What a Shopify store actually costs per month in India

As of 2026, a working Indian D2C Shopify store costs roughly ₹30,000–₹1,10,000 a month all-in — plan plus apps plus payment processing plus shipping plus maintenance. The Shopify plan fee, ₹1,994–₹7,447/mo, is usually the smallest line of the five. Order volume, your app stack, and shipping move the real total far more than which plan you pick. Verify current plan prices on shopify.com/in/pricing.

I build and maintain Shopify stores for D2C brands out of Delhi/NCR, so I see the invoices, not just the pricing page. This is the honest monthly arithmetic — five buckets, a line-item table, and a realistic total for a typical store — rather than the ₹1,994 number everyone quotes and then blows past.

Why does the plan fee mislead everyone?

When a founder asks "what does Shopify cost per month," they usually get the plan price back — ₹1,994 on Basic, ₹7,447 on the Shopify plan. That number is real, but it is one line of five, and often the smallest. The other four buckets — apps, payment processing, shipping, and maintenance — scale with your business in a way the flat plan fee does not.

Here is the mental model I use with every client: your monthly Shopify cost is a stack, not a subscription.

Three of those five grow as you grow. That is why two stores on the identical ₹1,994 Basic plan can have wildly different monthly costs — one spending ₹28,000, the other ₹90,000 — with the plan being an identical, trivial slice of both. Let's price each bucket.

Bucket 1 — how much is the Shopify plan itself?

This is the one number everyone already knows, so I'll keep it short. As of 2026 (verify on shopify.com/in/pricing):

Two things matter here beyond the sticker price. First, annual billing knocks roughly 25% off — the single easiest saving on this whole list, and it is set-and-forget. Second, the plan you pick changes the platform transaction fee percentage attached to your payments, which for a high-revenue store matters far more than the ₹5,000 difference in subscription. I unpack the plan tiers themselves in Shopify pricing plans in India for 2026 and the Basic-versus-Advanced decision in Shopify Basic vs Advanced in India.

For most stores, budget ₹1,499–₹7,447/mo for the plan and move on. It is rarely the line worth optimising first.

Bucket 2 — how much do Shopify apps cost per month?

Apps are where the "cheap plan" story falls apart. A functioning Indian D2C store almost never runs on Shopify's stock features alone. Here's a realistic stack and what each layer costs per month:

A lean stack runs ₹3,000–₹8,000/mo; a mature store spends ₹10,000–₹30,000/mo. Two traps here. Most apps bill in USD, so your rupee figure drifts with the exchange rate — a $90 stack is roughly ₹7,500 today and moves without you touching anything. And marketing apps priced by contact count are the fastest-growing line on your whole invoice; a list that triples in a good quarter can quietly triple that app's bill. I go deeper on choosing the stack in the best Shopify apps for Indian D2C, and on the hidden performance tax of a bloated stack in how Shopify app overhead hurts performance.

The discipline that saves the most money here is a quarterly app audit — remove what you no longer use, consolidate overlapping tools. One honest audit frees ₹5,000–₹15,000/mo for most stores.

Bucket 3 — what does payment processing cost?

This is the bucket founders forget entirely, and it is often the second-largest after shipping. Every rupee that passes through checkout carries a processing cost. As of 2026, two components:

1. The gateway's own rate. Roughly 2% on domestic cards and UPI through Razorpay, PayU, or Shopify Payments, plus 18% GST on that fee. International cards run higher.
2. Shopify's platform fee — charged only if you use a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments: about 2% on Basic, 1% on Shopify, 0.5% on Advanced. Shopify Payments waives it to 0%.

Here's what processing costs at different revenue levels, assuming a blended ~2% effective rate on Shopify Payments (no platform fee):

Now add the third-party platform fee if you're not on Shopify Payments: at ₹5L revenue that's an extra ~₹10,000/mo on Basic, ~₹5,000 on Shopify, ~₹2,500 on Advanced — which is exactly why the plan choice matters more for its fee percentage than its subscription price past a few lakh in revenue. The full breakdown, with worked examples and GST, is in Shopify transaction fees in India and the gateway-by-gateway comparison in Shopify payment gateway comparison for India.

Rule of thumb: budget ~2% of monthly revenue for processing on Shopify Payments, or ~3–4% if you're stuck on a third-party gateway on Basic.

Bucket 4 — how much will shipping and RTO cost?

Shipping is usually the largest monthly line for a physical-goods D2C store, and it's the one most under-modelled. Two parts:

Forward shipping — the courier cost per delivered parcel. Through aggregators like Shiprocket or Delhivery, a light (0.5 kg) parcel runs roughly ₹40–₹90 within a zone and more across zones and for heavier items. So per-order shipping of ₹50–₹120 is a fair planning band for most lightweight D2C. At 300 orders that's ₹15,000–₹36,000/mo in forward shipping alone.

RTO — return to origin on undelivered COD orders. This is the silent killer of Indian D2C margins: every failed COD parcel costs forward plus reverse shipping, packaging, and handling, with zero revenue to offset it. At a 25–35% RTO rate — common on COD-heavy stores — this can rival or exceed your forward shipping. I treat RTO in depth, because it deserves it, in the hidden costs of running a Shopify store in India and the prepaid-conversion fixes in reducing checkout abandonment in India.

Shipping and RTO together are where a store's real monthly cost lives — and, usefully, they're the most reducible through address verification, COD confirmation, and prepaid nudges. That's checkout and order-flow work, which is exactly where a developer retainer earns its keep.

Bucket 5 — what should I budget for maintenance?

The final bucket is the one almost everyone budgets at ₹0 and then pays for in lost conversions. A live store needs ongoing work: speed regressions after an app install, checkout fixes, seasonal campaign builds, CRO iteration, theme updates. Two ways to price it:

• Amortised small fixes: ₹5,000–₹15,000/mo for a store that only occasionally needs a developer. A theme tweak or single feature starts at ₹40,000 as a one-off (see my developer rates for India), spread across the quarters between fixes.
• A monthly retainer: ₹40,000–₹80,000/mo once the store is a genuine revenue channel and you want continuous improvement — speed, CRO, new features — rather than reactive firefighting.

You do not need this on day one. But treating a store as build-once-and-forget is precisely how stores get slow and leaky. The trade-off — reactive fixes versus a proper retainer — is the same one I walk through in why your Shopify store isn't converting and Shopify Core Web Vitals and store speed.

So what's the realistic all-in monthly total?

Here's everything stacked, for three honest store stages. All figures INR/month, USD at ~₹83.

A few things jump out. The plan is never more than 10% of the total and usually far less. Shipping is the biggest line at every stage. And the total is dominated by things that scale with your business — which is good news, because they scale with revenue coming in, not ahead of it.

For the small store, the honest headline is: budget ₹30,000–₹45,000/mo all-in, and expect shipping and processing — not the plan — to be most of it. Do not launch a store thinking your monthly cost is ₹1,994; that number is a rounding error against your real stack.

What actually moves the number?

In order of impact, largest lever first — which is the reverse of where most founders start optimising:

1. Shipping and RTO. Negotiate courier rates by zone, cut packaging weight, and attack RTO with address verification and COD confirmation. Biggest single line, most reducible.
2. Payment routing. Use Shopify Payments where available to zero out the platform fee; renegotiate gateway rates as volume grows.
3. App audit. Quarterly cull of unused and overlapping apps. Frees ₹5,000–₹15,000/mo for most stores.
4. Annual plan billing. Set-and-forget ~25% off the smallest line.
5. Maintenance efficiency. A store built clean needs less firefighting — good build economics pay a monthly dividend. That's the argument in the cost to build a Shopify website in India.

Notice the plan fee — the number everyone opens with — barely features. That's the whole point: optimise the buckets that scale, not the one that's flat.

What's next

If you want an honest read on your store's real monthly cost — the whole stack, not the plan fee — my developer rates for India page lays out exactly what each engagement costs and what it returns. Most of the biggest monthly savings above (RTO, payment routing, app bloat, speed) are developer work that pays for itself inside a quarter.

Tell me your monthly revenue, order volume, and COD split at /start and I'll give you a straight, line-by-line estimate of where your money is actually going each month — and which one or two fixes will move it most.

Related reads

• The hidden costs of running a Shopify store in India — the RTO and app-bloat side of the same math, in depth.
• Shopify transaction fees in India — gateway rate vs platform fee vs GST, decoded per order.
• Shopify pricing plans in India for 2026 — the plan tiers and which one to pick.

Sources

• Shopify India pricing
• Shiprocket — shipping rate calculator
• Razorpay — pricing