Most agencies make you book two calls to hear those numbers. We put ours on a page, because a rate you have to ask for is a rate you've already learned to distrust, and the store owners we want to work with do their homework before they talk to anyone. Homework needs numbers.
The rest of this page is the why: what's inside the hour, what the market charges for less, and why Plus work earns a higher rate. By the end you should be able to defend these numbers to your own CFO, line by line. That's the test we wrote it against.
45 minutes with Justin, the developer who scopes and builds the work. The rate you just read is the rate he'll quote.
An hour on your invoice is an hour on your store. Here's what it contains:
And here's what the hour doesn't contain: an account manager's salary, a status meeting about the status meeting, or a coordinator translating your request into a ticket and back. There is no layer to fund. The rate is the builder's rate, and it's the same number in the proposal and on the invoice. No junior rate appears after you sign. No blended team rate bills you for a meeting you weren't in.
The typing is cheap. The judgment wrapped around it, what to build, what it might break, how to ship it without risking revenue, is the profession. That's what the rate prices.
Typical agency rates run about $150 an hour or more today, and that's before you look at what's inside the hour. At a layered agency, your invoice carries the people between you and the work: account management, project coordination, internal reviews you never see. You pay for a full hour. The build gets a slice of it.
The rate is also only half the math. The other half is how many hours the outcome takes, and that's where the gap gets wide. Because the person who scopes the work is the person who builds it, nothing gets lost in a handoff and nothing gets rebuilt from a misread ticket. The same scope ships in dramatically fewer hours.
So the comparison worth making isn't $135 against $150. You pay rate times hours, and hours is where layered teams quietly double a bill. A cheaper hour that takes three times as many of them is the most expensive thing in this industry.
The honest answer has two halves: Plus problems are harder, and Plus mistakes cost more. Both halves earn the number.
Harder first. On Plus, the valuable work happens where Shopify's rules are strictest. Checkout can't simply be edited; changes go through checkout extensibility and Shopify Functions, compiled logic that runs under hard resource limits. B2B and wholesale bring price lists, company accounts, and payment terms into a storefront designed around one buyer at a time. Multi-store setups multiply every decision across storefronts that all have to keep agreeing with each other. And the integrations run deeper, because a business that needs Plus has more systems to connect, and every connection is a moving part that has to keep moving while you trade. It's a different discipline from theme work, practiced under tighter rules.
Now the stakes. A store doing $100K a month earns about $137 an hour, around the clock, averaged. That's roughly our standard rate, earned every hour of the month. Plus stores run multiples of that, and revenue doesn't arrive averaged. It arrives in spikes, and the spikes are exactly when a store change gets found out. A checkout problem on a launch evening is measured in thousands an hour. So Plus work gets our most senior hands, more testing passes, and slower, more careful rollouts.
That's what the extra $40 is: judgment under higher stakes, from people who've carried them before. Anyone selling you the same work at two prices is marking up. That isn't what's happening here, and now you can check.
One more thing a professional owes you: saying so when you don't need the hours. A share of the Plus requests we see are really Shopify Functions problems with a repeatable shape, so Justin built an app for those with The Click Collective. It's called Switchboard, and it puts Shopify Functions behind a no-code interface. When your problem fits the app, we'll point you at the app instead of the invoice.
Nobody asks their accountant to itemize the thinking behind a return. Nobody asks their lawyer to explain why the contract took the hours it took. Those professions earned a standing assumption: the work is hard, the stakes are real, and the person doing it carries both.
Development earned the same assumption more recently, so we're happy to show the work. Here it is in one comparison. Your ledger records the business. Your storefront is the business. An error in the books surfaces at filing time. An error on the product page surfaces in tonight's revenue. And fast, efficient systems stopped being an IT expense line a while ago: at your volume they're the difference between compounding and stalling. Building them is professional work, priced the way professional work is priced.
Some owners read a page like this and decide to learn the work instead. Respect. We're building a course for exactly that path: our process, end to end, for store owners who want to run their own stack. Some of our best clients tried the DIY route first; it's the fastest education there is on what an hour of this work is worth. If the budget says do it yourself, do it with our playbook.
Redesigns and builds are fixed fee, one time, starting at $2,400, $4,800, or $28,000, matched to how much of the site is custom. The figure goes in writing before money moves, and the figure on the scope of work is the figure on the invoice.
Fixed fee holds because of one document: the SOW. It lists the pages, the revisions, the timeline, and the price. Everything on the list is covered by the fee. Anything outside the list gets its own written quote before it gets built, and you decide with a number in front of you. That one line protects both sides. You never watch a meter run, and the fee never has to quietly absorb a project that doubled after signing.
It also means fixed fee rewards a thought-through project. That's why discovery comes first: we help you define the thing before either of us commits to a number for it. Come with clear goals and fixed fee is the best deal on this page.
The full ground rules and what each package includes: the fixed-fee page
Hourly covers what a fixed fee can't hold: development beyond a package's included hours, work outside a signed SOW, and ongoing engineering with no fixed endpoint. Estimated in writing first, at the rates above.
Rates pages usually stop at the hourly. Here's the whole list, because you shouldn't need a discovery call to find out what things cost.
Ongoing conversion work is a retainer: $3,200 a month, minimum three months. Inside it, about 27 hours a month of senior hands-on time across strategy and shipped development: heatmaps, funnel mapping, test planning, and the dev hours that build the fixes. Same team, same week.
A standing block of senior time gets priced better than hours bought one at a time. That's deliberate: a committed month lets us plan compounding work instead of reacting to requests.
The minimum works the same way. Month one is diagnosis, month two is testing, month three is when fixes compound and the report gets interesting. One month of CRO doesn't work, so we don't sell one.
Every stage is welcome here. A store doing $10K a month gets the same rate, the same senior hands, and the same honest scoping as a store doing $500K; what changes is what we recommend you spend on. The math on this page scales with you: the bigger the revenue, the more each protected hour pays back. Wherever you are, we'd rather tell you the right-sized move on the call than let you learn it from an invoice, and if the do-it-yourself route is the honest answer at your stage, the course above is being built for exactly that.
Because the rate isn't the variable; the hours are. A public rate lets you run the math on your side before anyone has invested in a call, and it puts the number on record. What your specific project costs gets quoted in writing after discovery.
No. It's a premium for stricter rules and a bigger blast radius. Checkout extensibility, Functions, B2B logic, and multi-store setups take more senior time per hour and more testing per change, and a mistake on a store at that volume costs more per minute than the rate difference costs per hour.
You see it in writing before we start. Defined projects go fixed fee, which makes hours our problem instead of yours. Hourly work gets a written estimate, and anything growing past that estimate gets flagged before it's built, not after it's billed.
It gets a written quote, you approve it or you don't, and the original number stays the original number. What's in the SOW is covered by the fee. What's outside it is a decision you make with a price in front of you. Nobody discovers scope on an invoice.
That's what it's for. The rates are $135 and $175, the projects are fixed fee, and the math above is the argument. If the numbers work for your store, the next step is 45 minutes with Justin, the developer who would scope the work. Testing everything this page claims takes exactly one call, because the person who answers is the person who builds. And if the answer is that you don't need us yet, that's the answer you'll get.
FireNet Designs is a verified Shopify Partner, featured in the official Partner Directory. Since 2022, we’ve delivered lightning-fast Shopify design, development, SEO, app builds, and more: 4x faster, at half the cost. No fluff, no middlemen, just results. The Anti-Agency for brands that want growth, not delays.
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