Agency costs
What working with a Shopify agency costs
Agency pricing looks opaque from the outside because most agencies keep it that way. This page explains how the pricing actually works: what you are paying for, which engagement models exist, and how to read a quote before you sign it.
What you are paying for
Where agency budgets actually go
An agency invoice is not a markup on typing speed. The price carries the specialization, the process, and the accountability for the result. Knowing which of these four blocks dominates your project tells you most of what your budget will look like.
Scope: what is actually being built
A configured theme, a custom storefront, a migration, an app. The build scope sets the base line of every budget, and it is the block you control most directly. Halving the scope halves more of the price than negotiating ever will.
Specialization you do not have to teach
A Shopify-only agency has solved your problem before, usually several times. You pay for that in the rate and get it back in the calendar: fewer discovery detours, fewer rebuilt features, and answers that arrive in the first call instead of the fourth week.
Design depth, decided page by page
Custom design for every template is the expensive default nobody needs. The pages where customers decide, home, product, checkout surroundings, earn custom work. Utility pages do fine on system patterns. Agencies that ask this question early are protecting your budget.
Project or partnership
A one-off build prices differently from ongoing store management with a monthly scope. Neither is better, they solve different problems. What gets expensive is pretending a long-term need is a one-off project and rebuying setup knowledge every time.
How pricing works with us
From first call to a number you can hold us to
We price from a written scope, not from a rate card and optimism. The steps are the same for a two-week project and a six-month one, only the paperwork scales.
A call that sorts the problem
What you run, what is not working, what better looks like. Sometimes the honest outcome is that you do not need an agency yet, and we say that too. You leave knowing whether the project is real and roughly how big it is.
A written scope with visible prices
Each work block is named and priced individually: you see what the design costs, what the build costs, what the migration costs. You can strike blocks before signing. An offer you cannot edit is a menu with one dish.
Progress you can see mid-project
Weekly check-ins against the scope document, work visible in a shared board, changes quoted before they are built. Budget surprises are almost always communication failures dressed up as technical ones, so the communication is the process.
Handover that ends the dependency
Documentation, admin walkthrough, and a store your team can run without calling us for every banner change. Whether ongoing support follows is your call, priced as its own monthly scope, never assumed into the project.
Trusted by brands worldwide
Great brands that we help build and scale their businesses
We believe strong client relationships deliver great results, helping businesses scale with stronger conversions and sustainable growth.
Agency cost FAQ
The pricing questions everyone asks before the first call
Honest answers about Shopify agency pricing, including the questions agencies usually dodge.
Comparing agencies?
Ask us the hard questions.
It depends on what you are buying: a configured theme sits at one end, a fully custom storefront with migration and integrations at the other, and most projects in between. The honest answer to "what does it cost" is a scoped quote, which is why we do the scoping first and free. Any number quoted before that is marketing.
Projects run at a fixed price on a written scope, ongoing store management runs as a monthly scope you can adjust. Pure hourly billing on a project moves the estimation risk onto the person least equipped to carry it, which is you.
A freelancer's rate is lower and the total is sometimes not, because you become the project manager, the QA and the backup plan. An agency prices those in. For a small, well-defined task a good freelancer is often the right call. For anything where design, development and data have to land together, coordination is most of the work.
Named work blocks with individual prices, what is explicitly out of scope, how changes get handled, and who owns what after handover. If the quote is one line with one number, every open question in the project has already been decided in the agency's favor.
Decide the scope before the kickoff and defend it during the project. Almost all budget overruns are scope drift with a delay: a small extra here, a rebuilt section there. Our change process quotes every addition separately before it is built, which keeps the drift visible and the decision yours.
When a configured standard theme genuinely covers your case, when you have strong developers in-house and need only strategy, or when the budget forces choosing between agency and inventory. A store that sells beats a prettier store that emptied the account. We have told people this in first calls, and it is why second projects come back.
Related
What the budget buys
The services behind the numbers on this page.
Martin Winkler
Co-Founder & CEO
Mark Chang
Founder & CTO