Shopify or a custom store: choosing by volume

"Shopify, or something of our own?" The question comes up in almost every ecommerce project we work on, and it is almost always framed wrong. People treat it as a question of identity (serious merchants supposedly own their platform) or as a question of this month's budget. It is first a question of cost structure: Shopify costs like a percentage of your sales, while a custom store costs like a stair step. Until you put the two curves side by side, you are choosing blind.

One clarification before we start, because it colours everything that follows: we build custom websites. We would make more money selling you one. This article still concludes that most early-stage stores should start on Shopify, because that is what the math says when you do it honestly.

The short answer, for the busy

For an early-stage store in Quebec, Shopify is almost always the right call: the Basic plan costs $49 CAD per month ($37 on annual billing), card payments run 2.8% + 30¢ through Shopify Payments, and you can launch in weeks. Its cost behaves like a percentage of sales, though: plans climb (Grow at $132, Advanced at $517, Plus from $3,400 per month), apps pile up, and a 2% surcharge applies on Basic if you use a payment processor other than Shopify Payments. A custom store instead costs a fixed step, independent of volume, and saves you nothing on cards: Stripe charges 2.9% + 30¢ in Canada. The crossover point is therefore not a revenue number. It is the moment a structural need, per-customer B2B pricing, genuinely bilingual content, or an unusual checkout flow, pushes you toward Plus or toward a pile of workarounds.

Shopify: a slope that follows your sales

On Shopify's Canadian pricing page, as of July 2026, the Basic plan costs $49 CAD per month, or $37 per month on annual billing. That is the number everyone knows, and it is the least interesting one. Shopify's real pricing model lives in three mechanisms that track your growth.

First, the plan ladder. Basic at $49, Grow at $132, Advanced at $517, Plus from $3,400 per month. Nobody climbs it out of vanity: each tier unlocks reports, staff accounts, slightly better card rates (2.8% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.6% on Grow, 2.4% on Advanced), and features held back for the next rung. A growing store eventually climbs: its needs pull it up, one rung at a time.

Second, apps. The app store is Shopify's great strength and its quietest cost mechanism. Product reviews, advanced filtering, bundles, subscriptions, custom fields: every need beyond the basics is solved in three clicks by an app, and every app brings its own monthly fee. None of them is expensive alone. The accumulation is what pinches: five or six apps at a few dozen dollars each, and your real software bill has doubled or tripled the plan price without anyone ever making an investment decision.

Third, payments. Use Shopify Payments and you pay the posted rate. If you have to route payments through another processor, Shopify adds a 2% fee on every transaction on Basic (1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced). A genuine percentage of your sales, charged simply for not using their processor.

None of this is a scandal. It is a coherent business model: pay little at the start, pay more as the platform keeps earning its place. You just have to see it for what it is: a slope, not a price.

Custom: a step, not a slope

A custom store inverts the structure. The main cost is a step: design and development, paid once or smoothed into a fixed monthly subscription (the model we work on), then hosting and maintenance that do not move with your sales. Whether you take in $5,000 or $500,000 a month, the step stays the same height.

Let's kill one myth right away: going custom does not save you card fees. A processor like Stripe charges 2.9% + 30¢ per domestic card transaction in Canada, a hair from Shopify Payments' 2.8% + 30¢ on Basic. Anyone selling you a custom store "to avoid transaction fees" is comparing badly: processing cards costs a percentage everywhere, from everyone.

The step, meanwhile, has a high and honest price: a serious custom build runs to thousands of dollars, not hundreds, whether it is billed upfront or spread over a subscription. It is the same trade-off as for a brochure site, the one we walk through in building your website yourself or hiring an agency: you pay for a structure that fits the business, instead of bending the business to fit the structure.

The crossover is not a revenue number

We sometimes get asked: "at what revenue does custom become worth it?" The question assumes Shopify's slope crosses the custom step at some precise volume. In practice, since card fees are equivalent on both sides, Shopify's slope is gentle: a plan, a few apps. A store with a standard catalog can sit on Grow or Advanced for years and lose almost nothing by it. If the math were only about volume, Shopify would win nearly every time.

The real crossover does not happen along the slope. It happens at the cliff: the moment a structural need requires the Plus plan, from $3,400 per month, roughly $41,000 a year. At that level the question changes in kind. You are no longer comparing a $49 subscription to a development project; you are comparing two investments of the same order of magnitude, and custom then offers something Plus will never sell you: a platform that adopts your rules instead of renting you its own.

The other road to the crossover is more insidious: the workaround pile. When your team is maintaining eight apps, two private integrations, and sync scripts to make Shopify do something it does not want to do, you are already paying the price of custom, in loose parts, without any of the benefits.

Where Shopify pinches

Three specific zones, all verified against the official documentation in July 2026.

B2B pricing. Since April 2026, core B2B features (company profiles, net payment terms, price catalogs) are included on all paid plans, a real improvement. The limits arrive quickly all the same: at most three active catalogs outside Plus, and assigning a catalog directly to a specific company, deposits, and partial payments remain Plus-only. If your model runs on prices negotiated customer by customer, you are standing exactly where the platform pinches.

Bilingual content. On Shopify, translation is a layer sitting on top of the primary content: every page exists first in the primary language, translations live above it, and the store falls back to the primary language whenever a translation is missing. For a Quebec store, where the French version has to exist and be of comparable quality (we explain why in starting an online store in Quebec), the model works, but it stays a layer: translations drift out of sync, content injected by third-party apps sometimes escapes it, and nobody owns the gap. A genuinely bilingual site, designed as two equal versions of the same business, is structurally simpler on a platform built for it.

Checkout. Shopify's checkout is deliberately locked down, and that is exactly what makes it reliable. The trade-off is written plainly in the documentation: extensions that modify the information, shipping, and payment steps are available only to stores on Plus. If your sales process needs an unusual flow, a configurator, assisted selling, atypical shipping rules, you hit that wall, and the door out is labelled Plus.

Where Shopify wins without debate

Let's be just as clear in the other direction. A standard catalog, a small team, a launch measured in weeks rather than months: Shopify wins, and by a wide margin. Hosting, security, payment compliance, and Black Friday load handling are included in the plan, each of them a project a custom build has to fund separately. And a detail that spoils nothing: Shopify is a Canadian company, founded in 2006 and headquartered in Ottawa. Choosing it is no local betrayal; it is probably the most widely used Canadian software in the world.

The right reflex is the same as with Wix, Squarespace and WordPress: judge the platform on your third year, not your first month. If your third year looks like "more products, more customers, same model", Shopify will age very well alongside you.

Start on Shopify, with a clear conscience

Our recommendation fits in two sentences. If you are starting out with a standard catalog, take Shopify, guilt-free and without looking back: the slope is gentle and you are buying speed at the moment it is worth the most. Revisit the day a specific signal shows up: a quote that requires Plus, a team spending its days tending workarounds, or a B2B or bilingual structure the platform refuses to fit.

That day, the math deserves a rerun with someone who holds both curves in mind. It is a conversation we offer, no strings attached, and it sometimes ends with "stay on Shopify". That is a perfectly good outcome.

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