A headless store starts at CZK 250,000 and ten to fourteen weeks with us, Shopify Plus starts at EUR 2,100 a month. We sell both, and we are going to write the opposite of what is usually expected in an article like this: for most Czech stores neither of them pays off, and they can tell from numbers they already have.
This is not modesty. It is that both decisions are made once and a wrong one keeps being paid for monthly. What follows is therefore a procedure for calculating the answer yourself, and a list of the cases where the answer comes out the other way.
Plus is not bought for speed, it is bought for the checkout
Here is the heart of the matter and the only reason it makes sense to pay for Plus as a first step. The Shopify help says it directly: "Apps that customize the information, shipping, and payment pages of the checkout, including checkouts from draft orders, are available only to Shopify Plus" (help.shopify.com, Customizing your checkout with apps, retrieved 31 August 2026).
On the regular plans you can customise the thank-you page, the order status page and customer accounts. The checkout steps themselves - information, shipping, payment - you cannot. In practice this means that custom fields such as a company registration number, conditional shipping by product category or custom payment logic in the cart require Plus.
Two dates that belong to this and get left out of quotes:
- checkout.liquid has been marked deprecated since February 2023 and is being replaced by an extensible checkout built on apps.
- Script tags on the thank-you page and the order status page ended on 28 August 2025 for Plus and 26 August 2026 for the other plans.
Anyone running tracking or an upsell built on those scripts today is facing a migration to a block extension regardless of whether they have Plus or not. It is work that adds no feature, it only keeps the existing one alive.
B2B on its own is no longer a reason to move to Plus
This is the most common outdated argument used to sell Plus, and as of this year it no longer holds. The basic B2B tools are on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans: company profiles, company locations, permissions, quantity rules and volume discounts, payment on invoice with due dates, reminders, saved cards, draft orders, customer PO numbers.
What stays on Plus is this (help.shopify.com, Shopify B2B features by plan, retrieved 31 August 2026):
| What | Basic, Grow, Advanced | Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Active catalogues | 3 in total at most | unlimited |
| Catalogue assigned directly to a company | no | yes |
| Deposits and partial payments | no | yes |
| Contextual checkout through Markets | Advanced only | yes |
The deciding sentence. If you have up to three wholesale price lists, you do not need Plus for B2B. If you have an individual price list for each of twenty customers, you need it right away, because three is not a recommendation but a limit.
What has not got smaller is the work around it. The platform provides the building blocks; connecting price lists to an ERP, transferring stock levels and approving an order on the customer's side remain custom development on any plan. How we build that logic is described on the CRM and ERP page.
The threshold in numbers: when Plus pays for itself from the fee alone
The one item where the difference between the plans can be calculated without estimates is the fee for using a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments. On the Advanced plan it is 0.6 % of turnover, on Plus 0.2 %, a saving of 0.4 % (shopify.com/pricing, retrieved 31 August 2026).
Against that stands the difference in plan price: Advanced at CZK 9,510 a month against Plus from EUR 2,100 a month. At an exchange rate of 24 to 25 CZK to the euro that is a difference of roughly CZK 41,000 to 43,000 a month.
The break-even point therefore lies between CZK 10.2 and 10.7 million of monthly turnover. Below that, Plus does not pay for itself out of the fee saving, not remotely.
What this calculation does not say. It does not say Plus pays off from ten million upwards. It says something else and more useful: below ten million, Plus has to be paid for by something other than fees - checkout customisation, unlimited catalogues, expansion stores. That "something else" has to be named in the contract before it is signed, because otherwise you have bought 0.4 % of a turnover you do not have.
Two caveats on that number. The price of Plus is quoted with a "from" and is negotiated; and put in the current euro rate yourself, ours moved the result by half a million of turnover.
Headless: what CZK 250,000 buys you and what you lose with it
Headless means you write your own frontend and talk to the commerce part through an API. On Shopify that is served by Hydrogen and the Oxygen hosting, which according to the documentation is free on all paid plans. What is free is therefore the hosting, not the solution: you pay for development and then for its maintenance.
With us headless B2B starts at CZK 250,000 and 10 to 14 weeks. At our published rate of CZK 1,800 an hour for e-commerce that is roughly 138 hours of work. That figure is neither a ceiling nor an average, it is a starting point.
What breaks along the way and what quotes tend to omit:
- The theme editor stops running the site. Whoever used to change a banner themselves will now ask a developer for the change.
- Apps that inject themselves into the theme do not run on a custom frontend. Reviews, chat, upsell, page builders - each of them you either replace with an API service or program yourself.
- Two systems appear instead of one. Two build processes, two deployments, two places where something can break on a Friday evening.
- Dependence on the supplier grows. Nobody who did not write the custom frontend can operate it until they have studied it.
A model return calculation you can fill in with your own figures
Simple and unpleasant. For CZK 250,000 to come back within a year, the project has to bring in roughly CZK 20,800 of extra margin a month. At a gross margin of 30 % that corresponds to CZK 833,000 of extra turnover a year, that is about CZK 69,000 a month.
Put in your margin and your number. What matters is the question behind the calculation: where will those CZK 69,000 a month come from? From faster loading? Then you first have to measure what slowness costs you today - and that can be found out more cheaply than by rewriting the frontend.
Three conditions without which you should not buy headless
All three have to hold at once. One or two mean the problem lies elsewhere.
- Speed is a measured problem and the theme is already clean. If the theme has not been tidied and the apps have not been uninstalled, headless only moves the load somewhere else.
- The frontend is not a shop. A configurator, one catalogue under several brands, a large content section from a CMS - there a custom frontend is paid for with function, not with speed.
- You have someone to maintain it. An in-house developer or a service contract with a fixed number of hours. Headless without a keeper does not age slowly, it falls over all at once.
What to do instead when it is only about speed
In most of the cases we see, "we need headless" hides a slow page, and that has a cheaper cause. Taking apart one Shopify theme after four years of edits, we counted 323 templates describing only 193 different structures, and 6.9 MB out of 8.8 MB in the image folder belonged to an uninstalled loyalty app.
Measurements on the same storefront: the server answered in 0.73 s, the main element rendered at 19.2 s and loading finished at 27.4 s, while the page weighed 10.6 MB and pulled 548 requests from 57 third-party domains (WebPageTest, mobile profile, cold cache, 24 June 2026).
The platform did not add those nineteen seconds, and a custom frontend would not remove them either, because the same things would be hung on it again. An analysis of that work is in the article on auditing apps.
When, on the contrary, you should not hesitate
So that this does not read as turning work down. There are cases where the answer is the other way round, and you recognise them by numbers as well:
- turnover in the order of tens of millions a year and payment through a third-party gateway,
- a checkout you need to touch in some way other than colour and logo,
- more than three wholesale price lists, or a price list assigned to a specific company,
- several brands or markets on one commerce backend,
- a frontend that is meant to do something other than sell from a catalogue.
Before you sign for Plus or headless, write one sentence on paper: "We are buying this because of ___ and in a year we will know it worked from ___." If the second blank cannot be filled with a number, it is not a decision but a hope.
We will do the maths on your numbers, even when the answer is no
Send us your monthly turnover, the share of payments through a third-party gateway, the number of wholesale price lists and the list of checkout customisations you need. We will return a calculation that also includes the "stay on Advanced and spend that money elsewhere" option - we use it more often than the other one.
What we build and for how much is on the store development page. If you are still choosing a platform, start with the comparison of Shoptet, Shopify and WooCommerce.
Write to info@lamapixel.com or call +420 775 599 009.
