Store launch budget and break-even planner
Before you spend anything, two numbers decide whether this works: what it costs to open, and how many orders a month it takes before you keep a cent. This works out both, and the honest worst case if you never sell.
Get the spreadsheet
Free. The file downloads straight away and the link is emailed to you as well, so you can find it again on the laptop you actually work on.
What is inside
- One-time costs: domain, theme, opening stock, photography, registration.
- Monthly costs: the plan, the apps, the subscriptions, the help.
- Unit economics: one typical order, from price down to what is left after ads.
- Break-even: orders a month, sales a month, the most you can pay for a customer, and the first-year cost if nothing sells.
How to use it
- Open it in Excel, or upload it to Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets. Everything survives the trip: formulas, dropdowns and formats.
- Fill in the sand-coloured cells. They are the only ones meant for typing; every white cell is a formula that keeps itself correct.
- Start with the Settings sheet. The rates there drive every fee calculation in the workbook, and they come from your own account, not from us.
- Keep it open at the end of each week. A spreadsheet you update on the day you remember is worth more than a perfect one you fill in once a year.
Why we give it away
We build real business apps with AI tools and publish what they cost down to the cent, and these sheets came out of doing that: they are the ones we keep open ourselves. Giving them away costs us nothing and puts us in front of the people we write for. How we test explains where the numbers in them come from.
Questions
What should I put for the Shopify plan?
Whatever you will actually pay. Basic was $39 a month, or $29 billed yearly, on shopify.com/pricing on 16 September 2026; the trial was 3 days free then $1 a month for 3 months. Use the number from your own billing page once you have one.
What if I have no idea about the order value yet?
Use the price of the product you would sell most, plus what you would charge for shipping. The point of the sheet is to see how sensitive the answer is: change it and watch break-even move.
Why does it show a first-year cost if I never sell?
Because that is the number worth knowing before you start. If you cannot live with it, either the budget or the plan has to change.
The other templates
- Shopify income and expenses tracker — What did my store actually make this month?
- Product profit and pricing calculator — Does this product make money at this price?
- Ad spend and ROAS tracker — Which of my campaigns actually made money?
Free calculators if you would rather work it out in the browser than in a spreadsheet.
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