQuick walkthrough of how to claim Shopify's current trial offer and what's included at each stage.
How to Claim the $1/Month for 3 Months Offer
Key takeaway
Claiming the offer takes minutes, and the order of the steps is the whole trick: the free days are for building, and the act of choosing a plan is what converts them into a live store on promotional pricing.
1
Step 1: Visit the Trial Page
Go to shopify.com/free-trial or click any Shopify "Start free trial" button. Make sure you see the $1/month offer mentioned on the signup page before proceeding.
2
Step 2: Create Your Account
Enter your email address, create a password, and answer a few quick questions about your business. No credit card is needed at this stage.
3
Step 3: Build During Free Trial
Use the 3-day free period to set up your store: add products, choose a theme, configure settings. You cannot process real payments during this phase.
4
Step 4: Select a Plan
Before the 3-day trial expires, go to Settings → Plan to select your plan (Basic recommended). Enter your payment details to lock in the $1/month rate.
5
Step 5: Start Selling at $1/mo
Once your plan is active, you have full selling capabilities for 3 months at $1/month. Set up Shopify Payments, add a custom domain, and launch.
Day 2 is the safe day to select a plan
If you don't select a plan within the three free days, the store becomes inactive. You can log back in and pick a plan later, but the promotional rate may no longer be attached to the account — and Shopify does not reset it. Choosing on day 2 costs you a dollar, starts the clock on your own terms, and takes the whole failure mode off the table. The checkout screen states your exact term before you enter billing details; whatever number it shows is the one you are agreeing to.
If your checkout says something other than three months
Longer $1/month terms are not a seasonal version of this standard offer — they arrive through separate channels and programs, and Shopify assigns the length per visitor. If your own sign-up names six months rather than three, the plan on this page still applies, only stretched. Our guide to the 6-month variant covers which channels carry it, and its live offer-status tracker records what we find on each monthly re-check.
Who Is Eligible for the $1/Month Deal
Key takeaway
Eligibility matters here for a reason that is easy to miss: because the offer is tied to a new account, the window is not repeatable. You cannot bank it, and you cannot start it over in a calmer month — which is the strongest argument for opening it only when you are actually ready to spend the 90 days.
Eligible
First-time Shopify users with a new email
Users signing up through the official trial page
Users signing up through Shopify partner links
Merchants in most countries where Shopify operates
Not Eligible
Existing Shopify store owners
Previously cancelled or deactivated accounts
Shopify Plus enterprise customers
Accounts with prior promotional usage
Creating a new account to get the deal?
Some merchants try creating a new account with a different email to access the promotional rate. While this isn't explicitly prohibited, Shopify tracks billing information and may not apply the discount if it detects a duplicate account. It's also impractical — you'd lose all your existing products, customers, orders, and store configuration.
Nothing about the store itself is restricted during the promotional cycles — the discount applies to the subscription line and to nothing else, so what you are testing over the 90 days is a full-price store with a cheap platform fee. The feature list and the bills that keep running underneath it are set out in our guide to what the $1 covers and what bills anyway.
What the 90 Days Cost, and Where the Money Really Goes
Key takeaway
Reading this window as "three dollars" is the mistake that wastes it. The discount applies only to the Shopify subscription; everything underneath runs at full price, including transaction fees of 2.9% + 30¢ per sale on the Basic plan. The chart below sets a lean 90 days beside an actively marketed one: identical platform fee, very different totals.
Source: estimated based on Shopify Pricing and typical merchant spending patterns
Budget the window, not the subscription
A lean 90 days is genuinely cheap: free theme, no paid apps, organic traffic only, and the bill is the $3 plus card fees on whatever you sell. The moment you buy traffic it stops being cheap — $150 of ads plus a domain and one email app puts the window near $250, and card fees on $1,500 of sales add roughly $74 more. Neither figure is right or wrong; what matters is deciding before day 1 which of the two runs you are doing, because the answer sets what day 90 is allowed to prove. Year-one totals are worked out in our guide to what year one costs.
The 90-Day Plan: What Each Phase Has to Produce
Key takeaway
The honest constraint of this term is that it is short. Our own guide to the rarer six-month variant says as much: with the three-month deal, most merchants are still setting up when the promotion ends. That is not an argument for waiting for a longer term — it is an argument for planning these 90 days around a single question, will people buy this, and treating everything that does not help answer it as optional.
So the plan below is written as exit criteria, not as tasks. Each phase names the state the store has to be in before the next one starts. If you arrive at a checkpoint without meeting it, the useful move is almost never "spend another two weeks building" — it is to cut scope so the store reaches real traffic sooner.
1
Days 1–3 (free): Exists and Can Take Money
A free theme, 5–10 products with real photographs and honest descriptions, shipping zones, and Shopify Payments configured. Exit criterion: you can place a test order end to end. Anything beyond that is decoration and belongs after launch.
2
Days 4–14: Publicly Live
Select the plan, add the pages a buyer looks for (About, Contact, shipping and returns), connect a domain, install analytics. Exit criterion: the store is reachable by a stranger and you have watched one person who is not you navigate it.
3
Days 15–35: First Traffic
One traffic source, deliberately chosen — organic social, a small ad budget, or a niche community. Exit criterion: 100 real visitors have seen the product page. Below that number nothing you observe about conversion is a signal.
4
Days 36–60: First Evidence
Read where the visitors drop off, then change one thing at a time — price, photography, offer, or audience. Exit criterion: a first sale to someone you don't know, or a clear, repeated reason people stop at the same step.
5
Days 61–85: Repeat It On Purpose
Try to make the thing that worked happen a second time; a single sale can be luck, two from the same channel is a mechanism. Exit criterion: you can name the channel, the cost of acquiring that customer, and whether the margin survives it.
6
Days 86–93: Decide Before the Invoice
Do the arithmetic while the cheap rate still applies and act before the fourth invoice arrives — continue, switch billing, pause, or close. Exit criterion: the decision is made, not deferred, because no decision is itself a decision here.
What counts as a passing grade
A useful bar for this window is one sale to a stranger — not a friend, not your own test order. It is a low bar on purpose: it says the offer, the price and the checkout survive contact with a real person, and it is reachable in 90 days by a store that launches in week two. Revenue targets sound more ambitious but measure your ad budget as much as your idea. If nothing sells at all, the window has still paid for itself — it cost about $3 plus whatever you chose to spend on traffic to learn it.
What a 90-Day Window Punishes That a Longer One Wouldn't
Key takeaway
Merchants rarely waste this window by doing something reckless. They waste it by doing reasonable things in the wrong order — work that would be perfectly sensible with six months of runway and is fatal with three.
Perfecting Before Launching
Costs weeks you cannot get back
Theme tweaking is the most expensive habit available here: it feels productive, produces no information, and Shopify will not reset the promotion to give the time back. Go live in week two with something plain, and let real visitors tell you what to fix.
Launching With No Traffic Plan
Zero visitors, zero evidence, 90 days gone
A store nobody visits produces exactly as much evidence as no store at all. Decide the first traffic source before you launch — one channel, chosen on purpose — because discovering you have no audience on day 70 leaves nothing to do with the finding.
Building the Catalogue First
80 products before the first visitor
Loading a large catalogue delays launch and splits what little traffic you get across too many pages to read. Five to ten products are enough to test whether anyone wants this; expansion is a problem worth having in month four.
Buying a Premium Theme Early
Free themes like Horizon are excellent
A premium theme is a real purchase made before you know whether the store has a future, and free themes such as Horizon and Dawn are fast and fully customisable. Buy one after the offer is validated, not while you are still finding out.
Treating $1 as the Steady State
The fourth invoice is at full price
The promotional rate ends on a date, and stores planned around $1 a month meet the standard rate as a surprise. Do the month-four arithmetic in week one, so the decision at the end of the window is a confirmation rather than a scramble.
Not Tracking What the Window Cost
Day 90 needs numbers, not impressions
The decision at the end is arithmetic: what you spent on traffic against what came back. Merchants who tracked nothing arrive at day 90 with a feeling instead of a figure, and default to continuing because they cannot prove they shouldn't.
The Day-90 Verdict: What the Window Owes You
Key takeaway
Everything above exists to make one moment survivable: the point where the promotional rate stops and you have to say what the store is. That moment is not really about money — the money question is settled arithmetic, and our guide to the day the rate ends works through the four moves and what each costs. What the 90 days have to supply is the evidence that makes choosing between those moves obvious.
Three numbers do almost all the work, and none of them can be reconstructed afterwards. How many real visitors reached the product page tells you whether anything you observed was signal or noise. How many of them bought tells you whether the offer works at the price you set. What each sale cost to produce — ad spend and card fees against margin — tells you whether the thing that worked can be repeated at a profit. A store with traffic and no sales has an offer problem. A store with sales that cost more than they return has a margin problem. A store that never reached real traffic at all has an audience problem, and that is the one worth knowing before month four.
A no is a result, not a failure
What the window does well is make being wrong cheap. If the three numbers say the idea does not work, closing or pausing at day 90 is the outcome the offer was for — you bought a real answer for the price of a few dollars of platform fees plus whatever traffic you chose to pay for. The expensive version of this mistake is continuing at the standard rate for a year because no one ever wrote the numbers down.
“Shopify doesn't extend or reset free trials or promotional pricing.”
Shopify Help Center — Trying Shopify with a free trial — Promotional pricing extensions and resets · View source (help.shopify.com)
Estimate the Bill That Arrives in Month Four
Key takeaway
Put your own numbers in rather than ours: the plan that is cheapest at fifty orders a month is not always the one that is cheapest at three hundred, and the crossover is what decides whether month four is a renewal or an upgrade.
Shopify Cost Calculator
Enter your estimated monthly numbers to see the true cost across all Shopify plans.
BasicBest
$489
per month
Plan fee$39
Processing$350
Apps$100
% of Revenue4.9%
Grow
$535
per month
Plan fee$105
Processing$330
Apps$100
% of Revenue5.3%
Advanced
$809
per month
Plan fee$399
Processing$310
Apps$100
% of Revenue8.1%
Plus
$2,685
per month
Plan fee$2300
Processing$285
Apps$100
% of Revenue26.9%
* Estimates based on Shopify Payments rates. Actual costs may vary based on location, currency, and negotiated rates. Does not include theme, domain, or developer costs.
Is 90 Days Actually a Long Runway?
Key takeaway
It is worth checking the premise of this whole guide: is 90 days generous, or is it tight? Against what competitors offer, the answer is generous — most rivals hand you a fortnight.
E-Commerce Platform Trial Comparison
Platform
Free Trial
Extended Offer
Total Low-Cost Days
Shopify
3 days
$1/mo × 3 months
~90 days
BigCommerce
15 days
None
15 days
Squarespace
14 days
None
14 days
Wix
14 days
None
14 days
WooCommerce
N/A (free plugin)
Hosting from $20+/mo
N/A
The gap is real: roughly 90 low-cost days against a fortnight, and with full selling capability rather than a sandbox. WooCommerce is free as software but needs hosting, SSL and setup work, which for a comparable store usually costs more than Shopify over the same three months.
The comparison flatters the offer, though, and it is worth resisting. Two weeks is not a runway at all — it is time to look around — so being six times longer than nothing much does not make 90 days comfortable. Set it against what a store actually has to do in that time, which is launch, find an audience, sell to a stranger and prove the sale can be repeated, and the window is adequate rather than generous. That is the useful reading: the term is long enough to answer the question, and only if you start asking it in week two. Plan costs beyond the window in our Shopify pricing guide.
The Bottom Line: Start It When You Can Spend It
Key takeaway
Here is the honest summary of a term most merchants are handed without thinking much about it:
What the term removes is not cost but the price of being wrong. Spend the ~90 days answering one question — will people buy what I am selling? — rather than building a store you have no evidence anyone wants. If the answer is yes, the standard rate is trivial next to what you have just proved. If it is no, you found out for about the price of lunch.
And if the store does not work out, the skills and the answer both stay with you — bought for the price of three months of platform fees rather than a year of them.
Ready to Spend the 90 Days?
Three days free, then $1/month for three cycles. Open the term in a month when you can launch inside two weeks — it doesn't reset.
Shopify currently offers a 3-day free trial. After the 3-day free period, you can continue with the $1/month for 3 months promotional offer, giving you a total of approximately 90 days to test the platform for minimal cost. This structure replaced the previous 14-day free trial that Shopify phased out in October 2022.
No, you don't need a credit card to start the 3-day free trial. You can sign up with just your email address and start building your store immediately. However, you will need to select a plan and provide payment information to continue beyond the 3-day period — either at the $1/month promotional rate or the standard plan pricing.
Yes, absolutely. Once you select a plan (even at the $1/month rate), you have full selling capabilities. You can add products, accept payments through Shopify Payments (standard card rates of 2.9% + 30¢ apply), fulfill orders, and run your store exactly as you would on a full-price plan. The $1/month pricing applies only to the subscription fee — transaction fees are charged at the standard rate.
It ends three billing cycles after you selected a plan, not three months after you created the account. The three free days come first and end the moment you choose a plan — that is when the first $1 is charged and the clock starts. End to end the window is roughly 93 days, and the date that matters is when the fourth invoice falls due, because that is the first one at the standard rate. Your own dates are shown in your Shopify admin, and they are the only ones that apply to you.
Yes, you can purchase and use any premium theme from the Shopify Theme Store during the promotional period. Premium themes cost $100–$500 as a one-time purchase and are yours to keep regardless of your subscription status. You can also use any of Shopify's 24 free themes (Horizon, Dawn, Sense, Craft, etc.) which offer excellent performance and customization options — often the better choice during your validation phase.
Aim to be publicly live inside the first two weeks. The window is too short to build first and market afterwards: a store that launches in week two has roughly ten weeks of real traffic to learn from, while one that launches in week six has about four — and four weeks rarely produce enough visitors for anything you observe to be a signal rather than noise. Launch plain, then improve based on what actual visitors do.
The $1/month for 3 months offer typically applies when you select any standard Shopify plan (Basic, Grow, or Advanced) during the promotional signup flow. The most common use case is Basic at $1/month. Shopify Plus and Starter plans are generally excluded from this specific promotion. The availability and terms may vary by region and time, so always check the current offer on Shopify's website.
Yes, you can upgrade or downgrade your plan during the promotional period. If you upgrade from Basic to Grow during the $1/month period, the $1 rate typically still applies for the remainder of your 3-month promotional window. However, the specifics may vary — check your account's billing page for exact terms. After the trial, standard pricing for your selected plan will apply.
The free trial is a 3-day period where you can explore Shopify without providing payment information — you can build your store but cannot process real orders. The $1/month offer is a 3-month promotional pricing period that starts after you select a plan and enter billing details. During the $1/month period, you have a fully functional store with all features, payment processing, and selling capabilities. Together, they give you ~90 days of low-cost access.
Shopify's combined offer (3-day free + $1/month for 3 months) is among the most generous in e-commerce. BigCommerce offers a 15-day free trial with no extended promotional pricing. Wix offers 14 days. WooCommerce is free (open-source) but requires separate hosting ($20–$100+/month). Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial. Shopify's ~90-day low-cost period gives you significantly more time to validate your business idea than most competitors.
Since early 2026, Shopify sets the $1/month promotion length as a per-visitor variable, so different people see different terms on the same day. Three months is the standard term most new merchants are assigned, and what our July 2026 check showed. Firm 6-month deals exist but arrive through separate programs like Shopify's 1MBB partnership (US and Canada). Check our 6-month trial tracker for current status.
Sometimes, but not as a seasonal version of the standard 3-month offer. Firm 6-month $1/month terms reach merchants through separate channels and programs — for example, Shopify's 1MBB partnership with Operation HOPE (US and Canada) — rather than the public sign-up page. Availability changes, so check our dedicated 6-month trial guide and its offer-status tracker for what is live in your region right now.
Three numbers, and none of them can be reconstructed afterwards: how many real visitors reached your product page, how many of them bought, and what each sale cost to produce once ads and card fees are counted. Traffic with no sales points at the offer or the price; sales that cost more than they return point at the margin; neither points at the audience. A useful passing bar for this window is a single sale to someone you do not know.
Front-end developer specializing in Shopify since 2017. Experienced in building custom Liquid themes, optimizing storefront performance, and integrating third-party apps. Directs the editorial process behind Shopify Ecom: sets each topic, and checks facts, links, and interactive elements before publication.
This article was written entirely by AI under human editorial direction. The editor sets the topic and structure, runs multi-stage validation on facts, links, and interactive elements, and verifies the output is useful from a business perspective. All claims are checked against official Shopify sources. Details may change — always confirm critical data at shopify.com.
