What Should I Charge? Pricing Calculator

The short answer: This Shopify pricing calculator turns five numbers into one selling price. These are your cost per item, the 30¢ fixed fee, your plan's card rate, any gateway surcharge, and your target margin. The formula is the per-sale fee equation solved for price: price = (cost + fixed fee) ÷ (1 − (rate + surcharge + margin)/100). Every rate comes from Shopify's pricing page, checked September 14, 2026: Basic at 2.9% + 30¢, Grow at 2.7% + 30¢, Advanced at 2.5% + 30¢, with outside-gateway surcharges of 2%, 1% and 0.6%. A $20 item at a 40% margin on Basic prices at $35.55. Set the margin to 0% and the same formula hands you your break-even floor.

The number this page produces is the price you type into the price field when you add products to your Shopify store. It is not a strategy. It is arithmetic: your cost, the payment fee Shopify publishes, and the margin you want left over.

The calculator returns a figure; this guide says where that figure comes from, which constants it rests on, and where it stops being valid. That last part matters most, because a price can be internally correct and still lose money once tax, ads and refunds show up. If you haven't opened the store yet, the full setup lives in our guide to starting a Shopify store.

What it calculates

For a store pricing one product on one plan, the deciding inputs are your cost and your target margin. Everything else in the formula is a published constant you can look up. The output is a single recommended price per item, not a range.

Cost means everything the item consumes: materials, packaging, and your hours. If you pay yourself, put an hourly rate in. Texas adopts the federal minimum wage rate, $7.25 per hour, according to the Texas Workforce Commission, in force since 2009 — a floor, not a target.

An hour of your time costs more than the wage. The Internal Revenue Service puts the combined Social Security withholding at 12.4% and Medicare at 2.9%, split between employer and employee (2026 figures). A solo owner pays both halves as self-employment tax: 15.3% of net earnings. Social Security stops applying at $184,500 of wages in 2026; Medicare has no cap, and wages past $200,000 carry an extra 0.9%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' employer-cost release from March 2025 splits what employers pay into wages and everything else. Keep that split in mind when you set your own rate.

No material cost doesn't mean zero cost. A digital download still consumes your hours, licenses and per-sale fees. Feed in zero and the margin flatters you.

Two boundaries define the output. Set the target margin to 0% and the formula returns the minimum price that covers cost and fees; that floor is not the recommendation, it's the line beneath it. And this prices one item: raising order value through upsells is different math, covered in our Selleasy setup guide. Which plan is cheapest is a volume question — the plan comparison calculator handles that separately.

How it works

Start with what you must clear: cost plus the 30¢ fixed fee. The card fee, any surcharge and your margin all come out of the selling price as percentages. So the price has to be grossed up by dividing by whatever share is left.

Solved, it reads: price = (cost + fixed fee) ÷ (1 − (rate + surcharge + target margin)/100).

One housekeeping note: this guide links to Shopify through affiliate links, so we earn a commission if you sign up through one, and you pay exactly the same. The rates themselves come from a single table, Shopify's pricing page, checked September 14, 2026: Basic at $39 monthly or $29 annual, charging 2.9% + 30¢ per card sale; Grow at $105/$79 at 2.7% + 30¢; Advanced at $399/$299 at 2.5% + 30¢. Using a gateway other than Shopify Payments adds a published surcharge: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.

That surcharge slot answers the platform-fee question generally: any published per-order percentage goes into the rate term. If a marketplace or processor charges a flat cents-plus-percent fee, substitute both numbers. If it charges something else, this formula isn't the right tool.

The formula replaces the spreadsheet dance where margin depends on price and price depends on margin. One division resolves it. Change an input and the price moves in a single step, no circular references.

Worth knowing where the fee actually goes: Shopify deducts it before the payout lands, as our walkthrough of how an order moves through Shopify shows. You never get an invoice for it; you just receive slightly less.

Our suggested worksheet line: Cost $__ + $0.30 fixed fee, ÷ (1 − % card rate − % surcharge − ____% target margin) = your shelf price.

Examples

A $20 cost at a 40% target margin on Basic: (20 + 0.30) ÷ (1 − (0.029 + 0.40)) = $35.55. The card fee works out to $1.33, leaving a margin of $14.22 per sale.

A $45 cost at 30% on Grow: $67.31. The fee is $2.12 and the margin $20.19. Same method, different constants.

The third case is the one people skip. Same $20 cost at 40%, but paid through an outside gateway charging 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, so the 2% surcharge stacks on top: $36.84. Card fee $1.37, surcharge $0.74, margin $14.74. Identical product, $1.29 more per sale, purely from the gateway choice.

Our take: Price from the formula first and check the market second, never the reverse. The third example is the whole argument: the gateway decision alone moved the price by $1.29 on a $36 item, and no amount of instinct surfaces that. If the going rate in your category sits below your formula price, the honest fixes are cost or margin, not a rounded-down tag.

Limits

The formula has no tax handling. US sales tax is added on top at checkout and remitted to the state, so it never passes through your margin; don't raise the target margin to cover it.

It also assumes one rate everywhere. Each plan publishes a single card rate, so selling into markets with different rates makes the single output an approximation, not a per-market price.

Three costs never appear: ad spend, refunds and chargebacks. A refunded order returns the full price while the original card fee often stays with the processor. The formula doesn't see any of that.

Fixed costs sit outside by design. The plan subscription is charged regardless of units sold: $39, $105 or $399 a month on monthly billing. Apps bill on top, and our guide to Shopify app costs puts a realistic app bill at $150 to $400 a month for stores under $100K in revenue. Per-order fees stack fastest, as our breakdown of Track123's real monthly cost shows. This calculator prices the item, not the business.

Finally, the math has a hard edge: a target margin near the payment rate has no solution. The denominator shrinks toward zero as rate plus surcharge plus margin approaches 100%. At Basic's 2.9% + 30¢, a 40% margin leaves plenty of room; a 97% margin divides by almost nothing and the price runs past any customer.

For the companion question — what you keep per sale, and how many sales cover the plan — use the Shopify Fee & Profit Calculator (United States) on this site. The two tools share one constants table, so their numbers agree.