BigCommerce’s New Pricing Hits Mid-Size Stores Hardest
When BigCommerce changed its pricing on June 1, most of the coverage focused on the new plan names: Core, Growth, Scale and Performance. That part is cosmetic. What changed the math for real stores sits further down the pricing page, and it lands hardest on a group nobody talks about much: stores doing somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a couple of million dollars a year.
I work on SEO and content for a Shopify and WordPress development agency, so platform comparisons cross my desk all the time. This time I wanted numbers instead of feature lists. I took both pricing pages and ran three stores through them, at $250K, $1M and $5M in annual sales. Every figure below is subscription plus platform fees, with card processing left out on both sides.
The $100K line
BigCommerce doesn’t let you pick a plan. It picks one for you based on trailing twelve-month GMV, which it counts as gross order value minus 10%, with taxes and shipping included. Growth now tops out at $100K of that. Cross it and the account moves to Scale, which costs $299 a month billed annually instead of $79.
$100K of GMV is a small store. A business doing $250K a year is well past it, so the store I modelled at that level sits on Scale and pays $3,588 a year in subscription alone. The same store on Shopify’s Grow plan pays $948.
Scale then adds its own catch. It includes $33,333 of GMV a month and charges 0.9% on everything above that. At $1M in sales the store runs about $75,000 of GMV a month, so roughly $41,667 of it is overage every month. That comes to $4,500 a year on top of the subscription, before a single payment fee.
The fee that used to be Shopify’s problem
For years the cleanest argument for BigCommerce was that it didn’t charge its own transaction fee. Shopify did, if you used a gateway other than Shopify Payments.
Since June, BigCommerce has its own version. The Open Payment Provider Fee applies to any order paid through a gateway outside its Embedded list: 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. The Embedded list is long and includes Stripe, PayPal, Adyen and Klarna, so plenty of stores will never pay it. If your gateway isn’t on the list, though, the fee starts with the first order.
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Put the two together and the $1M store on a non-Embedded gateway pays about $13,488 a year to BigCommerce. On Shopify Advanced with a third-party gateway the same store pays $9,588, and $3,588 if it uses Shopify Payments.
Where BigCommerce still wins
I expected Shopify to come out ahead everywhere. It doesn’t.
At $5M a store moves to BigCommerce Performance, which starts at $1,499 a month on an annual contract. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term. At that size both prices get negotiated, but the starting point favours BigCommerce.
There is also a middle case that is easy to miss. If your store relies on a gateway that counts as Embedded on BigCommerce but third-party on Shopify, the $1M comparison flips: about $8,088 a year on BigCommerce against $9,588 on Shopify. So before you compare totals, check how your gateway is classified on each platform.
What I’d actually do
If you’re on BigCommerce and doing between $100K and $2M a year, pull your last twelve months of orders and calculate GMV the way BigCommerce does. Then check which plan that puts you on, how much of your monthly volume sits above the Scale allowance, and whether your gateway is on the Embedded list. It takes an afternoon, and it will tell you more than any comparison chart.
If the numbers say stay, stay. BigCommerce still has strong native B2B and catalog tools, and for some stores those matter more than the fee difference. If they say move, plan the migration properly, because the platform fee is the cheap part of getting a replatform wrong.
I put the full breakdown into a guide on the SPLIT Development blog, with both pricing tables, the three-store calculation and the B2B, headless and SEO differences: BigCommerce vs Shopify in 2026: Pricing, Fees and Which Platform Fits Your Store.
I handle SEO and content for SPLIT Development, a Shopify and WordPress development agency. The figures above come from BigCommerce’s and Shopify’s published pricing, checked in October 2026.
