The short version: Shopify Basic is $29 a month billed annually or $39 billed monthly, with card rates from 2.9% plus 30 cents, a 3-day free trial followed by $1 a month for three months, and a 2% fee on every order if you do not use Shopify Payments. Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually or $12.50 monthly, 0% commission, 2.9% plus $0.30, a 7-day trial, and sales tax calculated and remitted in all 50 states. Since the processing rates match at the entry tier, the whole cost difference is the subscription: $19 a month, or $228 a year. What that $228 buys is a general-purpose commerce platform that can do far more than sell food locally. Whether you need any of it is the actual question.
All figures below came off Shopify's own pricing page and Homegrown's signup page in July 2026.
Shopify is infrastructure. Homegrown is a product.
Shopify is built to sell anything, anywhere. Physical goods, digital goods, in person, online, wholesale, international, in a dozen currencies, through apps that plug into everything. It has no opinion about what you sell, which is exactly its strength and exactly its cost.
Homegrown is built to sell food locally. Pickup at the places you actually sell, delivery inside a radius you set, a route to run, sales tax filed for you, and a marketplace listing. It has strong opinions, and if those opinions do not match your business it will feel narrow.
The difference in practice:
If the app-stack costs are the part you want pinned down, we priced the whole thing in what Shopify really costs a cottage food business. Or skip the spreadsheet and test the simpler option directly.
Same four disclosures on every plan.
| Homegrown | Shopify Basic | Shopify Grow | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $10/mo billed annually, or $12.50/mo billed monthly | $29/mo billed annually, $39/mo billed monthly | $79/mo |
| Free trial | 7-day free trial, nothing charged until day eight | 3 days free, then $1/month for 3 months | Same |
| Platform fee | $0, 0% commission | $0 with Shopify Payments, 2% per order without it | Same structure |
| Card processing | 2.9% + $0.30 | From 2.9% + 30¢ | From 2.7% + 30¢ |
Two things to pull out.
The 2% is the fee people forget. It only applies if you use a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments. Most small vendors use Shopify Payments and never see it. But if your state, bank, or business type pushes you toward another processor, that 2% lands on top of whatever that processor charges, and on $2,000 a month it is $40.
The trial is short and then discounted. Three days free, then $1 a month for three months, is a longer runway than it first sounds, but it also means your real bill starts in month four. Budget for $29, not $1.
Shopify Advanced is $299 a month with rates from 2.5% plus 30 cents, and Plus starts around $2,300 a month. Those tiers are not in the conversation for a cottage food business, and the fact that they exist tells you who Shopify is actually built for.
Because the entry-tier processing rates are identical, the arithmetic is unusually clean. At $2,000 a month across 100 orders, a $20 average order:
Shopify Basic, billed annually, using Shopify Payments
Homegrown, billed annually
Shopify Basic without Shopify Payments
So the difference is $228 a year on identical processing, or $708 a year if you cannot use Shopify Payments. That is real money for a part-time food business, and it is also not enough to decide on by itself if Shopify does something you actually need.
The number most comparisons leave out is the app bill. Shopify's subscription buys the platform, not the features people assume come with it. Subscriptions, advanced pickup scheduling, bundles, loyalty, and better review widgets are almost always paid apps, commonly $10 to $30 a month each. Two of those doubles your Shopify cost and nobody warns you at signup, because at signup you do not yet know which ones you will want. A fair way to budget is to price Shopify Basic at $29 plus whatever two apps cost, then compare that to a platform where the equivalent capability is either included or genuinely absent. An honest comparison names both, and this one does: several of the things you would buy apps for on Shopify are not available on Homegrown at any price.
The other half of the real cost is time. A Shopify store is a build. Choosing a theme, arranging sections, writing the pages, wiring up shipping profiles and tax settings, and testing checkout is commonly a full weekend for someone who has not done it before, and longer if you care how it looks. That time is invisible in every pricing comparison and it is frequently the largest line in the whole exercise. Price it at whatever an hour of your Saturday is worth and add it to year one.
Genuinely quite a lot, and it is worth being fair about it.
If any of those describe where your business is heading, $19 a month is a bargain and this comparison is over. Our look at Shopify for cottage food businesses covers who grows into it.
The gaps are specific and they all point the same direction.
The sales tax difference is the one that shows up as hours rather than dollars. The SBA's guidance on calculating startup costs is a good reminder that setup work and ongoing compliance are costs even when nobody invoices you for them.
That last one deserves weight. E-commerce keeps taking share of US retail, which the Census Bureau tracks in its quarterly retail e-commerce sales report. If your ambition is a national brand, buying the platform that scales is a reasonable call even if you are overpaying today.
The clean test: count the items on this list you would use this month. Two or more and Shopify stops being overkill and starts being infrastructure. Zero and you are paying for a warehouse to store a bicycle.
And if the list left you unsure, price the honest middle path: start on the $10 tool, and move to Shopify the month your growth actually demands one of these six things. Migration is an evening of CSV work, not a rebuild.
There is an honest bound here too. Homegrown does not do national shipping, wholesale portals, subscriptions, sell-by-weight, or timed drops. Subscriptions and drops are on the roadmap and not live. If your plan depends on any of those, Shopify or a specialist tool is the right answer and no price difference changes that.
Yes, and for many vendors that is the sensible sequence. Start where your customers actually are, prove the product sells, then buy the bigger platform when you have a reason to.
The reverse also happens: vendors who started on Shopify because it is the default answer, spent two weekends on a theme, and are paying $29 a month plus app fees to take twelve pickup orders a week. If that is you, the migration is easier than you think, because a catalog of twelve products and a customer list moves in an afternoon.
The cheap way to find out which side you are on is to run a real week rather than reason about it. You can set up a storefront and take live orders inside a 7-day trial before anything is charged. If the answer is that you needed apps and shipping labels after all, you have lost a week and learned something concrete. Our comparison of e-commerce platforms for local vendors covers the wider field, and our Square Online against Shopify piece is worth reading if Square is also on your list.
Basic is $29 a month billed annually or $39 billed monthly, with card rates from 2.9% plus 30 cents. There is a 3-day free trial followed by $1 a month for three months. Add 2% per order if you use a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments, which is avoidable for most US sellers by using Shopify Payments itself, and add whatever paid apps you install.
$10 a month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly, with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 card processing. The trial is 7 days and nothing is charged until day eight.
Homegrown, by $19 a month at the entry tiers, because the processing rates are identical and the subscription is the only difference. That is $228 a year, or $708 if you cannot use Shopify Payments and pay the 2% surcharge.
It has pickup and local delivery features, and apps that extend them. What it does not do out of the box is manage several pickup locations with their own schedules, or plan the route for deliveries you make yourself. That is where market vendors usually end up buying apps.
No. Shopify calculates rates and helps you track nexus, but registering, filing, and remitting are yours. Homegrown calculates and remits in all 50 states.
It will process the orders, but it has no awareness of cottage food rules. Your state decides what you can sell, whether you can ship it, and how it must be labeled, and none of that appears anywhere in the Shopify admin. Treat compliance as entirely your own responsibility on any general-purpose platform.
Only if the platform is genuinely costing you more than it returns. Count your app subscriptions, the $29, and the hours you spend maintaining the store, then compare against what a simpler tool would do. If the honest answer is that you use one tenth of Shopify, moving is worth an afternoon.
Shopify is more platform than most cottage food businesses need, and that is not a criticism. It is built to still be the right answer when you are shipping nationally with a warehouse, which is a genuinely useful property to buy.
But if your customers collect from your porch or your market booth, you are paying $228 a year plus setup time for capabilities aimed at a business you are not running, and you are still filing your own sales tax. The test is simple enough: list your real products somewhere built for local selling, run a week of actual orders, and see whether anything is missing. You can do that inside a free trial without touching your Shopify store.
