Shopify Plus is a genuinely good product. It's also easy to outgrow in ways that aren't obvious until you're two years and a few hundred thousand dollars in.
We're not neutral on this — one of our case studies is a client we moved fully off Shopify Plus onto a self-hosted Laravel Lunar stack, which took their platform and hosting costs from roughly $2,400/month down to $150/month. But that project makes more sense as a story about when Plus stops fitting than as a blanket argument against it. Plenty of our other ecommerce work keeps clients on Shopify Plus because it's the right tool for what they're doing.
Where Plus is genuinely the right call
If you're a DTC brand with a relatively standard catalog, need to launch fast, and don't want to own infrastructure, Shopify Plus is hard to beat. You get a checkout that converts well, PCI compliance handled for you, an app ecosystem that covers most common needs, and a hosting bill that scales predictably with your plan tier rather than your engineering choices. For a huge number of businesses, that trade — pay Shopify a fixed, known cost and never think about servers — is the correct one.
Where it starts to strain
The client we migrated ran into three things at once, and any one of them individually might not have justified the move.
First, B2B. They needed tiered pricing by customer group, quote-to-order workflows, and net-terms accounts — the kind of functionality Shopify Plus supports today largely through its B2B feature set or third-party apps, each with its own monthly fee and its own limitations on how deeply you can customize the workflow. Once you're stacking four or five paid apps to cover gaps in core commerce logic, you're paying twice: once for the platform, once for the patches.
Second, ERP integration. They needed inventory, orders, and fulfillment status flowing to and from their ERP in real time, not through a periodic sync app. Shopify's API is solid, but building a correct two-way integration on top of any platform's API takes real engineering regardless of which platform you're on — so this alone doesn't disqualify Plus, but it does mean the "no engineering required" pitch of Shopify isn't quite true once your operations get this specific.
Third — and this was the deciding factor — the pure cost math stopped working. Between the Plus subscription tier, the B2B and integration apps, and transaction fees on top of it all, they were paying for flexibility they weren't getting. Once they had custom order management and B2B logic requirements this specific, the marginal cost of owning the stack outright became lower than the cost of renting a platform and patching around its limits.
The honest trade-off
Moving off Shopify Plus means you now own the infrastructure. Someone has to run the servers, apply security patches, monitor uptime, and handle scaling — Shopify was doing all of that for you. For this client, that trade made sense because the new AWS footprint, run correctly, cost a fraction of what they'd been paying, and they wanted the commerce logic to be an owned asset rather than a rented one. For a smaller catalog without deep B2B or ERP requirements, that same trade-off would probably not pay for itself, and staying on Plus is the right answer.
How we'd actually evaluate this for you
Add up your Plus subscription, every app fee tied to workflows core commerce platforms don't handle natively, and your transaction fees over twelve months. Compare that to what a right-sized, owned infrastructure footprint would cost to run and maintain. If the gap is small, stay — the operational simplicity is worth it. If the gap is large and your requirements are genuinely custom, it's worth a real conversation.