What a Shopify Horizon migration costs
Most agency-assisted Horizon migrations land between $15,000 and $75,000, with straightforward single-store projects at the lower end and multistore or multimarket work above it.
That’s the short answer. The longer one is more useful, because the range is wide for a reason and the reason is knowable before you get a quote.
Why is there no standard price for a Horizon migration?
There is no reliable public benchmark specifically for Horizon migration pricing, because the theme is new enough that no body of comparable, published project data exists yet.
What does exist are broader Shopify agency ranges, gathered from published directories and 2026 market guides. They’re the closest useful reference, and they’re the numbers most quotes are implicitly anchored to.
| Type of work | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Theme customization or small features | $5,000 – $15,000 |
| Full-site design and build | $25,000 – $80,000 |
| Agency-assisted mid-market migration | $15,000 – $75,000 |
| Moderately complex mid-market migration | $45,000 – $75,000 |
| Custom Shopify Plus replatform | $75,000 – $250,000+ |
Sources: published US Shopify agency directory data and 2026 agency market guides. These are general Shopify project ranges, not Horizon-specific figures.
Two things worth noticing about that table. The bands overlap heavily, which means a quoted number tells you very little on its own about what you’re buying. And the widest band — mid-market migration — spans a factor of five, which is where most brands reading this will fall.
What actually drives the cost?
Seven factors account for nearly all the variance between a $15,000 migration and a $75,000 one, and every single one can be established before anybody quotes you.
The largest single multiplier. Each storefront carries its own theme, its own accumulated changes, its own app configuration, and its own testing burden.
Market-specific pricing, shipping, legal, translation, and availability rules all have to be reproduced and tested separately.
A theme modified lightly is a smaller job than one where hundreds of files diverge from the original. Drift is measurable, and it’s the best single proxy for how much custom functionality has to be documented and rebuilt.
Every bespoke section is something that has to be understood, specified, and rebuilt — not copied.
Not the number of apps but the integration pattern. Apps using theme app extensions generally port cleanly. Apps hardcoded into theme files, or built against older markup, need remediation. What breaks and why →
B2B pricing rules, subscription eligibility, bundle logic, customer-segment display rules. This is the most expensive category because it’s the least documented — it was built incrementally to solve specific commercial problems and rarely written down anywhere.
If nobody has recorded what the current storefront does, that work happens as part of the project, and it’s typically the largest single phase.
A brand with one store, one market, a modern app stack and light customization sits near the bottom of the range. A brand with four storefronts, six markets, B2B rules and a subscription program sits near the top. Most brands know which they are.
What does a $12,000 quote usually mean?
A quote at the bottom of the range is usually pricing a theme installation and customization rather than a migration, and those are genuinely different jobs.
Installing Horizon and configuring it to look like your brand is real work, and for a simple store it may be all you need. Reproducing years of accumulated functionality — custom sections, integration points, conditional business rules, metafield-driven content, market logic — is a different exercise with a different cost.
The problem isn’t that low quotes are dishonest. It’s that a brand comparing a $12,000 number against a $50,000 one usually assumes they describe the same job, and they typically don’t.
Before comparing quotes, make sure they’re quoting the same scope. Ask each one what happens to your custom sections, your metafields, your app integrations, and your conditional display logic. The answers will separate the two categories quickly. What to ask before hiring anyone →
What does it cost to migrate in-house?
An in-house migration trades cash for internal engineering time and risk concentration, and the build is usually the smaller half of the work.
If you have Shopify developers with capacity, doing it yourself is a legitimate option and for a straightforward store it’s often the right one. Be realistic about what the project actually contains, though, because the theme build is the part people estimate accurately and the rest is the part they don’t:
- Documenting what the current storefront does, in enough detail that nothing gets lost
- Establishing which apps need vendor updates, reconfiguration, or rebuilding
- Reproducing conditional business logic that exists only in theme code
- Preserving URL structure, redirects, and structured data
- Verifying that every analytics tag and event still fires correctly
- Testing across templates, states, customer segments, and markets
The cost of getting those wrong is invisible on launch day. Missing functionality gets reported by customers over the following weeks. Lost SEO shows up a month later in a traffic decline nobody attributes to the migration. Broken tracking is discovered when someone questions a report.
Whichever way you go, the assessment work is worth doing properly. It’s the same work either way — the only question is who does it.
Why do migration quotes change mid-project?
Quotes move when scope was estimated rather than established, which is the normal condition for a project priced before anyone examined the store.
The pattern is consistent. An agency quotes based on what a store appears to contain. Week three arrives, someone finds a subscription integration on a four-year-old pattern, or eligibility rules buried in a snippet, or a market-specific pricing display nobody mentioned. That work wasn’t in the estimate, so it becomes a change order.
That isn’t bad faith. It’s what happens when the scoping work is skipped, and it’s why the useful question about any quote isn’t how much but what happens when you find something that wasn’t in the estimate.
There are only two real answers: the price changes, or it doesn’t. Get that in writing before you sign, whoever you hire.
What Anatta charges
We publish our pricing, which is unusual in this market and deliberate. Here’s what we charge and why.
| Readiness Audit | Horizon Sprint | Horizon Sprint — Complex | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $2,500 | $40,000 | $75,000+ |
| Timeline | 5 business days | 4 weeks | 6–8 weeks |
| For | Any store on a pre-Horizon theme | One store, one market | Multistore and/or multimarket |
| Credit | Applied in full against a Sprint booked within 30 days | — | — |
Against the market ranges above, $40,000 sits at the floor of the mid-market migration band — with a fixed price, a fixed timeline, and four written guarantees attached. We’re not the cheapest option and we’re not trying to be the most expensive one either.
A requirements specification with acceptance criteria, architect review, the full Horizon build, solutions engineer review, GitHub handoff, a sandbox environment for your testing, before-and-after speed, SEO and accessibility reports, 90-minute training, a 30-minute follow-up session, your previous theme retained unpublished, and a 30-day warranty covering anything that worked before and doesn’t after.
Third-party search implementation, third-party CMS implementation, third-party app version upgrades, analytics and tagging migration, data services (analytics engineering, data pipelines, agentic data setup and audit), a full integration and tech stack audit covering business systems, and managed services after launch.
CRO-led redesign and data warehouse work.
Why do you require an audit before quoting?
We don’t quote a fixed price on a store we haven’t examined, because that’s precisely how fixed prices turn into change orders.
The Readiness Audit is five days and $2,500. It establishes what your storefront actually does, which apps are exposed, where your custom logic lives, and what the project would genuinely cost. It’s also what makes the guarantees possible — you can’t underwrite a promise about a store you haven’t measured.
If the audit concludes you shouldn’t migrate, it says so. That happens a few times a quarter, and those are good outcomes.
If you do proceed within 30 days, the fee comes off the Sprint price. So for anyone who goes ahead, the audit is free — and for anyone who doesn’t, $2,500 is a considerably better outcome than a migration they didn’t need.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a Shopify Horizon migration cost?
Most agency-assisted migrations fall between $15,000 and $75,000. Straightforward single-store, single-market projects sit at the lower end; multistore, multimarket, B2B, or subscription-heavy stores sit above it. Custom Shopify Plus replatforms commonly exceed $75,000.
Why do Horizon migration quotes vary so much?
Because the underlying jobs vary enormously. The main drivers are how many storefronts and markets you run, how far your theme has drifted from its base version, how many custom sections exist, how your apps are integrated, and how much conditional business logic lives in theme code rather than in platform settings.
Is Shopify Horizon free?
Yes. Horizon is free on every Shopify plan. The cost of a migration is entirely the work of rebuilding your storefront’s functionality on it, not the theme itself.
Can I migrate to Horizon myself?
Yes, if you have Shopify development capacity. The theme build is usually the smaller part of the project — documenting current functionality, resolving app compatibility, reproducing business logic, and preserving SEO and tracking are where the real effort and the real risk sit.
Is a cheap Horizon migration quote a bad sign?
Not necessarily, but it usually describes different work. Quotes in the $5,000–$15,000 range typically cover theme installation and customization rather than reproducing existing functionality. Confirm that any quotes you’re comparing cover the same scope before comparing the numbers.
Does a Shopify Plus migration cost more?
Usually, though not because Plus itself adds cost. Plus merchants tend to have more storefronts, more markets, more integrations, and more custom logic — and each of those adds scope. More for Plus merchants →
What should I ask an agency before signing a fixed-price migration?
What happens when they find functionality that wasn’t in the estimate. Whether scope is established before or during the build. What documentation you receive. What happens to your previous theme. And whether anything is guaranteed in writing.
Find out what your migration would actually cost.
Five days, a written assessment of your store: what it currently does, which apps are exposed, where your custom logic lives, what you’d gain, and what the work would genuinely cost. Including a recommendation not to migrate if that’s the honest answer.
$2,500, credited in full against a migration booked within 30 days.
Not ready for that? Estimate it yourself — or see where your store stands, free.
