There is no shared break-even point, and the published figures disagree because they are answering three different questions. One is the fee crossover, the monthly sales at which a Shopify plan costs less than Etsy’s commission. One is the payback period, how long the saving takes to repay what the move cost you. One is the business break-even, the share of your sales you have to keep after moving to end up with the same money. The three produce different numbers from identical inputs, and only the third is the one most sellers actually mean.
Fees and plan prices change, and this page is a dated record rather than a permanent fact. Every platform figure below was read on September 7, 2026 on the platform’s own page and is quoted as that company’s figure. Check your own account and your own country’s pricing page before you decide anything.
The numbers in circulation, and why they are not comparable
A single search for this question on September 7, 2026 returned published break-evens of roughly $450 to $500 a month in sales, around $600 a month, around $1,350 a month, and a version expressed as 60 to 70 orders a month. Those are not variations on one answer. They differ by roughly threefold, and one of them is not even denominated in the same unit.
None of the pages carrying them publishes the assumptions that produce them. The assumptions that would explain the whole spread are short enough to list: which Shopify plan, monthly or annual billing, whether card processing is counted on either side, whether listing fees and renewals are counted, what average order value is assumed, whether Offsite Ads is in the model, whether apps are in the model, and whether any cost of replacing marketplace traffic is in the model.
Change those and you can produce any figure in that range honestly. That is the real finding: a break-even quoted without its assumptions is a description of someone else’s shop. It is not wrong so much as it is about a different business than yours.
Question one: the fee crossover
This is the easiest of the three and the least useful, which is why it is the one everybody publishes.
It asks at what monthly sales figure a fixed subscription becomes cheaper than a percentage. Etsy charges nothing to exist on and takes a share of each sale. Shopify charges a fixed monthly price and takes no commission of its own. So:
Fee crossover = Shopify plan price divided by Etsy’s transaction fee rate
Etsy’s seller page, read September 7, 2026 in its US version, states a “6.5% Transaction fee” on the sale price including the shipping price you set. Shopify’s pricing page, read the same day with the region set to the United States, showed Basic at $25 USD a month on monthly billing and $19 on annual, Grow at $65 and $49, Advanced at $399 and $299, and Plus “from $2,300/mo.” The worked table of crossovers for each of those plans is in our full side-by-side of what Etsy and Shopify actually charge, so it is not repeated here.
What matters is what this formula leaves out, which is almost everything: card processing on both sides, your listing renewals, your apps, your theme, your domain, and any cost of getting a visitor to the new store. The crossover is a comparison of two price lists. It is not a comparison of two businesses.
Question two: the payback period
This one asks how long it takes the saving to repay what the move cost you.
Payback in months = the one-off cost of moving divided by the monthly saving after moving
The one-off side is quotable in your own currency and nobody else’s: a theme if you buy one, any paid help with product data and images, redirects and domain work, and the hours you spend, valued at whatever your hours are worth. We publish no figures for those because they are yours, and any number we invented would be exactly the kind of unsourced estimate that made the published break-evens disagree in the first place.
Two things break this calculation quietly. The monthly saving in the denominator is usually taken from question one, which excludes most costs. And the payback assumes your sales continue at the same level, which is the assumption question three exists to test.
Question three: the business break-even, and the term no calculator includes
This is what a seller means by break-even. Not “when is the software cheaper” but “at what point do I have as much money as I had before.”
Two things move when you leave that no fee comparison contains. Your sales do not transfer at 100%, because marketplace search was supplying part of the demand. And your own store has to buy or earn the traffic the marketplace was providing.
Write it out with inputs you can pull from your own records:
- S = your monthly sales
- m = your gross margin rate after cost of goods, before platform fees
- f = the share of sales Etsy currently takes
- r = the share of your sales that still happens after you move, your retention rate
- P plus T = your own store’s monthly platform cost plus whatever you spend to replace marketplace traffic
Staying leaves you: S multiplied by (m minus f)
Leaving leaves you: (S multiplied by r multiplied by m), minus P, minus T
Set those two equal and the retention rate you need comes out as:
r = [S (m minus f) plus P plus T] divided by (S multiplied by m)
Ignore the fixed costs for a moment and it reduces to something you can do in your head:
r = 1 minus (f divided by m)
The fee rate divided by the margin rate, subtracted from one. That is the whole relationship, and it is the sentence this page exists to publish.
What that reduction actually tells you
Take Etsy’s published US figures, read September 7, 2026: a 6.5% transaction fee plus a $0.20 listing fee counted once against each order. On a $50 average order that is about 6.9% of sales. Card processing is excluded here on both sides, deliberately: Shopify’s pricing page as read that day did not state a card rate per plan, so pairing Etsy’s published 3% plus $0.25 against a Shopify figure we could not read would tilt the comparison. Add both back from your own statements when you run this for real.
| Your gross margin | Retention you need to stand still | Sales you can afford to lose |
|---|---|---|
| 25% | 72.4% | 27.6% |
| 40% | 82.8% | 17.2% |
| 50% | 86.2% | 13.8% |
| 70% | 90.1% | 9.9% |
Our arithmetic, from Etsy’s published fee figures on the date read, with an assumed $50 average order and fixed costs set to zero. It is an illustration of the relationship, not a prediction about any shop.
The direction of that table surprises most people, including us when we first wrote it out. A thinner margin gives you more room to lose sales, not less. When your margin is 25%, Etsy’s roughly 6.9% is eating more than a quarter of what you keep, so removing it buys a large cushion. When your margin is 70%, the same fee is a tenth of what you keep, and losing more than about a tenth of your orders puts you behind.
The honest caveat that belongs immediately after it: this is a ratio, not a measure of resilience. A 25% margin business has more proportional room and far less absolute cushion in dollars, so the same percentage shortfall hurts it sooner in cash terms.
Now put the fixed costs back
Fixed costs are where the cushion goes. Take a hypothetical shop at $4,000 a month, 80 orders averaging $50, a 50% gross margin, so $2,000 of margin before fees. Etsy’s transaction and listing fees on the figures read that day come to about $276, leaving $1,724.
With zero platform and traffic spend, the required retention is about 86%, exactly as the reduction predicts. Add $300 a month of Shopify plan, apps and traffic spend combined and the required retention passes 100%, which is the arithmetic saying that at the same sales volume no retention rate works: the shop would have to grow, not merely hold. Change the margin, the order value or the spend and it moves the other way. That is not a verdict on moving. It is the reason a single published threshold cannot be one.
Illustration only, with round hypothetical figures and the assumptions stated. Not a description of any real shop.
The input you cannot look up, and how to narrow it
Everything above is arithmetic except r, and r is the term that decides the outcome. Nobody can hand you your retention rate, because it depends on who your buyers are.
Your own Etsy Shop Manager stats break visits down by source. The share arriving from Etsy search and Etsy’s own recommendations is the part of your demand the marketplace is supplying. The share arriving from your social accounts, your email list or people typing your shop name is the part that already belongs to you. Those two shares are the closest thing to a measurable upper and lower bound on r that exists, and reading them costs nothing.
The other half of the picture is what it costs to replace the difference, which is the T in the formula and the line no calculator has ever included. A new store starts with no search history and no audience, and both take time, money or a great deal of work to build. Our piece on why a new Shopify store has no traffic at first is the honest version of that timeline, and how long it takes to replace marketplace income is the same question expressed in months.
What to check before you trust any number here, including ours
The platform costs in P are not one figure either. Shopify’s published plan price is the floor rather than the bill, and the apps, theme and domain are the part that moves it, which we work through in what Shopify actually costs per month.
And the arithmetic answers a narrower question than the one you are really asking. It compares money to money. It does not price the ownership of your customer list, the risk of a suspension, the work you take on, or the fact that a marketplace can change its terms after you have built on them. Those belong in the same decision, and they are the subject of our wider look at how much revenue you need before leaving Etsy, which is deliberately not a number either.
Last checked: September 7, 2026. Etsy figures from etsy.com/sell, US version. Shopify plan prices from shopify.com/pricing with the region set to the United States, in USD. Both companies publish different figures in different countries and change them without notice.