Shopify maintenance costs anything from your own evenings to a few thousand dollars a month, depending on who does it and how much your store changes. Shopify already looks after hosting and the platform itself, so you are not paying for server upkeep. You are paying for what Shopify leaves to you: your theme, your apps, your product data and checking that customers can still buy. A monthly plan from an agency typically sits between a few hundred and a couple of thousand dollars. Ours, Store Care, runs from $299 to $1,499 a month, and the rest of this guide lets you judge whether you need one at all.
What Shopify does and what it leaves to you
Your Shopify plan fee is separate from maintenance. On Shopify's pricing page, checked on 30 October 2026, Basic is $19, Grow is $49 and Advanced is $299 a month billed yearly, and Plus starts at $2,300. That buys the platform. It does not buy someone to look after your particular store.
| Job | Who does it |
|---|---|
| Servers, hosting, the core platform | Shopify |
| Bug and security fixes to themes from the Theme Store | Shopify, automatically |
| Moving to a new version of your theme | You |
| Checking your code edits survived an update | You |
| Reviewing apps, and removing the ones you no longer use | You |
| Product data, feeds and structured data | You |
| Page speed | Mostly you: your theme, images and apps decide it |
| Testing that checkout still works | You |
The theme line catches people out. Shopify says editor customizations carry over when you update, but code edits only do if they don't conflict with the update, and otherwise you have to copy them across yourself. Its automatic updates are for bug and security fixes, and they aren't supported on uploaded themes. So a store with a custom or heavily edited theme has more upkeep than one on a stock theme.
What maintenance includes
Whoever does it, this is the work. Use the list to check a quote, or to run the store yourself.
- Place a test order through to payment, on a phone
- Check for a newer version of your theme, and whether your code edits would survive
- Review installed apps: remove what you no longer use
- Check page speed on your home, collection and best-selling product pages
- Fix errors in Google Merchant Center and Search Console
- Check that discounts, shipping rates and taxes still work
- Remove staff and collaborator access nobody needs
- Export your products and customers, and keep a copy of your theme
Two of these deserve a note. Test orders: Shopify recommends placing one at setup and whenever you change payment settings. We would go further and test on a schedule, because an app or theme change can break checkout too. Be careful with test mode, because customers can't place live orders while a payment provider is in it. Speed: the targets to aim for are Google's Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint within 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1.
What each option costs
Doing it yourself
The cost is your time, and it is easy to undercount. It costs nothing on an invoice, works well for a small store on a stock theme with few apps, and goes wrong when you are busy or away. Be honest about whether the list above actually gets done each month.
| Hours a month on the checklist and small changes (example) | 8 |
| What an hour of your time is worth (example) | $75 |
| Cost of your time a month | $600 |
A freelancer
Usually hourly, sometimes a small monthly retainer. Rates vary too much by country and experience for one number to help, so get a quote and ask three things: what the minimum charge is, who covers when they are away, and how quickly they respond if checkout breaks at the weekend. A good freelancer can be excellent value for planned work. The gap tends to be monitoring and cover, since nobody is watching the store between jobs.
An in-house hire
The most control, and the most cost. The US median pay for web developers and digital designers was $99,520 in May 2025, before benefits and tools. That makes sense when a store has enough development work to fill the job. Maintenance alone rarely does.
A monthly plan
A fixed fee for a set amount of monitoring, updates and change hours. When you compare plans, compare the hours, the response time and what happens if they miss it, rather than the price alone. For reference, these are our Store Care plans, which are run by GigaCommerce, Gigaverse's commerce team:
| Plan | Monthly | One-time onboarding | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $299 | $399 | Stores under about $250K a year with a small catalog |
| Growth | $699 | $599 | Growing stores, $250K to $2M a year |
| Scale | $1,499 | $999 | $2M a year and up, Shopify Plus, multi-store or multi-market |
Onboarding is waived on annual billing, and annual plans get two months free. See what each plan includes.
Do you need a plan at all?
Probably not if your store is small, runs on a stock theme with a few apps, changes rarely, and you will honestly do the checklist. A plan starts to pay when any of these is true:
- A broken checkout for a few hours would cost more than the monthly fee.
- You have custom code or a theme you can't safely update yourself.
- Requests pile up because nobody has time for small changes.
- You have no idea when the checkout was last tested.
If you are unsure, our free store audit will tell you what needs attention, and you can do the work however you like. If search is the bigger problem, start with the Shopify SEO checklist.
