Key Insights in 60 Seconds
Skim the highlights, then jump to the route you are actually weighing.
What You'll Learn
Two Shopify offers now sit side by side, and they are not the same thing. The public signup gives you 3 days free and then, on most plans, $1/month for 3 months. A store created with an AI tool or a vibe-code partner starts on a free trial that Shopify's Help Center described as “currently 4 months” when we read it on September 13, 2026.
The four months are real, but they belong to a route, not to a coupon. This article covers who gets that route, how selling works while the trial runs, what the two routes cost in year one, and what the older “120-day free trial” phrase was about.
The Quick Verdict
Key takeaway
Find your situation in the first column. The sections after it are the evidence underneath each answer.
Which route, by your situation
| Your situation | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You'll build the storefront in Lovable, Manus, Replit or v0, or from a ChatGPT or Claude store preview, anyway | Claim the new store | The free trial, currently 4 months as of September 2026, starts when you claim; charges wait until it ends even if you pick a plan early |
| You work in a terminal and have a Stripe account | Stripe Projects CLI | If the CLI creates the store on a free trial, the trial starts at creation; a CLI store created on a paid plan has no trial and is billed for that plan. Stripe lists the countries supported for the paid tier of Stripe Projects |
| You want the standard signup and admin, nothing in between | Public signup | 3 days free, then $1/month for 3 months on most plans, then the plan price: one plan-month plus $3 (Basic: $42) more than the AI route in year one if no promotional rate follows the AI-route trial and the $1 rate covers your plan; a tool you won't use isn't worth the free trial |
| You already run a Shopify store | No new trial on that store | Shopify doesn't extend or reset free trials; the trial the Help Center describes belongs to a new store an AI tool or vibe-code partner creates, and connecting a tool to your store creates no new store |
| You read about a "120-day free trial" in an older guide | That was 1MBB's earlier wording | As of September 2026, 1MBB is $1/month for 6 months on Basic in the US and Canada, a paid rate, not a free trial |
What Is Shopify's 4-Month Free Trial?
Key takeaway
Shopify's Help Center page on the free trial gained a section for stores created with AI tools. Its central sentence is short enough to quote in full:
If your store was created with an AI tool, such as the Stripe Projects CLI, or with a vibe code partner, then your store starts with a free trial, currently 4 months.
Read the sentence slowly, because three words in it decide most of what follows.
Free trial means no subscription charge during the period (app charges can still apply), which is not the same as the $1/month rate on the public signup. Created with ties the trial to how the store came into being, not to who you are. And currently marks the length as a value Shopify can change; this article reports it as it stood on September 13, 2026, not as a promise about a store you create next month.
Set beside the public offer, the differences line up in a table.
Two offers side by side
| Public signup | AI-tool route | |
|---|---|---|
| Trial length | 3 days | "Currently 4 months" (Help Center, September 13, 2026) |
| What you pay during it | $0 subscription for 3 days, then $1/month for 3 months on most plans; app charges can still apply | $0 subscription for the whole trial; app charges can still apply |
| What starts the clock | Signing up | Claiming the store (partner-built, or from a ChatGPT or Claude storefront preview) or creating it on a trial (Stripe Projects CLI) |
| If you pick a plan before it ends | Charges start after the 3 days; on most plans the $1/month rate then applies for 3 months | Charges start only after the trial ends |
| What follows | The standard plan price after the 3 promotional months | The plan you chose, billed after the trial ends; no page we read says directly whether a promotional rate comes first; with no plan chosen, the store is paused until you choose one |
Help Center free-trial page and setup page for AI-created stores, shopify.com/pricing and shopify.com/free-trial, read September 13, 2026. The AI-tool trial length is quoted as Shopify states it and can change.
The public offer is the one you meet at Shopify's free-trial page: “Try Shopify free for 3 days, no credit card required”, after which, as the pricing page put it on September 13, 2026, “most plans” start at $1 per month for the first 3 months before switching to standard pricing. The Help Center's free-trial page adds the boundary that applies to any such rate: “Promotional pricing is only available to eligible merchants on eligible plans.”
What the AI-tool sentence does not tell you is which plans the trial applies to. The Help Center sentence names no plan. The same free-trial page says in a general section that “The free trial allows you to test out various Shopify plans, including Basic, Grow, and Advanced”, but neither its AI-tool section, the setup page for AI-created stores nor the plan-features page says whether that list covers the 4-month trial; the note in the section on the $1 rate lists what we checked and when.
The AI-tool section is recent. An archived copy of the free-trial page from July 23, 2026 does not contain it, and the live page did on September 13, 2026, which is the closest window we can give for when it appeared. We found no dated announcement of the route on stripe.com's newsroom or on shopify.com/news in the searches we ran, so Help Center pages are the only official record of it we have; the surfaces and the date are in that same note.
Who Gets the 4-Month Trial?
Key takeaway
The Help Center pages we read describe three doors into the trial. A vibe-code partner creates the store and hands it to you through a claim link; the Shopify plugin for ChatGPT and the Shopify connector for Claude build a store from a storefront preview that you claim; the Stripe Projects CLI creates it from a terminal, on a trial unless a paid plan is chosen at creation.
Connecting an AI tool to a store you already own does not create a new store, and the Perplexity connector manages an existing store only.
The Four Vibe-Code Partners Shopify Names
Key takeaway
Shopify keeps a Help Center page listing the vibe-code partners it works with. On September 13, 2026 it named four: Lovable, Manus, Replit and v0 by Vercel. Shopify's Field CTO listed the same four in a May 2026 essay for the enterprise blog:
These apps include Lovable, Replit, Manus, and v0 from Vercel, which also offers developer products like its Marketplace and CLI integrations.
The partner builds the store, but the trial does not start at that moment. You start the claim from the partner's platform, the partner sends you a claim link, and, in the Help Center's words, “Claiming the store connects it to your Shopify account and makes you the store owner.” The same page adds that “Claiming the store also starts your free trial.”
Lovable's own documentation puts a deadline on that step: a new store has to be claimed within 30 days, because Shopify removes development stores that stay unclaimed for 30 days. What each partner says about the trial itself is in the table.
The four partners, as Shopify and their own docs describe them
| Partner | Creates a new store / connects one you own | What its own docs say about the trial | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lovable | Creates a new store, or connects a store you already own | Claiming "starts a separate 120-day free trial on a Shopify subscription" (Lovable's wording; see the 120-days section below) | Lovable docs |
| Manus | Creates a new store, or connects a store you already own | Claiming "prompts you to log in to Shopify or start a free trial"; no length stated in the pages we read on September 13, 2026 | Manus integration page |
| Replit | Creates a new store only; Shopify says Replit's setup flow "doesn't include connecting a store that you already own" | "Claiming starts a free trial"; no length stated in the pages we read on September 13, 2026 | Replit docs |
| v0 by Vercel | Creates a new store, or connects a store you already own | "Spin up a free test store or connect you existing store" (sic); the page names a free test store, not a trial, as we read it on September 14, 2026 | Vercel Marketplace |
The first two columns follow Shopify's vibe-code partners page, read September 13, 2026; the third quotes each partner's own documentation, which is the partner's description and not Shopify's.
Shopify itself adds a warning on the same page: “Availability and supported features change, so confirm what a partner supports in that partner's own documentation before you start.” Treat the table as a dated snapshot for the same reason.
Shopify's Learn With Shopify channel walks through the Lovable version of this route, including the create-or-connect step, in a May 2026 tutorial. It shows the build; the trial length in this article comes from the Help Center, not from the video.
The Stripe Projects CLI Route
Key takeaway
Stripe Projects is a plugin for the Stripe CLI. In Stripe's description it “provisions and manages third-party services (such as hosting, databases, auth, AI, and observability) from the terminal”, creating accounts, syncing credentials and handling billing through Stripe. Shopify is one of the services it can provision, and the catalogue at projects.dev describes what that gives you:
The Shopify app lets developers provision a fully hosted Shopify online store directly from Stripe Projects – no separate signup or context switching. Choose a plan, launch your storefront, and manage billing through Stripe, so you can go from idea to selling in just a few clicks.
The commands, as Stripe's documentation and the projects.dev card list them:
stripe plugin install projectsinstalls the plugin into the Stripe CLI.stripe projects initstarts a project.stripe projects add shopify/storeadds the Shopify store to it.
Here a trial, if the store starts on one, begins at creation, not at a claim. The Help Center: “If the store starts on a free trial instead, then that trial starts when the store is created, because the store is yours from the moment the CLI creates it.”
The word instead matters, because “A store created through the Stripe Projects CLI can instead start on a paid plan, because the developer or AI agent chooses the plan when creating the store”, and such a store “doesn't include a free trial”.
Stripe's documentation says “You only need to add your payment method to Stripe once”, and that when you select a paid plan in the CLI, Stripe tokenizes it into a Shared Payment Token that the provider charges; neither that page nor the Shopify pages we read say whether creating a store on the free trial needs a payment method.
On the Shopify side, once the store is on a paid plan, “your Shopify subscription uses Stripe as the payment method”, the bills are charged to Stripe, and that payment method is managed “through the Stripe Projects CLI, not in the Shopify admin”. The Help Center adds: “To use a different payment method for your Shopify subscription, add one in your billing settings in the Shopify admin.”
Stripe's Projects documentation lists 62 providers under “Available providers”, described as providers that “co-designed the integration protocol with Stripe”, and when we read the full table on September 13, 2026 Shopify was not among them. The same page points to stripe projects catalog “to view the most current list of providers” or to projects.dev/providers, and that catalogue, read the same day, shows a Shopify card with the stripe projects add shopify/store command.
Take the trial mechanics from the Help Center, which is Shopify's own statement, and the command from projects.dev.
Paying for a plan through Stripe Projects is available where Stripe supports its paid tier. As of September 13, 2026, that list held 81 country codes across 7 regions, and Stripe states that it “might be updated as needed”. The page gives codes only, no country names.
Countries supported for the paid tier of Stripe Projects
| Region | Codes | ISO country codes as Stripe lists them |
|---|---|---|
| Africa | 6 | EH, GQ, MW, NA, RW, TN |
| Asia Pacific | 14 | AF, AU, BN, HK, KR, LK, MN, MO, MV, NF, NZ, PG, SG, TM |
| European Union | 30 | AT, BE, BG, BL, CY, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GF, GR, HR, HU, IE, IT, LT, LU, LV, MT, NL, PL, PT, RO, SE, SI, SK, YT |
| Europe | 8 | AD, AL, CH, GB, GG, GI, GL, SM |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | 13 | AR, BR, CO, DO, GT, GY, JM, MX, NI, PY, SV, TT, VE |
| Middle East | 5 | AE, JO, KW, PS, QA |
| North America | 5 | BM, CA, KY, PM, US |
docs.stripe.com/projects/paid-tier-countries, read September 13, 2026. The page lists ISO codes without country names and says: “This list might be updated as needed.”
Two things the pages we read leave open, and the first is the shape of the store you get. The Help Center pages we read do not describe the scope of admin access for a store created through the CLI; the closest they come are the sentences above, which place the Stripe payment method in the CLI and a different payment method in the Shopify admin's billing settings, but none of them describes the rest of the admin.
The second is the number itself. Stripe's own pages, the Projects documentation, the paid-tier list and the projects.dev card, do not name a trial length for Shopify at all; of the pages we read, only Shopify's Help Center gives the “4 months” figure. The surfaces and dates for both are in the note in the section on the $1 rate.
Do not confuse the route with the payment gateway. Where Shopify Payments is supported in your country, Stripe is not available to activate as a separate gateway, because Stripe is Shopify Payments' banking partner. Stripe Projects is about how the store is created and how its subscription is billed, not about how your customers pay.
What Doesn't Create a Trial Store
Key takeaway
Three things sit close to the routes and create no new store.
- ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity on a store you own. Shopify's AI-tools section says the ChatGPT plugin and the Claude connector “can build a store from a storefront preview and manage a store that you own”, while the Perplexity connector “manages an existing store only”. Managing a store you already own creates no new store. Building one from a preview does: Shopify's setup page for AI-created stores covers the case where you “created the store from a preview in an AI tool, such as the Shopify plugin for ChatGPT or the Shopify connector for Claude”, and says “Your free trial begins when you claim the store, not when the store is created.” The ChatGPT and Claude pages say standard plan pricing applies to a store created or run this way, with no extra Shopify fee; none of the three connector pages themselves, as we read them on September 13, 2026, names a free trial or a trial length, and the note in the section on the $1 rate lists them.
- A partner tool connected to a store you already own. The trial the Help Center describes belongs to a store the tool creates: for a partner-built store, “Claiming the store also starts your free trial.” Connecting an existing store is a different action, one that Lovable, Manus and v0 offer and Replit does not, and Shopify's general rule stands: “Shopify doesn't extend or reset free trials or promotional pricing.”
- mock.shop. Shopify's blog describes it as a public set of demo stores with realistic product data that needs “no existing store, API key, or form”. It is where an assistant can practise before a store exists; going live means pointing the build at a real store's domain and Storefront API token, and that real store is created by one of the routes above.
Shopify's own in-admin AI, Sidekick and Shopify Magic, is also not a creation route: it works inside a store that already exists, whichever route created it.
Can You Sell During the 4 Free Months?
Key takeaway
The store starts closed. The Help Center's setup page for AI-created stores puts it plainly: it “starts with its storefront password protected, so customers can't buy from it yet”, and to remove the password and start selling you “choose a paid plan in your Shopify admin”.
The same page adds: “Choosing a plan is one part of getting ready to sell. You also set up payments, shipping, taxes, and your store policies, and you do this in your Shopify admin rather than in the AI tool or the partner platform.”
The obvious worry is that choosing a plan means paying for one. It does not, while the trial runs:
If you choose a paid plan during your free trial, then charges start after the free trial period ends.
So the order of events is short:
Replit's documentation spells out the payment step: “a paid plan is required to process live orders”, and live capture “requires the claiming Shopify account to finish payments setup and KYC”. Shopify's free-trial page sets a payment condition for any trial store too: “To sell and accept orders during your free trial, you need to set up a payment provider.”
If you are not ready to sell, leave the password on and choose the plan later; if you are, choose it and set up payments, shipping, taxes and store policies in the admin.
What Happens When the 4 Months End?
Key takeaway
The end of the trial is a choice, not a bill. The Help Center says: “If your free trial ends before you choose a paid plan, then your store is paused until you choose one.” There is no grace period to ask for: “It's not possible to extend the duration of your free trial period”, and more generally, “Shopify doesn't extend or reset free trials or promotional pricing.”
Shopify publishes its standard plan prices. On monthly billing, Basic is $39 a month, Grow is $105 a month and Advanced is $399 a month, as Shopify's pricing page showed on September 13, 2026. This article's arithmetic uses monthly billing throughout.
What the first invoice after a trial looks like, and whether Pause and Build is open to a store that is not ready, belong to our guide to Shopify trial billing traps.
On the Stripe Projects route the bill lands in a different place: once the store is on a paid plan, the Shopify subscription uses Stripe as the payment method, which you manage through the CLI, not in the Shopify admin. To use a different payment method, Shopify says to add one in your billing settings in the Shopify admin.
Does the $1/Month Rate Follow the Free Trial?
Key takeaway
Shopify's billing page on offers describes promotional pricing in general terms: “Shopify might offer promotional pricing on monthly plans for new merchants, such as a reduced rate for a set period after your free trial ends.” The free-trial page adds the boundary: “Promotional pricing is only available to eligible merchants on eligible plans.”
Whether the $1/month rate follows the 4-month trial is the question those sentences do not answer. The same free-trial page says: “Following the conclusion of your free trial, you're billed for your selected plan, potentially benefiting from a promotional rate for a set period before transitioning to the standard plan pricing.”
The page for the Shopify plugin for ChatGPT says: “Standard Shopify plan pricing applies to a store that you create or run this way, and there's no extra Shopify fee for using the plugin.” The page for the Shopify connector for Claude says the same of the connector. The free-trial page and the ChatGPT and Claude pages read differently, and none of the pages we checked says directly whether a promotional rate follows a trial on the AI-tool route.
Budget on the standard plan price from month five, and treat any promotional rate that appears in your admin as a bonus rather than a plan.
Some statements on this page are absences in what we read, not rules Shopify or Stripe publish.
- Whether the $1/month promotional rate follows the 4-month trial: not stated directly on the Help Center free-trial page, its offers page, the setup page for AI-created stores, the vibe-code partners page, or shopify.com/pricing.
- Which plans the 4-month trial applies to: the free-trial page names Basic, Grow and Advanced for its free trial in general, but none of its AI-tool section, the setup page for AI-created stores or the plan-features page says whether that list covers the 4-month trial.
- The scope of admin access for a store created through the Stripe Projects CLI: not stated on the setup page for AI-created stores, the vibe-code partners page, the AI-tools considerations page, or the AI-tools index.
- A trial length for Shopify on Stripe's side: not stated in the Stripe Projects documentation, its paid-tier country list, its templates page, the projects.dev Shopify card, or Stripe's Shopify app page.
- A trial or trial length on the connector pages: not stated on the ChatGPT plugin, Claude connector, or Perplexity connector pages themselves; the ChatGPT and Claude pages refer you to the setup page for AI-created stores, which says a new store created with an AI tool starts on a free trial.
- A trial length in Replit's, Manus's or Vercel's own documentation: not stated on the pages linked in the partner table.
- A dated announcement of the route: not found on stripe.com's newsroom or shopify.com/news in the searches we ran.
All of these were read on September 13, 2026. If Shopify or Stripe publishes any of them, the absence is what changes on this page.
What Each Route Costs in Year One
Key takeaway
The comparison below counts the subscription only, on monthly billing in US dollars, and assumes, as of September 2026, that the AI-tool route runs its full trial, currently 4 months, with no promotional rate after it, and that the public signup gives 3 days free and then $1/month for 3 months on the plan you pick, which Shopify's pricing page offers on “most plans” without naming them. Domain, apps and card fees are left out because they are identical on either route.
Take Basic at $39 a month. On the AI-tool route, if no promotional rate follows the 4-month trial, the first four months cost $0 and the next eight cost 8 × $39, which is $312 for the year. On the public signup, if the $1 rate covers Basic, the 3 free days sit inside month one, the first three months cost 3 × $1, and the remaining nine cost 9 × $39, which is $354. The gap is $42: one month of the plan plus the three promotional dollars.
Year-one subscription by route
| Plan (monthly price) | AI-tool route: 4 × $0 + 8 × plan, if no promotional rate follows the trial | Public signup: 3 × $1 + 9 × plan, if the $1 rate covers your plan | Difference, if both route conditions hold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic ($39) | $312 | $354 | $42 |
| Grow ($105) | $840 | $948 | $108 |
| Advanced ($399) | $3,192 | $3,594 | $402 |
Plan prices as shown on shopify.com/pricing and held in this site's pricing module (Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 per month, monthly billing, verified September 13, 2026); promotional term from the same page. Subscription only, USD.
The gap has the same shape on every plan in the table: one plan-month plus $3. That is the subscription-side money advantage of the AI-tool route if no promotional rate follows its trial and the $1 rate covers your plan; it scales with the plan you pick, not with anything you do.
What the public route costs once a domain, apps and card fees are added, which is where most of a first year's spend actually goes, is worked through in our guide to what the $1 route really costs in year one.
Which Route Fits You?
The verdict at the top answers by profile. The quiz below answers by combination: how you want the store built, whether your country is on Stripe's paid-tier list, whether Stripe as the payment method for your Shopify subscription suits you, and when you want real orders. Every route it returns is a legitimate one; none is a wrong answer.
4 Months or 120 Days? Untangling the Old 1MBB Wording
Key takeaway
Search for a four-month Shopify trial and the older results talk about a “120-day free trial”. Wherever the phrase appeared in the dozen non-Shopify pages we read at the top of that search on September 13, 2026, it referred to 1MBB, Shopify's program for Black-owned businesses, in a form the program no longer takes; a Shopify community thread from mid-2025 closed the question the same way.
Whether a 120-day free trial is still on offer at all has its own short answer in our FAQ: Is the Shopify 120-day free trial still available?
As of September 2026, 1MBB is not a free trial. As Shopify's 1MBB page showed on September 13, 2026, it offers the Basic plan at $1/month for the first 6 months, for merchants in the US and Canada only: a paid promotional rate on one plan in two countries. What the deal is today, in full, is in our guide to Shopify's $1 for 6 months deal.
Then there is the newer use of the same number. Lovable's integration documentation says claiming a store “starts a separate 120-day free trial on a Shopify subscription”, while Shopify's Help Center says “currently 4 months” as of September 2026. We read those as two wordings of one period rather than two offers: 120 days is about four months, and both tie the start to claiming the store, though neither page says they are the same period.
The difference to watch is currently, which only Shopify's version carries.
Four phrases, four referents
| Phrase | Where you see it | What it refers to | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| "120-day free trial" | Shopify's own 1MBB page in 2021, third-party guides, and Shopify Community threads from 2023 and 2025 | 1MBB, Shopify's program for Black-owned businesses, in an earlier form | Not the current form: 1MBB is $1/month for 6 months on Basic, US and Canada |
| "Free trial, currently 4 months" | Shopify Help Center, free-trial page | A store created with an AI tool or a vibe-code partner | Live on September 13, 2026; "currently" means the length can change |
| "Separate 120-day free trial" | Lovable's integration documentation | The trial that claiming a Lovable-built store starts, in Lovable's wording | 120 days is close to 4 months, and both Lovable and Shopify say claiming the store starts the trial |
| "3 days free" | shopify.com/free-trial and shopify.com/pricing | The public signup trial, followed by $1/month for 3 months on most plans | Live on September 13, 2026 |
Shopify Help Center free-trial and vibe-code partners pages, shopify.com/1mbb, shopify.com/pricing and Lovable's integration documentation, read September 13, 2026; older third-party guides and Shopify Community threads as found in search that day; the 2021 1MBB wording from an archived copy of shopify.com/1mbb, checked September 14, 2026.
The Bottom Line
Key takeaway
The trial length is what Shopify's Help Center called “currently 4 months” on September 13, 2026; this article reports it as it stood that day, not as a promise about a store you create next month.
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
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