Going Headless With Shopify: How Much Does It Cost?
Going headless is pricey. We all know it. It’s more pricey than having a regular Shopify store with out-of-the-box features. But how much exactly?
Let’s get straight to the point here. First, you need to break down the setup cost for a Shopify headless storefront.
I. Initial Setup Costs Breakdown
To go headless, you’d need the right tech stack. Here’s the typical tech stack of a headless Shopify store:
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Platform: Shopify ($25 - $2000)
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Frontend: Hydrogen ($0)
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CMS: Weaverse + MetaObjects (if needed) ($12-$250)
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Deployment: Oxygen ($0)
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Filter & Search: Shopify Predictive Search & Filter ($0)
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Analytics: GA, Pixel, Clarity, Plausible
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Additional Apps: Reviews, Support (CRM), CX, Email, Filter, Subscription. ($1,000-$10,000)
Now let’s break further the cost for each of these components.
1. Shopify Subscription
Yes, with Hydrogen and Oxygen, you can go headless even when you’re on Shopify regular tiers. Shopify offers several subscription tiers:
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Basic Shopify ($25 per month): This plan is suitable for small businesses just starting out but has limitations in API call capacity and feature set.
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Shopify ($79 per month): A mid-tier plan that offers more features and higher API limits, suitable for growing businesses.
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Advanced Shopify ($299 per month): Ideal for larger businesses needing advanced reporting and more significant API usage.
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Shopify Plus ($2,000+ per month): The go-to choice for most headless implementations. It provides unlimited API calls, advanced customization options, and priority support. This plan is crucial for businesses looking to fully leverage the capabilities of headless commerce, ensuring a smooth and efficient operation
Most merchants who go headless go with Advanced Shopify or Shopify Plus - which is a necessity for accessing advanced features and ensuring you have unlimited API calls. The starting cost is $2,000 per month. This subscription acts as the gateway to the full potential of your headless setup, providing the essential infrastructure and support you need to start building your custom front-end experience.
2. Frontend: Hydrogen
In case you don’t know, Hydrogen is Shopify’s headless stack engineered for performance and UI flexibility. It’s a Remix-based framework that helps developers build custom storefronts quickly and efficiently.
Using Hydrogen, merchants can create content-rich and dynamic shopping experiences without being tied to Shopify's traditional front-end limitations. Hydrogen allows you to leverage modern development tools and frameworks, ensuring your site is fast, scalable, and performant. It also provides built-in components and hooks that simplify common tasks, making the development process smoother and faster.
And the best part? It’s free.
3. Visual CMS (Weaverse) + Metaobjects
Hydrogen is great - but it lacks a visual preview and a theme customizer, one that’s similar to Online Store 2.0, for easy content editing. There are plenty of CMS that are well-integrated with Shopify Hydrogen (i.e.: Storyblok or Sanity - both of which start at $99/month ), however, Weaverse is the only visual CMS that’s native to Hydrogen, without the huge price tag.
Weaverse starts at only $12/month and is priced by traffic. Even when your store has over 1M traffic, it only costs you around $100 - no more than Sanity’s starter plan.
With Weaverse, you can use SDKs, pre-made Hydrogen themes, and a visual editor to launch Shopify headless stores faster. Meanwhile, non-technical team members can easily edit content and design using a familiar section-based editor. (Imagine Online Store 2.0, but for Hydrogen instead).
MetaObjects further complements this setup by providing structured content types within Shopify. They enable you to create reusable content blocks, which can be used across various pages and products, making it easier to maintain consistency and efficiency. You can update a MetaObject once and have it reflected wherever it’s used across your site.
4. Deployment: Oxygen
Oxygen is Shopify’s global hosting solution, designed to work with Hydrogen for easy deployment and scaling of your headless storefront. Oxygen is completely free to use with Shopify plans. It ensures that your storefront is hosted on a global CDN, providing fast load times and high availability regardless of where your customers are located. This seamless integration with Hydrogen simplifies the process of deploying and managing your custom storefront.
5. Analytics: Google Analytics
Tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Microsoft Clarity, and Plausible provide necessary insights and data for optimizing your store’s performance and user experience. These tools often have free tiers with optional premium features. Google Analytics, for instance, helps track user interactions, providing valuable data to improve marketing strategies and user experience.
6. Additional Apps
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Review Apps: Needed for building trust with customers, review apps allow customers to leave feedback on products, which can significantly influence purchasing decisions.
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CRM/Customer Support: CRM tools help manage customer interactions and ensure a seamless support experience.
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Email Management: Tools for handling email campaigns and customer communication are vital for maintaining engagement and driving sales.
Of course, these are only the essential apps. The cost of these additional apps can range from $1,000 to $10,000, depending on the features and service providers you choose.
7. Deployment
Development costs represent a significant part of your initial investment.
Agencies can charge anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000 for a complete headless Shopify project, covering design, development, and testing. Alternatively, an in-house team offers more control but requires substantial investment in salaries, training, and development tools. These costs are essential for creating a robust, customized storefront that meets your business needs and provides a superior customer experience.
8. Ongoing Maintenance Costs
Once your headless setup is live, ongoing maintenance is essential to keep everything running smoothly. This includes:
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Regular Updates: Both frontend and backend updates to ensure security, performance, and compatibility with new features.
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Bug Fixes and Optimizations: Addressing any issues that arise and optimizing the site for better performance and user experience.
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Additional Feature Development: As your business grows, you might need new features, which requires additional development time and resources.
These maintenance activities typically cost between $5,000 and $20,000 per month, depending on the complexity of your setup and the level of support required.
Conclusion
Based on the breakdown above, going headless with Shopify would cost you anywhere from $2000 to $100,000, depending on your requirements and the scale of your project. However, its worth noting that going headless with Shopify has become a lot more affordable in recent years. You can easily go headless with a basic stack (Hydrogen + Oxygen + a Visual CMS like Weaverse), which would cost you around $2000 - given that you have some experience with React.
When planning your headless development plan, you also need to take into account the following costs.
Key Considerations Before Going Headless With Shopify (Beyond Just Costs)
Technical Expertise and Resources
A headless setup isn’t for the faint-hearted.
You’ll need a team that knows its way around modern web technologies like React (which Hydrogen uses) and can handle API integrations. If your current crew isn’t up to speed, you might have to hire new talent or bring in an agency. Both options can get pricey.
Business Needs and Objectives
Even though Shopify makes it a lot more affordable to go headless, you’d still need to ask yourself if going headless aligns with your business goals.
If you’re feeling constrained by your current setup and need advanced customizations or better performance, headless could be the answer. But if your current setup is doing just fine and you don’t need those extra bells and whistles, it might be more hassle than it’s worth.
Flexibility and Customization
One of the big draws of headless commerce is the ability to create a unique shopping experience. You can tailor every aspect of your site to fit your brand perfectly.
But remember, this flexibility means ongoing development work. Your team needs to be ready for the constant updates and tweaks that come with maintaining a custom setup.
Integration Capabilities
Think about the tools you currently use. Some might not play nice with a headless setup, meaning you’ll need custom integration solutions. Check how your CRM, marketing automation tools, and other essential services will work in a headless environment to avoid any nasty surprises.
Future Scalability
Consider your long-term plans. A headless setup is great for scalability, letting you add new features and sales channels as your business grows. If you’re planning significant expansion or need to frequently update your site, headless commerce could provide the flexibility and scalability you need.
Risk Management
Lastly, don’t forget about the risks. Moving to a headless setup means you’ll rely more on developers, and you might face some downtime during the transition. Managing a decoupled system can be tricky, so plan carefully, choose reliable partners, and set aside a contingency budget for any bumps in the road.
Time to Market
Switching to a headless setup can be time-consuming. It involves extensive planning, development, and testing phases before you can go live. If your business needs to launch quickly or adapt to market changes rapidly, consider whether you can afford the time investment. A prolonged development cycle could delay your go-to-market strategy and impact your revenue targets.
Final Words
In short, going headless is resource-consuming, yet, with the recent innovations, the cost is going down. I believe that going headless will soon be as affordable as using Shopify out-of-the-box features, but at the end of the day, you still have to ask yourself - does this make your beer taste better?
Godspeed, and happy selling!
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Building A Blazing Fast Shopify Store: Liquid or Hydrogen?
Someone once told me, “You don’t really need your website to go that fast.” I knew what they meant. I’d just spent five seconds waiting for Song for the Mute’s homepage to load. By any standard metric, that’s slow. But I didn’t care. When you’re browsing one of the coolest brands on the internet, and you really want to buy, you’re not timing it. You’re in it. You’re immersed. You’re seeing poetry, storytelling, and fashion blending perfectly together! But most stores aren’t Song for the Mute. And if your brand doesn’t have that kind of magnetic pull yet, performance matters — a lot. Google called it out years ago in their “Milliseconds Make Millions” report. Even today, 82% of users say slow speeds affect their purchasing decisions, and a 1-second improvement in page speed can yield an extra $7,000/day for a $100k/day site. Things haven’t changed. Now, if you're using a traditional Shopify theme, built on Liquid and your site feels sluggish, your first instinct might be to install a performance app. Don’t. Most of them do more harm than good. Others might suggest going headless. I build for Shopify Hydrogen, and even I’ll say this: don’t rush. Can Shopify Liquid Perform Well? Absolutely. Shopify published their own study in late 2023 showing that Liquid storefronts outperform most ecommerce platforms in Core Web Vitals. As of September 2023, 59.5% of Shopify sites passed all CWV thresholds, a stat that continues to climb. Even large-scale merchants like Rothy’s, Rad Power Bikes, and Dollar Shave Club use Liquid and still hit performance benchmarks. Surprisingly, Liquid even outperforms most headless implementations. Shopify found that many SSR frameworks — the ones powering most headless setups — had fewer sites passing Core Web Vitals compared to Liquid. Hydrogen ranked second, but there’s still a gap. So why invest millions in building Hydrogen? Just why? Hydrogen vs Liquid/Shopify Themes A Rebuttal Against Liquid First, I have to say that it might be hard to compare apples to apples in this case, mainly because the data in Shopify’s benchmark focuses on real storefronts using Hydrogen. Many of these early adopters built custom experiences without performance best practices. In contrast, Liquid storefronts benefit from: Years of optimization by Shopify's core teams Default themes like Dawn that are tightly optimized A templating model that constrains performance pitfalls Hydrogen, on the other hand, gives full freedom. Yes, this freedom cuts both ways; it brings performance potential and risk of poor implementation. Hydrogen storefronts can match or exceed Liquid performance when built well. Shopify’s own documentation even notes: “Some routes in the Hydrogen demo store template saw their load time cut in half” after optimizing GraphQL queries. Hydrogen is built on React Server Components (RSC) and uses Vite for ultra-fast development. Shopify chose this stack specifically because: RSC reduces client JS bundle size significantly Pages stream in progressively with lower Time to First Byte (TTFB) Data fetching is done on the server, not in the client render phase You get full control. You also get full responsibility. That’s why some Hydrogen stores load in half the time, and others fall flat. When Should You Consider Hydrogen? Page speed shouldn’t be the only factor in deciding between Shopify Hydrogen and Liquid. The real choice comes down to how much control you need over your storefront experience. If you’re planning to run A/B tests, personalize content, or build dynamic user interfaces, you’ll hit the limits of Liquid fast. Hydrogen is built for that kind of flexibility. It’s designed for brands that want to iterate quickly, experiment often, and optimize every touchpoint. On the other hand, Liquid works well for stores that prioritize simplicity and stability. Its guardrails are a strength if your store setup is relatively fixed, maybe with just a few campaign landing pages here and there. Use Hydrogen if: Your store has 500+ SKUs or 100K+ visits/month, and you’re seeing speed decline. You need to launch experiences that your theme can’t handle: multi-currency PWA, AR tools, immersive UIs. Your team (or agency) is fluent in React and headless workflows Stick with Liquid if: You’re validating a new product or category All your needs are covered within the theme editor, and your site already performs well You don’t have the engineering support to maintain a custom frontend The TL;DR In short, Liquid gives you structure. Hydrogen gives you freedom. Choose based on how far you plan to push your storefront. How To Build Hydrogen Storefronts Faster? One of the biggest reasons developers hesitate to go headless is that it breaks the visual editing experience. The Shopify Theme Editor disappears. Content teams are locked out. Everything becomes a Jira ticket. Weaverse fixes that. With Weaverse Hydrogen, developers can build Hydrogen themes and components via an SDK, expose them in a familiar drag-and-drop editor, just like Shopify Theme Editor, and let content teams reuse, remix, and publish without touching code. And it's only getting easier. With Weaverse AI, the gap between idea and execution shrinks dramatically. Developers will soon be able to turn Figma design into Hydrogen landing pages using Weaverse and Figma MCP. Merchants will soon be able to edit their Hydrogen storefronts using a natural language interface. If you’re interested in Weaverse AI, let me know here, and I’ll reach out once it’s ready!
The Future of Building with Shopify: Hydrogen and AI
Building An Online Store: Then & Now Let’s start with a story. A history lesson, perhaps. It is 1999. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store. You nod gravely and call your web guy. He nods back and disappears for six months. You don’t hear from him again until he returns with 10,000 lines of spaghetti PHP, a MySQL database held together with duct tape, and a shopping cart that breaks when you add more than three items. You launched anyway. The homepage has dancing gifs. The checkout form requires 12 fields. Half of your customers abandon their carts. You get one sale a day. But hey you’re a dot-com entrepreneur now. It is 2007. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store. You go to Magento and download the open-source package. You spin up a server, start following a forum thread with 43 pages titled “Help: Checkout Broken!” and spend the next few weeks configuring payment gateways, plugins, cron jobs, and SSL certificates. You hire a developer to customize the theme. He hardcodes your logo into the footer and disappears. You hire another developer to undo what the first one did. The store launches. It’s not great, but it works. Kind of. At least until the next security update. It is 2016. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store. You open Shopify. It takes you 45 minutes to get to your first product page. You feel powerful. You don’t need a developer. You need a laptop and a credit card. You buy a theme. You connect Stripe. You install a bunch of apps that each solve one extremely specific thing: reviews, popups, upsells, abandoned cart reminders, shipping rate calculators, order printers, email sequences, and chat widgets. It’s a Frankenstein monster of app integrations, but it’s yours. You ship. You sell. You sleep. Sort of. Then the cracks start showing. You want to customize the checkout? Sorry, you need Plus for that. You want a multilingual storefront with dynamic pricing across geographies? Maybe hire an agency. You want to build a branded mobile experience that feels native? Time to hire a dev again. It is 2023. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store and he needs it to be butterfly, fast, and performant. You’re familiar with React and you think Shopify's built-in functionalities are still pretty good, so you decide to build with Shopify Hydrogen. It’s Shopify’s answer to headless. It’s powerful. It lets your developers do things that Liquid never could. Your storefront looks stunning with buttery transitions and personalized landing pages. And still, your performance scores are through the roof. You’ve replaced four apps with custom code. But it also demands more. You’re writing GraphQL queries, managing server components, and wrestling with route loaders and caching strategies. Now your team is busy maintaining a headless stack, they barely have time to explain. What used to take hours now takes days. What used to take days now takes a roadmap. Everything is beautiful and nothing is simple. It is 2026. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store. You open Figma. Then you open Weaverse. You type something like: “Turn this Figma design into a Weaverse page. Five products. Ships worldwide. Prioritize mobile. Feels editorial.” You watch as the layout comes to life. The hero image loads before you finish your sentence. You adjust it with a message: “Make it taller. Add motion.” You change the font. You swap the checkout flow. You personalize the homepage with a prompt. It’s Hydrogen underneath, but you don’t feel it. The complexity of headless is still there. But it’s abstracted away from you, turned into something anyone can use. The future isn’t Hydrogen or AI. It’s Hydrogen plus AI. That’s how Weaverse AI is being built. And this time, everything is possible and simple. Introducing Weaverse AI, The First AI Store Builder for Shopify Hydrogen In 2022, Shopify launched Hydrogen, a React-based framework for building highly customizable, interactive, and high-performance storefronts for Shopify stores. Weaverse was created 6 months later. For years, we’ve been focused on one thing: helping Shopify merchants build better storefronts, faster. Before Hydrogen, that meant delivering Liquid-based themes that looked great out of the box and were easy to use. But Liquid has limits. Custom layout logic often requires installing third-party apps. Dynamic sections depend on metafield hacks. Over time, these workarounds pile up, slowing down performance and restricting flexibility. When Hydrogen became available, we saw a better path forward. Weaverse Hydrogen is our response: a platform that brings Hydrogen’s flexibility into a merchant-friendly environment. With Weaverse Hydrogen, developers can build Hydrogen themes and components via the SDK, make them configurable in the visual editor, and let content teams reuse and remix them across storefronts. Merchants can drag and drop prebuilt components into a Hydrogen-powered store, preview changes in real time, and deploy to Oxygen or locally with ease. It felt like Shopify Theme Editor, but as powerful as Hydrogen can be. Now we’re taking the next step with Weaverse AI. What Is Weaverse AI and What Can It Do? Weaverse AI helps developers, agencies, and merchants build Shopify Hydrogen stores faster using a natural language interface. Imagine describing the section you want—“three columns with product cards and buy buttons”—and it generates it. Upload a Figma file, and it scaffolds a matching theme. You start with a prompt and end with a shoppable page. This is where Weaverse AI leads. There are two major pieces behind this shift: 1/ Weaverse AI Assistant (inside Weaverse theme customizer): Merchants and marketers can build and update Hydrogen pages using natural language. Want a new banner? Change layout? Update styling? Just ask. Generated sections can be promoted to the component library and reused across the organization. 2/ Weaverse MCP (Model-Component-Pipeline): Developers can go from Figma to Hydrogen in one conversation. Unlike black-box generators, the output is developer-friendly, inspectable, and structured around Hydrogen code. Every section is visible to merchants, editable in the GUI, and tweakable by devs. AI defines schema, default values, and preview logic for seamless editing. For Developers: Build Less, Deliver More Faster Prototyping and Development: Weaverse AI speeds up development. Instead of building boilerplate sections from scratch, developers can scaffold pages from Figma designs and let AI handle the repetitive work. You focus on what matters: performance, business logic, and standout features. In practice, a developer could sketch out a site structure in Weaverse’s visual builder and let AI fill in the gaps, achieving in a day what might have taken a week. Less Maintenance Works: AI assistants can handle routine updates or bulk changes across a site. For example, if a client wants to change all CTA buttons to a different style, an AI could execute that change across the codebase. It’s easier to keep the storefront fresh and updated without a continuous manual slog. For Agencies: Faster Builds, Better Margin Higher Throughput, Shorter Timelines: With AI generating first drafts and a visual tool (Weaverse Theme Customizer) enabling rapid tweaks, projects that took months can now ship in weeks, without cutting corners. This means agencies can handle more clients in parallel or offer faster turnarounds, increasing their capacity and revenue potential. Custom for Everyone: Because baseline development is faster, agencies can spend more time on strategy, branding, and customization for each client. It becomes feasible to offer truly bespoke designs to even smaller clients, since the heavy lifting (coding the theme) is largely automated. Even small clients can afford something custom. AI removes the overhead, so you can offer premium service without premium dev hours. Productized Packages: Offer AI-assisted setup packages, budget Hydrogen builds, or retainers focused on optimization instead of maintenance. You move from vendor to strategic partner. For Merchants: More Control, Less Waiting No-code Visual Editing: Merchants can finally have the best of both worlds: the flexibility and speed of a custom headless site, and the ease-of-use of a Shopify page builder. You can launch landing pages, rearrange product sections, or update content without waiting on a dev. The builder is visual and intuitive, and the AI assistant can guide or even generate entire sections for you Faster Iteration. A/B test homepages. Add new sections for a campaign. Update product grids before lunch. With Hydrogen’s speed and AI’s flexibility, iteration is instant. You just chat. Lower Overhead. Reduce dependency on developers for day-to-day changes. Let AI help with SEO, performance suggestions, or layout fixes. You run a modern, high-converting store without needing a tech team on call.
Weaverse Pricing Update - More Free Usage, More Flexibility
Building a brand is tough. You’re constantly juggling priorities, from sales and marketing to product development—and everything costs money. When you’re starting, every penny matters. Your burn rate matters. As a startup ourselves, we understand this deeply. Weaverse is designed to help you build headless storefronts faster, bringing your vision to life. But we also know that’s only part of the equation. You need time and resources to truly scale and grow. This is why we released a new pricing update to offer our users more flexibility to grow, to scale, to win - without losing sleep over your burn rate. Here’s what’s new New Pay-As-You-Go Plan: Replacing our Free Plan, this option is ideal for those just starting out. You now get 10,000 free view credits (twice the previous 5,000!). Only pay as your store grows—simple, flexible, and effective. Introducing Grow Plan: Tailored for growing businesses. For $29/month, you get 200,000 view credits, along with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and guaranteed response time to ensure your store runs smoothly even as you scale. Introducing Scale Plan: Designed for high-traffic stores. At $199/month, you’ll get 1.5 million view credits and priority access to our upcoming features, including Localization, A/B Testing, and Scheduling. What About Current Paid Users? Don’t worry, you’re covered. The new pricing doesn’t affect existing paid users. If you’re already on a legacy business plan, you can switch to any of the new plans with the same add-on pricing: $1 for every 10,000 views. Not Sure What View Credits Are? View credits are counted each time a page on your Hydrogen theme is viewed, whether it’s a first-time visit or a repeat view. This ensures that our pricing is directly linked to how much value you’re getting from Weaverse. For more details, check out our pricing page here. If you have any questions or concerns, just drop me a message on Linkedin!
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