Setting Up an Online Store for Free or Low Cost: 17 Routes by the Numbers (2026)

Three ways to a store that costs nothing a month

The routes with no monthly fee come in three kinds, and all of them are paid for per sale instead.

A free plan on a store builder. Square Online’s Square Free plan is “$0/mo. per location”: “there are no monthly subscription costs — you only pay processing fees when you take a payment”, at 3.3% + 30¢ for an online card payment.¹ Big Cartel’s Gold plan is its “free-forever option—no credit card required, no hidden fees”, for up to five products,⁸ paid through the seller’s own Stripe or PayPal account, since “Big Cartel does not process payments directly”.¹⁰ Payhip’s Free Forever plan comes with “All features” and unlimited products but takes 5% of each sale, on top of Stripe’s or PayPal’s standard rates.¹² Ko-fi’s shop also takes 5% on its free plan, or 0% for $12 a month on Gold.¹⁴

A storefront that is also the seller. Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy each give you a store page and act as the merchant of record, so the customer buys from them and they deal with the tax. Gumroad has no monthly fee and charges “10% + $0.50 Per transaction for all sales through your profile or direct links”;¹⁶ card processing (2.9% + $0.30) comes on top for those sales, while the 30% on sales through its Discover marketplace includes processing.¹⁷ Lemon Squeezy charges 5% + 50¢ with card processing included, plus 1.5% on international payments and 0.5% on subscription payments.²¹ Neither sells physical goods: Lemon Squeezy prohibits “physical goods of any kind”,²⁴ and Gumroad’s list of high-risk products that aren’t allowed names physical products.¹⁸

A payment link on a page you already have. Stripe charges “No setup fees, monthly fees, or hidden fees”, 2.9% + 30¢ per successful domestic card payment, and its Payment Links are “Included at no additional charge”.²⁵ A link opens a Stripe-hosted payment page, can be shared “on social media, in emails, or on your website”, and is no-code.²⁶ PayPal’s Payment Links build “a PayPal-hosted checkout page in seconds”, with “No website required”.³⁰ Its fee schedule (last updated October 1, 2026) charges 2.99% + 0.49 USD for a card paid through a payment link and 3.49% + 0.49 USD for PayPal Checkout; the Payment Links product page shows a 10¢ fixed fee for the same rows, so the chart uses the fee schedule’s 49¢.²⁹³⁰

What the free plans leave out

Your own domain. Square Free publishes on an address “ending in ‘square.site’ (like ‘mybusiness.square.site’)”,² and connecting your own domain is for “Square Online Plus and Premium subscribers”;³ Plus is $49 a month.¹ Big Cartel allows a custom domain on Platinum and Diamond only;⁹ Platinum is $15 a month, or $144 billed annually.⁷ Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy both document custom domains with no plan tier,¹⁹⁶¹ while a Stripe Payment Link on your own domain is an optional $10 a month.²⁵

Room to grow. Big Cartel’s Gold plan holds five products with one image each; Platinum raises that to 50 products and Diamond ($30 a month) to 500.⁹⁷ Square Free has no abandoned-cart emails, bundles or subscriptions, and real-time shipping rates come only with Square Premium ($149 a month).¹ A digital item on Square Online is a file “that you can manually send to the customer”, with automatic delivery through the SendOwl app.⁶

Payments, on some builders. Wix has a free plan, but “to start accepting online payments, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan”;⁶³ payments start on Core, at $29 a month billed yearly.⁵² Squarespace has no free plan, and its 14-day trial site is private and “can’t accept payments”.⁵⁰ GoDaddy’s Airo builder has a free tier for building preview sites, but publishing starts on a paid plan, and its cheapest paid plan, Starter, sells only by “sharing a link or QR code”; the product catalog starts on Professional.⁵⁴

Where the cheapest plans went

Three of the best-known cheap routes have closed or changed. Shopify’s Starter plan, which sold through shareable product links, “isn’t available to new stores”.⁴⁶ Shopify’s $0 plan is now Agentic, “For selling in AI channels”,⁴⁵ on which “Your online store stays password protected, so customers can’t visit it”.⁴⁷ Shopify’s cheapest way to a public store is the Basic plan, $29 a month billed yearly or $39 monthly, after an offer to “Try 3 days free, then $1/month for 3 months”.⁴⁵

Ecwid, long known for a free plan, now lists “four paid plans (Starter, Venture, Business, and Unlimited)”.⁶² Starter is $5 a month for 10 products on a free company.site address, with no digital goods and no connected domain.³⁴ And Lemon Squeezy posted in January 2026 that its goal is “to provide Lemon Squeezy users an easy way to migrate to Stripe Managed Payments”, without giving a date or a change to its fees.²³

The recipe: a $0 store, step by step

Square publishes the order in which a Square Online site gets set up, for its Free, Plus and Premium plans alike.⁴ On Square Free, every step costs nothing until the first sale.

Step list and plan scope: Square’s “Set up your website” guide.⁴ Item types: its guide to non-physical items.⁶ Tax rates: Square’s sales-tax article.⁵ Costs per step and plan features: the Square Online plans page.¹² Square doesn’t publish how long setup takes.

The payment-link route is shorter. In Stripe’s documented steps you open the Payment Links page in the Dashboard and click +New, select an existing product or add a new one, and click Create link.²⁷ From there, “click Buy button to configure the buy button design and generate the code that you can copy and paste into your website”.²⁸ The page holding the button can be a free one: Cloudflare Pages states that “All plans come with unlimited sites, seats, requests, and bandwidth”.³³ GitHub Pages is the exception: it “is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site”.³² Carrd’s free plan has no payment embeds or custom domain; its Pro Standard plan, $19 a year, adds both, with embeds “from third-party services like Stripe, PayPal, Gumroad”.³¹

Who handles the sales tax

The biggest difference in effort between these routes is who files the tax. Lemon Squeezy’s definition: the merchant of record “is responsible for handling all payments and takes responsibility for everything relating to the purchase, including collecting sales tax, processing refunds and chargebacks, and ensuring PCI compliance”.²² A payment processor such as Stripe or Square moves the money and leaves the tax with the seller.

Gumroad says that since January 1, 2025 it “handles ALL your tax obligations” as a merchant of record, managing “sales tax collection and remittance worldwide”.¹⁶ Lemon Squeezy takes “the liability of tax collection and calculation and pay[s] taxes on your behalf”.²⁰ Payhip says it “automatically collects, reports and remits digital EU/UK VAT as well as US/Canadian sales tax on your behalf”.¹² Big Cartel, for shops selling in USD, “automatically calculates, collects, and remits any applicable U.S. sales tax on all orders shipping to or within the U.S. and Puerto Rico”, leaving home-rule localities such as those in Colorado to the seller.¹¹

Elsewhere the tax is yours. Square: “It is solely your responsibility to accurately configure, charge, collect, and remit applicable taxes.”⁵ Ko-fi “is not the merchant of record on any transaction”.¹⁵ Squarespace says “You’re responsible for ensuring your business collects, files, and pays the correct taxes.”⁵¹ Shopify Tax is free for US stores until $100,000 of sales, a lifetime threshold for stores created on or after May 13, 2026, then 0.35% on US orders with calculated tax on Basic.⁴⁸ Stripe Tax Basic costs 0.5% per transaction where you’re registered to collect.²⁵ When and where a seller has to register is set by each state’s sales-tax nexus rules, not by the platform.

The cheapest paid plans, and what they add

The paid plans buy back the things the free ones leave out: a full store on your own domain, more products and built-in tax rates. Hostinger’s Website Builder lists “Ecommerce available” from its Unlimited plan, $3.99 a month on a 48-month term paid up front ($191.52), renewing at $16.99 a month; its cheaper Premium plan doesn’t list ecommerce.⁴³ It charges no sales commission (“depending on the payment gateway you choose, there may be fees”) and allows up to 1,000 products.⁴⁴ Etsy’s Pattern website is “free for 30 days, then you will be charged $15 per month”, with no transaction fee on Pattern sales.³⁶

Squarespace’s Basic plan is $19 a month billed annually or $25 monthly, with a 2% transaction fee on store sales that drops to 0% on Core ($29 annually).⁴⁹ Wix Core is $29 a month billed yearly, with a catalog of up to 50,000 products; automated sales tax starts on Business.⁵² Shopify Basic adds no fee of its own when Shopify Payments takes the card, and 2% when a third-party provider does.⁴⁵

WooCommerce is the free, open-source route: “WooCommerce Free, with no monthly subscription”, with hosting that WooCommerce itself puts at “$25 – $350/month for most stores”.³⁸ WooPayments has “no setup fees, monthly fees for online payments, or other hidden charges” and charges 2.90% + $0.30 for US cards.³⁹ On WordPress.com, “Installing plugins is available on all WordPress.com paid plans”,⁴¹ which start at “$4/month billed annually”.⁴² WooCommerce’s own setup checklist runs: add your products, set up payments, customize your store, collect sales tax, select shipping options and launch.⁴⁰

The one fixed cost most routes share: a domain

Every route above runs on the platform’s own address for free, and a .com of your own is the main yearly cost that most stores add. Cloudflare Registrar says it “does not mark up domain prices at all”;⁵⁶ its domain search showed a .com at $10.46 for the first year and the same on renewal on 2026-10-18. Porkbun lists a .com at “$11.08 everyday low price”, with “No surprise renewals”.⁵⁷ Squarespace’s annual plans and Hostinger’s builder plans include a custom domain free for the first year.⁴⁹⁴³ Shopify gives every store a free myshopify.com address, whose name can be changed “only 1 time”.⁵⁸