The subscription comes straight from the pricing page
Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus each carry a monthly and a yearly price on the page: Basic is $39 a month or $29 on a yearly commitment, Grow $105 or $79, Advanced $399 or $299, and Plus from $2,300 with no lower yearly figure. The billing toggle decides which of those two numbers is charged.
The yearly price is quoted per month so the two views compare directly - it is what the annual commitment works out to, not a single payment taken once a year. Switching the toggle is the fastest way to see what a store pays for choosing flexibility.
These are the prices the pricing page printed on the fetch date, not a contract. A plan change or a Shopify price move changes the subscription line immediately, while everything below it stays the same.
Card processing at the plan’s own rate
Each plan quotes its own online standard card rate - 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, 2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced and 2.25% plus 30 cents on Plus. The page takes the rate attached to the plan you picked rather than one blended average.
The arithmetic is the average order value times that percentage, plus the 30 cents, multiplied across the month’s orders: (value × rate) + fixed cents, then × orders. The fixed part is why cheap baskets give up a visibly larger share of their value than expensive ones.
The subscription does not move with volume; processing does. That is why a store doing hundreds of orders a month can spend more on card fees than on the plan itself, and why the table reports payment as a share of the monthly revenue the model priced.
The payment route changes the arithmetic
In-person card payments are charged at 2.6% plus 10 cents, so a counter sale and an online sale of the same value do not cost the same to process. Choose that route and the plan’s online rate is not used at all.
With a third-party provider the arithmetic changes shape instead of just its rate: Shopify charges a flat 2% of revenue, and the provider’s own processing cut is paid to the provider rather than billed through Shopify. The page prints that 2% line and skips the per-order card calculation entirely.
Only one route is modelled at a time. A store that splits its orders between online and in person needs two runs and a sum, not an average of the two rates - averaging would produce a number that matches neither channel.
What is deliberately not included
Cost of goods, advertising, apps and domains sit outside this page, because they are not subscription or processing and mixing them in would turn a fee tool into a profit statement. The first-year credits Shopify advertises and the $89-per-location Retail POS Pro add-on are named and excluded for the same reason.
So are the posted rates the page does not offer as options: online premium at 3.5% plus 30 cents, manual in-person at 3.5% plus 10 cents, PayPal from 3.49% plus 49 cents, and the extra 1% on international online payments. They are on the pricing page, not in the selector.
The total therefore reads as the subscription plus processing, nothing more. The order count is capped at ten million a month and money figures saturate at the site’s shared ceiling, so an extreme entry is clipped instead of printed as nonsense.
Where the subscription stops mattering
The two costs scale differently: the subscription is fixed, the processing fee follows orders. At the defaults, 300 orders of $40 is $12,000 of revenue and $438 of processing against $29 of subscription, so the plan is about 6% of the bill. At 30 orders it is 40% of it; at 3,000 it is under 1%.
That is also how to read an upgrade. Basic and Grow tie at 625 orders a month, where $29 plus 2.9% equals $79 plus 2.7%; at 3,000 orders Grow is $190 a month ahead. Below the crossover the cheaper plan wins even with the worse rate, so the order count, not the rate, is what decides.
The subscription only dominates on a very small store: at $40 an order, the plan is the larger of the two lines below about 20 orders a month, and processing takes over above it.
Danfio