Looking for a Shopify alternative

Shopify is infrastructure for businesses that have outgrown a person. Multi-location inventory, staff permissions, wholesale channels, international tax handling, an API that a development agency can build against. All of it is real, most of it is excellent, and a shop run by one person selling what they make will use almost none of it.

You still pay for the surface area, though not in the obvious way. The subscription is not really the cost — the cost is that a platform serving businesses of every size has to keep its core general, which is why so much of what a small shop needs day to day arrives as something you add.

This is the part that surprises people, and it is not hidden so much as spread out. A platform with an app store has a reason to keep the middle of its product thin: the missing pieces are a marketplace, and the marketplace is a revenue stream. Most of those apps are monthly subscriptions, most are individually small, and you say yes to each one because each one is obviously worth it.

The honest version is that the ecosystem is genuinely useful and is Shopify’s single biggest advantage. If you need a specific integration for a specific carrier or accounting package, it almost certainly exists there.

Stashed has no app store, which cuts both ways. The things a shop needs to be a shop are on the plan — page builder, physical and digital products, courses, email with 2,500 contacts, your own domain — and there is no tier above yours holding one of them. There is also nowhere to go if you need something we have not built.

Shopify has several plans, and the difference between them is not only capacity. Rates improve as you move up, which means the cheapest plan charges the most per sale — the opposite of how most people assume it works, and a real cost for exactly the shops least able to carry it.

It also charges an extra percentage on every order if you use a payment provider other than its own, which is the mechanism that makes leaving expensive rather than forbidden.

Stashed has one plan at $29 a month. There is no tier above it, so there is no version of this shop you are not getting, and 5% of a sale comes back to you in full when you refund the order.

If you have staff who need different permissions, stock in more than one place, or a wholesale side, use Shopify. Those are not gaps we are planning to close and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

If your business depends on one particular integration, check whether it exists here before you move. There is a reasonable chance it does not, and no store to buy it from.

And if you are already on Shopify and it is working, the honest advice is to stay. Migrating a shop that is fine is a week you could spend making something.

You can build the entire shop, on a real theme, with your products in it, and look at it before anyone asks for a card. Not a trial with a clock on it — the card is requested at publish and not before.

Physical and digital live in the same catalogue, so a record with its download attached is one product rather than two. A course is a product too, with a real classroom behind it rather than a folder of files.

And the design is the point rather than the upsell. Every theme was drawn here, every one opens in the same page builder, and the builder is free to use for as long as you like.

The same comparison against Big Cartel, Gumroad and Etsy. For the whole picture rather than one rival, there is what an online shop actually costs, which breaks the bill into the seven places money goes.

Every claim about Shopify was read from their own pricing or fee pages in September 2026 and describes the shape of the bill rather than a price. We do not publish their figures: those are set per country, so any number here would be wrong for most people reading it, and a stale one is worse than none. Our own figures come from the code that charges them. If something here has stopped being true, tell us.