Ask three builders what a Shopify website costs and you'll get quotes of £500, £5,000 and £25,000 for what sounds like the same job. All three can be honest. The price depends on who builds it, what you sell and how much of the work you take on yourself. Here are the real numbers for the UK in 2026.
The platform itself
Shopify charges a subscription before anyone designs anything. Plans run from £25 a month at the entry level to a few hundred pounds for the advanced tier, with Shopify Plus in four figures a month for enterprise brands. Most small businesses start on the basic plan and upgrade when order volume justifies it. Hosting, security and the checkout come included, which removes the server bills you'd pay elsewhere.
Three routes to a finished store
Do it yourself: £0 to £300
Shopify's free themes plus your own evenings will get a store live. Budget £150 to £300 for a paid theme if the free ones fight your brand. The real cost hides in your time and in the details you don't know to fix: slow images, weak product pages, a checkout that leaks sales. This route suits testing an idea more than building a brand.
A freelancer: £800 to £5,000
A UK freelancer will customise a theme, set up your products and hand over a polished store, from around £800 to £1,500 at the simpler end. Complex briefs push towards £5,000. You get one person's skill and speed. You also get one person's availability when something breaks in November.
An agency: £2,000 to £20,000+
UK agencies charge £90 to £150 an hour, and custom builds land between £5,000 and £20,000. Below that, expect a template-led build with lighter customisation, which suits plenty of businesses. Above £20,000 you're into large catalogues, replatforming from WooCommerce or Magento, and Shopify Plus. The higher quotes should include the work that earns the money back: UX design, conversion optimisation and SEO built into the project rather than bolted on afterwards.
The costs that never make the quote
Apps add £50 to £500 a month depending on what you bolt on: reviews, subscriptions, email, loyalty. Product photography and copywriting either cost money or cost sales. Ongoing support retainers run from about £500 a month with a freelancer to £1,500 and up with an agency. None of this is compulsory. All of it is worth pricing before you sign anything.
What moves the price
Four things drive most of the variation: how many products you sell, how much custom functionality you need (subscriptions, bundles, trade pricing), whether you're migrating data from an old platform, and who writes the content. A ten-product store with sharp photography is a small job. Five hundred products migrated from Magento with custom B2B pricing is a different project with a different invoice.
How to spend the right amount
Match the spend to your stage. Testing a product idea? Build it yourself on a free theme and put the savings into ads. Making steady sales through a DIY store that looks like one? A rebuild in the £1,500 to £5,000 range tends to pay for itself in conversion alone. Turning over six figures with plans for more? The £5,000+ bracket is where UX research, conversion work and proper SEO enter the scope.
Whoever you speak to, ask three questions. What exactly is included? Who owns the store and its content afterwards? What happens after launch? Vague answers to any of these cost more than the quote shows.
Dash Media builds conversion-first Shopify stores for brands across Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire and the UK, with email, content and AI automation handled under the same roof. For a straight answer on what your store should cost, tell us what you're planning and we'll tell you what we'd build.