Shopify Starter Plan: What You Keep and When to Move

You went to sign up for the $5 plan everyone still writes about, and it is not in the form. Or you are already on it, and you have just noticed that Shopify's pricing page does not mention your plan any more, that the link your Help Center article gives for your own transaction fees goes nowhere, and that nobody has emailed you about any of it.

Nothing has gone wrong with your store. Shopify closed the Starter plan to new stores, and left everyone already on it exactly where they were. What follows is the part almost no page on the subject covers: what you keep, what the plan never did, and the one number that decides whether staying still saves you money. If you never had the plan and came here for the price, jump to what to start on instead — that decision does not need the arithmetic in between.

The Quick Verdict

Find your row, then read the arithmetic underneath it.

Where the Starter Plan Stands Today

The status of the plan is not ambiguous, and it does not need interpreting. Shopify's Help Center page for Starter carries a two-sentence notice, and the first sentence settles the question.

Two other surfaces agree with it in their own way. Shopify's pricing page lists four plans — Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus — and the word Starter does not appear on it (read August 29, 2026), and the plan's own marketing address, shopify.com/starter, answers with a redirect to a free-trial offer and an empty body.

It is not only Starter. The Retail plan — the sibling tier that paired POS Pro with Starter-level online tools — carries word for word the same notice on its own Help Center page: the Retail plan is not available to new stores, and a merchant who changes plan cannot revert back to it. The Lite plan page carries the same notice word for word.

Read together, that is a whole light tier closed rather than one plan withdrawn — all three notices read on August 29, 2026. Shopify defines the term "new store" on neither page.

Why Nobody Can Give You the Closing Date

If you ever have to show when your plan changed — to an accountant closing a year, a partner reviewing your account, or the other side of a dispute — the record that will hold is your own billing history, because no Shopify page we have found publishes a date for the change. Several roundups do print a specific day. None of them cites a Shopify page for it, and the date most commonly repeated falls after our own corpus had already recorded the closure notice as live.

So this article dates its reading rather than the event. Where you see "read August 29, 2026" below, that is the day we opened the page — not the day Shopify decided anything. Treat that distinction as the working rule for this whole topic.

Does the Answer Change in India, South Africa or the UK?

The question arrives constantly, and it arrives with a country attached, because the plan was cheap enough to be the obvious entry point in markets where $39 a month is a real decision. The notice on the plan page carries no geographic qualifier of any kind, and neither does the pricing overview.

What you can act on is narrower, and more useful than a ruling would be: the plan your store is on and the rate it is billed at both appear in your own Shopify admin. That is the country-specific answer for your store, and it does not depend on anybody's reading of a global page — including ours.

What the Starter Plan Actually Is

Most of the confusion about this plan comes from a single assumption: that it was a cheap version of a Shopify store. It was not. It was a different product with a different job, and Shopify says so in the first line of the page describing it.

The practical shape of that is a product link you paste into an Instagram bio, a DM, a newsletter or somebody else's website, which opens a page you barely control and hands the buyer to Shopify's checkout. The storefront is incidental; the link is the product. That is why the limits below read as strange restrictions if you expected a store, and as perfectly sensible if you expected a link.

Starter column: Shopify Help Center, Shopify Starter plan, read August 29, 2026.

What You Keep If You Are Already On It

A closed plan is not a cancelled plan. Nothing in what Shopify publishes suggests a forced move, and the plan page itself describes exactly one route off Starter: a plan change the merchant makes. So the honest framing for an existing merchant is that your terms did not move — the documentation did.

Read the Starter column as a dated record, not as a price list. The $5 a month, the 5% in-person rate and the 5% surcharge on outside gateways come from an archived snapshot of the plan page taken April 15, 2026, because no live Shopify page we have found prints them any more. Basic's column is current: $39 a month, 2.9% + 30¢ online, 2.6% + 10¢ in person and a 2% third-party surcharge, read August 29, 2026.

Starter figures are the last Shopify published, from archived snapshots of the plan page (April 15, 2026) and the pricing page (July 20, 2026). Basic figures: Shopify plans and pricing, read August 29, 2026. Seat counts: user account limits by plan; location limits: set up locations. US rates, month-to-month billing.

Why the $5 Is No Longer on Any Shopify Page

This is the part that turns a documentation curiosity into a decision. The Help Center page for the plan does not print a rate. Instead it says: "The Starter plan offers competitive transaction fees. Review the Starter plan to find the specific transaction fees for your region." The link inside that sentence points at shopify.com/starter — the address that now returns a redirect to a free-trial offer, with nothing about Starter at either end of it.

A merchant on this plan therefore cannot verify their own rate against public documentation. The official route Shopify hands them ends nowhere, so the only current, authoritative figure for what they pay is the one in their own admin and on their own invoice. That is why every Starter number on this page carries a snapshot date instead of a claim about today, and it is the single strongest reason to check Settings, Plan before acting on any article about this plan — including this one.

When Basic Starts Costing Less Than Starter

Every plan comparison on this topic starts and stops at "$5 versus $39", which is the half of the trade that flatters Starter. The other half is the card rate, and it runs the other way. Put both on the same axis and there is one point where the lines meet — everything before it favours staying, everything after it favours moving.

The Crossover, Worked Out

Write the two monthly bills as formulas, where V is a month of online card volume. Starter costs $5 plus 5% of V. Basic costs $39 plus 2.9% of V. They are equal when the subscription gap equals the rate gap applied to the volume:

($39 − $5) ÷ (5% − 2.9%) = $34 ÷ 0.021 = $1,619 a month. That figure assumes both plans on Shopify Payments, US rates, month-to-month billing — and it is the number every other mention on this page refers back to.

One property of it is worth understanding rather than memorising. The per-transaction fee drops out of the comparison because it is the same on both plans. A store doing that volume across thirty orders and a store doing it across three thousand cross over at exactly the same place. That is a feature of the current rate table rather than a law of plan pricing — and the moment the two fixed fees differ, as they do in person, the single answer disappears.

If Your Checkout Runs on an Outside Gateway

Not every store runs on Shopify Payments, and for those that do not, the arithmetic above is the wrong arithmetic. What Shopify charges you then is a surcharge on top of whatever your provider takes — and your provider charges the same on either plan, so its fee cancels out of the comparison exactly the way the 30¢ did.

The surcharge gap is wider than the card-rate gap: 5% on Starter against 2% on Basic. So the same $34 subscription gap is repaid three points at a time instead of two, and the crossover lands at $1,133 a month rather than $1,619. If you do not know which route your checkout uses, that is the first thing to settle — it moves your break-even by nearly $500 of monthly volume.

Why In-Person Sales Have No Single Crossover

Here the tidy cancellation stops working. Starter's last published card-present rate was 5% with no per-transaction fee; Basic's is 2.6% plus 10¢. Because those fixed components differ, the number of taps changes the comparison: a market stall selling forty $8 items and a studio selling one $320 piece put the same money through the terminal and land in different places.

We are not going to print a single in-person break-even, because there isn't one. If counter sales are a meaningful share of your revenue, run the two formulas on your own average order value rather than trusting a headline figure — including any headline figure in an article that has not asked you how big your orders are.

Run It on Your Own Volume

The calculator below starts on the crossover itself, so the first thing you see is the article's own number — then change the volume to your real one and watch which side wins. Above $5,000 a month it stops, deliberately: at that point the useful comparison is no longer Starter against Basic but when the next plan up pays for itself, which is worked out in our plan-cost guide.

What Starter Never Included

These are not features Shopify removed when it closed the plan. They were never on it, and they are named on the plan's own page — four of them in a single sentence and all five in the table beneath it — which is what makes them the cleanest part of this decision: a ceiling you have already hit is not a trade-off to weigh, it is an answer you have already been given.

The last of those five needs a note of its own, because Shopify's own advice around it has aged badly. Two further boundaries sit beside that list rather than in it — Shopify Flow and Magic's theme blocks.

What In-Person Selling Looks Like on Starter

Shopify's POS subscription overview says that all paid subscription plans include some in-person selling features, and that extra retail features come from subscribing to POS Pro at an additional monthly cost per location. The Starter plan page says that Starter does not support upgrading your POS plan to the POS Pro subscription. Those two sentences describe one boundary, not a disagreement: the base level is there, the paid upgrade on top of it is not.

Shopify Flow and Magic Theme Blocks

The two look like the same kind of limit and are documented very differently, which matters if you go and check for yourself. For Shopify Magic's generated theme blocks there is an explicit sentence: the feature is not available on the Starter plan, which uses the Spotlight theme and does not support adding custom theme sections or blocks. The reason is stated alongside the rule, so nothing is left to interpret.

Shopify Flow works the other way. Its page says the app is free on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, and Starter is simply absent from the list — the same shape as the B2B documentation, which names those four plans too.

That is a plan list, not a prohibition, and no page we have found states the prohibition directly; the surfaces we read for this are named in the box near the top of this page. Practically the answer is the same, but if you are arguing it with a developer or a support agent, know which of the two you are holding.

Stay or Move? Five Questions

The verdict table at the top answers by profile. This answers by combination — because the real decision is rarely one signal. A merchant under the crossover who needs a second admin seat and a merchant over it who needs nothing are both easy; the awkward cases are the crossings, and those are what the five questions below sort out.

Can You Go Back to Starter After Upgrading?

You have met this twice already — in the insights at the top and in the last row of the verdict table. Here is the sentence underneath it, because it is what makes every earlier decision on this page final: if moving up were reversible, a merchant near the crossover could just try Basic for a quarter and come back.

Combine that with the closure notice and both directions are shut: you cannot downgrade into Starter from a paid plan, and you cannot open a second store on it either. So treat the move as permanent and time it on the arithmetic, not on a hunch — one month above the crossover is a poor reason to spend a plan you cannot get back, and six months below it is a poor reason to sit on a ceiling you have already hit.

Pausing Is Also an Exit

Seasonal merchants reach for the pause plan for exactly the right reasons. Selecting Pause and Build changes your subscription fee to $9 USD per month, you keep access to the admin and your products stay visible, and checkout, the POS channel, discounts, gift cards and abandoned-checkout recovery are all deactivated so nobody can buy. On a plan you can return to, that is a clean way to spend a quiet quarter.

The same Shopify page then adds the sentence that changes the calculation for you specifically: "However, when you decide to unpause, you must select a new plan, as your old plan is no longer valid." Put that beside the Starter closure notice and the practical instruction writes itself.

Before you pause, treat it as leaving Starter for good, and if that is not what you intended, check the options your own admin offers you before the pause rather than after it. The wider mechanics of pausing, cancelling and what each one bills are covered in our guide to Shopify's billing traps.

If You Came Here for the $5 Plan

If you arrived looking for the cheapest way onto Shopify, the honest answer is that the rung you read about is gone and two others exist — and they are not interchangeable, because they differ in what the customer can actually do.

Basic is the plan for a store people can visit and buy from. It runs $39 a month, or $29 a month billed annually, after a 3-day free trial with no card required and $1 a month for the first 3 months on most plans — "most", not all, and Plus is outside it. If you want the thing Starter never was, this is where it starts: start the three-day free trial.

Before the second rung, one route that needs no plan decision at all. If what attracted you to Starter was selling from a site you already own, the Buy Button channel is included on every plan — the mechanics, and the other four ways to do it, are in our guide to adding Shopify to an existing website. You never needed Starter for that part.

And if you are hesitating between tiers rather than between Shopify and nothing, four questions settle which plan is yours — none of which is the plan this article is about. What follows is the one rung that answers a different question entirely.

The Agentic plan is the genuinely free rung, with a genuine catch. Shopify publishes it at $0 a month with no subscription fee for merchants who are not already using Shopify as their ecommerce platform, and the fees its page still names are Shopify Payments or third-party transaction fees on what sells, plus any paid apps or services you add.

The catch is written on the same page: you can use the Online Store channel to build and prepare a store, but your online store stays password protected, so customers can't visit it, and customers can't complete a purchase in your online store checkout. It is a different entry with a different boundary — a listing and a build surface, not a cheaper Basic. The wider picture of how agent-driven checkouts work is the subject of our guide to agentic commerce.

Pick by what the customer has to be able to do. If they must reach a storefront and buy from it today, that is Basic, and the trial starts it this afternoon. If they only have to find you while you build, that is Agentic, and it costs nothing to sit there. Neither one is a version of Starter, and neither one is worth delaying while you wait for Starter to come back.

The Bottom Line

The reason this topic is confusing has nothing to do with Shopify being unclear and everything to do with timing: most of what is written about the Starter plan was written while it was still on sale. The plan page itself is blunt, and once you have read it, the rest is arithmetic you can do in a minute.

Frequently Asked Questions