Ask an agency what they charge and you will usually get "it depends". That is true and useless. It depends on things you can be told, and an agency that will not put a range on the work before a discovery call is mostly protecting its own flexibility.
So here are real numbers, what moves them, and how to compare two quotes that look nothing alike.
A note on where these come from: these are the ranges we quote and the ranges we see quoted across the market for competent senior work. You can find every one of these done for less. Sometimes that is a good deal and sometimes you pay for it twice.
The ranges
Shopify build — $8,000 to $25,000+
A custom theme build for a DTC brand. Design, build, content migration, integrations, launch. The low end is a small catalogue with a straightforward offer. The high end has subscriptions, a large catalogue, several integrations or a genuinely custom design system.
Shopify Plus build — $20,000 to $60,000+
Plus builds cost more because the requirements that pushed you onto Plus — B2B, international markets, checkout customisation, higher volume — are themselves complex. Checkout extensibility and Shopify Functions are powerful and they are development work.
Headless build — $35,000 to $100,000+
A Next.js storefront on the Storefront API. You are paying for a bespoke front end plus the infrastructure and content layer around it. Wide range because "headless" describes anything from a fast marketing storefront to a full custom commerce front end.
CRO redesign or audit — $5,000 to $25,000
An audit alone sits at the low end. A redesign with implementation and testing sits at the high end. Ongoing CRO usually runs as a monthly retainer instead.
Migration to Shopify — $10,000 to $40,000
Driven almost entirely by data complexity and URL count, not by design. A 200-product store with clean data is straightforward. A 20,000-SKU store with fifteen years of URLs and custom attributes is not.
The four things that actually move the number
1. Integrations
The single most reliable predictor. Each system that has to talk to the store — ERP, 3PL, subscriptions, loyalty, review platform, CRM, custom pricing — adds scope, testing and failure modes.
A store with Shopify, Klaviyo and a review app is a different project from one wired into an ERP with real-time inventory, even if the design brief is identical. When you compare quotes, compare integration lists first.
2. Catalogue size and structure
Not just product count. Variant complexity, how many attributes drive filtering, whether products need custom configuration, how much content sits per product.
500 simple products can be less work than 40 with configurable options and technical specification sheets.
3. Content readiness
The quietest budget killer. If copy, photography and product data are ready, the build moves. If they are not, the agency either waits — which costs you in timeline — or writes and produces them, which costs you in fees.
Ask any agency quoting you: what happens to this number if our content is not ready on day one? The answer tells you whether it was in the quote.
4. How many people need to approve
Rarely on a quote, always in the real cost. A project with one decision-maker moves at a different speed from one with five stakeholders and a monthly review cycle. Agencies that have been burned by this price it in. Agencies that have not will discover it, and the discovery becomes a change order.
Why two quotes for the same brief differ by 3x
Usually one of five reasons, and it is worth working out which:
Seniority. Senior people cost more per hour and take fewer hours. The cheaper quote may be the same total cost delivered more slowly, or a genuinely cheaper outcome.
What is in scope. One quote includes analytics, tracking, redirects, QA across devices and post-launch support. The other includes a theme. They are not the same purchase.
Where change orders live. A low fixed price with an aggressive change process can end higher than a realistic fixed price with none.
Design depth. A lightly customised premium theme and a design system built for your brand are different products, and both are legitimately called "a Shopify build".
Optimism. Some quotes are simply wrong, and you find out in month two.
Ask each agency to list what is explicitly not included. That single question makes wildly different quotes comparable faster than anything else.
What should be in a quote
If it is not, ask:
- Design — how many templates, how many rounds of revision
- Development — templates, components, integrations named individually
- Content migration — products, pages, blog, customers, orders
- Redirects and technical SEO for a migration or replatform
- Analytics and conversion tracking
- QA across browsers and devices
- Launch support and what post-launch care is included, for how long
- Training or documentation for your team
- Who owns the code and the accounts afterwards
Retainers and ongoing work
After launch there are three common shapes:
Maintenance retainer — $500 to $2,500/month. Fixes, small changes, updates, monitoring. Fine if you have no roadmap and just need someone available.
Growth or CRO retainer — $3,000 to $12,000/month. Continuous testing, iteration and implementation. Only worth it above a traffic level that supports testing — below roughly 20,000 monthly sessions you will not reach significance often enough to justify it, and a project-based approach is more honest.
Ad-hoc. Reasonable if your needs are genuinely occasional, but expect to queue behind retained clients.
When cheap is right
Not every store needs a $20,000 build.
If you are pre-launch and testing whether anyone wants the product, a good premium theme configured well is the correct answer. Spending your capital proving demand is better than spending it on a custom store for a product nobody has bought yet.
The moment to invest is when the store is demonstrably a constraint — traffic arriving and not converting, operations that a theme cannot support, a catalogue the platform is fighting. Until then, the cheapest version that ships is usually the right call. Any agency that tells you otherwise at that stage is selling.
The honest summary
For a competent senior agency in 2026: a Shopify build starts around $8K, Plus around $20K, headless around $35K, and CRO around $5K. Integrations and content readiness move those numbers more than anything on the design brief.
And the number that matters is not the quote. It is the quote plus the change orders plus the cost of doing it again if it is wrong. A cheaper build you replace in eighteen months was the expensive option.
About the author
Manpreet Singh
Manpreet Singh is the founder of Proscube, an ecommerce growth studio. He leads the studio's Shopify and Shopify Plus engineering, headless builds, CRO, and its work on AI engine optimization, and writes its guidance on how to grow a DTC brand without wasting money. He works directly with founders — no account-manager layers between you and the people doing the work — and would rather tell a client not to build something than sell them work they don't need.
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