What a Shopify agency actually costs

Why the question is so hard to answer

Search for what a Shopify agency costs and you will find a hundred pages that answer it with a range so wide it is useless, followed by an invitation to book a call.

The range is wide for a real reason and a bad one. The real reason: "a Shopify agency" covers a solo developer doing theme edits and a forty-person shop rebuilding a headless storefront for an enterprise, and those two things genuinely differ by two orders of magnitude. The bad reason: an unpublished price can be adjusted after the discovery call, once the agency knows your revenue and how badly you want it.

We publish every number we charge, so this piece can be more specific than most. What follows is how agency pricing is actually structured, what each model does to the incentives on your project, and how to read a quote you have been given.

The four models, and what each one does to you

Hourly

You pay for time. It is the most common model at the freelance end and it survives at agencies because it is the easiest to defend line by line.

What it does to the incentives is the problem. Every efficiency gain is a revenue loss for the person making it. A developer who finds a way to do the job in a day instead of four is worse off, and nobody has to be cynical about this for it to shape estimates over time. You also carry all the estimation risk: an overrun is a change order, not the agency's problem.

Hourly is defensible for genuinely open-ended work — an ongoing maintenance relationship where nobody can say in advance what next month contains. It is a bad fit for a defined build.

Fixed price

One number for one deliverable. The agency carries the estimation risk: if the build takes half as long as expected, they keep the difference, and if it takes twice as long, that is their problem.

That symmetry is the point. It also creates the pressure that scope becomes the battleground — which is why an exclusion list matters more than a price. A fixed price without a written statement of what it does not include is not really a fixed price, it is an opening position.

Our whole menu works this way, with two prices that are fixed rather than floors: the Store Teardown at €750 and speed optimisation at €1,200. Everything else is published as a floor — "from €3,500" — because a redesign genuinely varies with the number of templates and the state of the brand, and a single number would be a lie in one direction or the other.

Monthly retainer

You buy a standing capacity. Common for CRO, paid media and anything ongoing.

The failure mode is the retainer that quietly becomes rent. Month eleven looks like month three, nobody is quite sure what was shipped, and the relationship persists because cancelling is a conversation nobody wants to have. The fix is not a different price, it is a retainer with a monthly deliverable you could describe to a colleague — and billing in advance, which is standard and worth knowing so you are not surprised by it.

Watch for one specific thing on paid media retainers: whether the fee is a percentage of your ad spend. That model means the agency's revenue rises when your spend rises, whether or not the spend is working. Our paid media is a flat monthly fee plus the spend at cost, and the ad accounts stay in your name.

Percentage of revenue or equity

Rare, and usually proposed by the agency rather than requested by you. It aligns interests in theory. In practice it is hard to attribute — if revenue rises 20% in a quarter when you also launched a product and hired a head of retention, the argument about what caused it is unpleasant and unwinnable.

If someone proposes this, ask how attribution will be measured before you discuss the percentage. If the answer is vague, the percentage is not the problem.

What the tiers actually look like

Rather than invent a market-wide table, here is the structural difference between the tiers, which is the part that decides which one you need.

A solo freelancer. One person, usually one skill. Excellent value for a defined task inside their specialism — a theme customisation, a set of template changes, a speed pass. The risk is a single point of failure and a limited range: a great developer will not fix a positioning problem, and often cannot tell you that is what you have.

A small studio. A handful of senior people covering design, build and growth. The range is broad enough to diagnose as well as execute, and the person who scopes the work usually does it. The limit is capacity — a studio that is honest about being small is telling you it will sometimes say no.

A mid-size agency. Departments, account management, a process. You get resilience and breadth, and you pay for the layer between you and the people doing the work. Whether that layer is worth it depends entirely on how much coordination your project actually needs.

An enterprise partner. Headless builds, ERP integrations, procurement processes, a legal review of the SOW. If you need this, you know, and cost is not the deciding variable.

The most common expensive mistake is not picking the wrong tier. It is buying a build from one tier and growth from another, with nobody owning the number that connects them.

How to read a quote

Six questions, in the order they are worth asking.

1. What does it exclude? The most important question on the list and the one least likely to be answered in writing without prompting. Our services page publishes an exclusion list for all twelve scopes, which is a standard you can hold any quote to.
2. What is the payment schedule? Fully upfront is normal for small fixed-price work. Anything larger is usually split across milestones. Fully upfront on a large build is a risk you are carrying alone.
3. Who actually does the work? Ask whether the person in the meeting is the person building it. If the answer involves the words "delivery team", ask where.
4. What happens if it takes longer? A fixed price should mean fixed. Find out now whether that is true.
5. What do you keep at the end? Files, repository, ad accounts, documentation, in your name. If any of those live in the agency's account, you are renting your own store.
6. Is ad spend marked up? It should pass through at cost.

What we charge, since we are the ones asking you to compare

Every number is on the pricing page, in three currencies, with the delivery window for each. Floors are marked as floors and the two fixed prices are marked as fixed.

The entry point is the Store Teardown — €750, $900 or AED 3,350 depending on your market, delivered in five days, no call in the process. It is a written audit of your store's conversion path and AI visibility with five fixes ranked by revenue impact, and it is credited in full against any engagement you start within thirty days.

It exists because the honest answer to "how do I know you are any good" is not a case study. It is a small piece of the actual work, bought before you commit to anything larger.