Yes. Shopify has built-in AI, and most of it costs nothing beyond your plan. Sidekick (the admin assistant), the Inbox agent for customer chat, a theme generator, and in-editor text and image tools come with Basic ($29 a month billed yearly, $39 monthly) and above. Tinker, a separate creative app, is free. Paid extras are mostly third-party apps.
The useful question is not "does it exist" but "what does each plan give me and where does the bill start". Plans differ less than you might expect for AI: the features below sit on Basic upwards, and the real differences are usage limits, staff accounts and everything that is not AI. One caution first: Shopify changes this area every few months, so check your own admin.
The plans and what they cost
These are Shopify's list prices in USD as I read them on its pricing page in November 2026. Plans billed yearly are cheaper per month than month to month, and Shopify has been running an introductory offer of three days free and then $1 a month for three months on new stores.
| Plan | Yearly billing, per month | Monthly billing | Shopify's own label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $29 | $39 | For solo entrepreneurs; no additional staff accounts |
| Grow | $89 | $105 | For small teams, up to 5 staff accounts |
| Advanced | $359 | $399 | For global reach, up to 15 staff accounts |
| Plus | - | from $2,300 | For complex businesses, unlimited staff accounts |
| Agentic | $0 | $0 | For selling in AI channels; you pay only when you make a sale |
The Agentic plan is a different animal: it is for adding your products to Shopify's Catalog so AI shopping channels can show them when you do not run a Shopify store. It is not the built-in AI of a Shopify store.
What each AI feature is, in one line, and what it costs
Shopify's help centre groups these as AI-powered tools and says most are available at no additional cost, with availability that "can vary by plan, device, and language". Here is the list as I could verify it.
- Sidekick. The assistant inside the admin. It answers questions, writes content, edits things like orders, builds Shopify Flow automations, and can generate small custom apps. It works on any admin page on desktop or in the Shopify app. Shopify lists it among the built-in features on the pricing page for every plan.
- Text generation in editors. Writes product descriptions, online store pages and posts, theme-editor content and Shopify Messaging emails inside the editor you are already in.
- Theme editor and file editor tools. In the theme editor, Sidekick generates custom theme blocks from a text prompt. In the file editor, it changes an image from a text prompt, and a separate tool replaces an image background with a colour.
- Theme generator. Creates a theme from a description of your business. Shopify's help centre marks it free.
- Inbox agent. An AI that answers shoppers' questions about products, shipping, returns, sizing and policies, using your catalogue, policies, knowledge base and published pages. You must switch it on; until then conversations stay with your staff. It needs the Shopify Inbox app and new customer accounts.
- Smaller helpers. Suggested replies and instant-answer suggestions for your own Inbox conversations, product category suggestions, customer segment descriptions, sorting of search filter values, spend projections in a cohort report, and summaries of reviews for select apps in the App Store.
- Tinker. A separate mobile app with more than 100 creative tools for product photos, short videos and brand assets. Shopify's help centre calls it free, with monthly usage limits that refresh automatically.
- Connections to outside AI tools. Shopify lists ways to connect your store to assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Pricing there depends on the assistant's own plan.
The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration
From formulas and pivot tables to Power Query, DAX, VBA and AI with Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude — hands-on from the first lesson.
By Sagnik Bhattacharya and Virginia Thorn, Primetime Emmy Award winner
Buy nowPlan by plan: what you get
Here is the matrix a store owner usually wants. A tick is based on Shopify's pages as fetched in November 2026. Where the page did not state a plan, I say so rather than guess.
| Feature | Basic | Grow | Advanced | Plus | Extra cost? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sidekick chat and tasks | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | None shown |
| Sidekick app generation | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | None, but hourly and weekly limits |
| Inbox agent | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Free; needs new customer accounts |
| Theme generator | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Free |
| Editor text tools | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | None shown |
| Tinker app | Not tied to a plan | - | - | - | Free, monthly usage limits |
One of those rows differs from older advice. Several guides written earlier in 2026, and my own earlier notes, said Sidekick custom app generation was only for Grow, Advanced and Plus. Shopify's help page, fetched in November 2026, now says Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. If you are on Basic, open Sidekick on a desktop browser and test it rather than trusting either version. Part of the confusion may come from a different row on the pricing page: building custom apps with Shopify's APIs (the developer route) shows limited data access on Basic and full data access from Grow up. That row is about apps a developer writes, not the apps Sidekick generates.
A wedding-stationery store picks a plan, with numbers
Take an illustrative wedding planner who has started selling invitation sets and table-sign kits online, with one part-time helper. She wants Sidekick, the customer chat agent and descriptions for 80 products. Her question is whether the AI justifies paying for Grow over Basic.
The cost gap on yearly billing is $60 a month ($89 less $29), or $720 a year. The AI features she wants are on both plans, so the AI adds nothing to the case for Grow. What does differ, on Shopify's comparison table: no additional staff accounts on Basic against five on Grow, online card rates of 2.9% + 30 cents against 2.7% + 30 cents, and third-party transaction fees of 2% against 1%. Shipping discounts are the same on both.
So the decision turns on the helper. If the helper only packs orders and never needs the admin, Basic is enough. If the helper needs her own login to answer Inbox messages or edit products, Grow is the plan with staff accounts, and the $720 a year buys that, not the AI. A quick check on the card-rate gap: at $3,000 a month of online card sales, 0.2 percentage points is $6 a month, so card rates alone do not justify the move at her size.
Now the saving the AI does give her. Writing 80 descriptions by hand at 12 minutes each is 16 hours. With the editor's text tool plus her edit, 5 minutes each is about 6.7 hours. The saving is about 9.3 hours, and the tool costs nothing extra. That pays for far more than the $29.
Sidekick: what it can and cannot do
Sidekick is an assistant for you, not for your shoppers. Shopify's help page says it plans and runs multi-step tasks and shows you the changes for review before applying them, can keep working in the background and notify you, can build Flow workflows, can calculate with code to forecast or compare, and can remember instructions through saved skills.
It also lists the limits plainly: it cannot handle customer conversations or support on your behalf, it cannot change your live store without your approval, and it cannot edit images inside your theme or your product list. In some stores it cannot run code and only uses a skill when you pick it.
A prompt and a realistic reply
Try a prompt that asks for a decision, not a rewrite.
Which five products sold fewer than three units in the last 90 days but have more than 20 in stock? Show a table with product, units sold, stock and a suggested action. Do not change anything.An illustrative reply is a table of five lines, each with a suggestion such as "bundle with best-selling item" or "reduce price by 15 per cent". What to check: open the orders report yourself for one product to confirm the units sold, because the figure in a summary is only as good as the date range Sidekick assumed. Then decide on the actions yourself. For more on repeated tasks, see how to use Shopify Sidekick to run your store faster and Sidekick Skills recipes for repeat store tasks.
Custom app generation and its limits
Shopify's help page says generated apps can read and change store data through the Admin API, including orders, products, customers, discounts, content and analytics, and that they run only inside the admin. They are not visible to customers and cannot reach themes, checkout or customer account apps. Generation works from a desktop browser only, staff need the App development "Develop" permission, and two rolling limits apply across the whole store, one hourly and one weekly. Complex apps and each round of refinements use more of the limit.
Because these apps can change customer-facing data, Shopify tells you to test them thoroughly before installing. A practical test: run the app against five products you do not mind altering, on a day with no sales promotion, and compare before and after in the product list.
The Inbox agent: free, but not unattended
The Inbox agent is the feature most likely to surprise you, because it speaks to your customers. Shopify's help page says it is opt-in, you configure its persona and training from the Inbox page in the admin, and it answers using your catalogue, policies, knowledge base and published storefront content. For a catalogue product it can also run cited web searches for reviews or ratings, and shoppers with an active Shop session can get tailored recommendations without signing in.
Shopify's help page on assigning the agent, checked in November 2026, says Inbox is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans and lists three requirements: the Shopify Inbox app installed, an active online store, and new customer accounts. The agent does not work with legacy customer accounts, and the Inbox app listing shows the app as free. So if the agent is missing in your admin, check which customer-account version your store uses before you think about upgrading.
Two settings matter on day one. The assignment mode can be all conversations, only when your staff is unavailable (outside the availability hours you set), or never, which is the default for stores that had Inbox before the agent existed. And when a shopper asks for a person and no staff member is available, the agent gives out your store's sender email address, so make sure somebody reads that inbox. Shoppers also see an automatic notice that the chat is powered by Shopify and that they are talking to AI, and you cannot remove or change it.
A before and after on a returns question
A shopper writes: "Can I send back personalised table signs?" If your return policy page says personalised items are final sale but the knowledge base article still says 30 days for everything, the agent will quote whichever it finds first. Before: two documents disagreeing. After: one policy page, the knowledge base article deleted or corrected, and a test conversation proving the agent now says final sale. Fixing the source is a ten-minute job that prevents a wrong promise, and the walk-through is in test the Inbox AI agent on your policy questions first.
Where the costs begin
Built-in AI is free at the point of use, but a store with AI in it can still run up three kinds of bill.
- Third-party AI apps. Chat, review summaries, recommendation and search apps are priced on their own listings, often per conversation or per resolved ticket. Compare them against the free Inbox agent before paying; Shopify Inbox against Tidio Lyro shows how to do that fairly.
- Outside assistants. Connecting ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to your store runs on those tools' own plans. A team that already pays for one may find it handles analysis better than Sidekick; the comparison by job covers it.
- Your time reviewing. The largest cost is rarely money. Unreviewed AI output creates refunds and corrections. Count the review minutes in every saving you claim.
For the wider cost picture of adding AI to a store, how much it costs to add AI to a Shopify store itemises one-off and monthly items.
A bookkeeping practice's online shop, a second example
An illustrative bookkeeping practice has added a small shop selling templates and printed planners, run by one partner on the Basic plan. It gets about 15 customer messages a week, nearly all about delivery and file formats. The partner switches on the Inbox agent, loads the shipping and file-format answers into the knowledge base, and watches transcripts for two weeks. Of 30 conversations in that time, 24 are answered correctly, 4 need a corrected knowledge base article, and 2 are escalated to the partner.
The sum: if each manual reply used to take 4 minutes, 24 handled by the agent saves 96 minutes in two weeks, about 48 minutes a week, for no extra fee. The 6 problem conversations cost around 30 minutes to fix. The net is positive from week one and gets better as the knowledge base improves. The principle is the same for any business that gets repetitive questions.
Tinker and the creative helpers
Tinker is an app for making product photos, short videos and brand assets from plain-language prompts. Because it is a separate app, nothing in it changes your store until you upload the result. Do the usual checks on any AI image: does it show the product you actually ship, with the right colour and size? A generated scene that makes a notebook look twice its real size is a refund waiting to happen. The same caution applies to the editor tools that change an image from a text prompt.
A quick sum on photography
If a photographer costs $150 for a half-day shoot covering 12 products, that is $12.50 a product. A generated scene may cost nothing in cash but 10 minutes of your time and the review. At $25 an hour that is about $4 a product. The saving is real only where the picture is honest. For anything where fit, texture or true colour sells the item, keep real photos for the main image and use generated ones for secondary lifestyle shots, with your own wording checked.
When a feature is missing from your admin
Shopify rolls changes out gradually, and the help centre itself says availability can vary by plan, device and language. If Sidekick app generation or the Inbox agent is not where a guide says, work through this order before assuming you need to pay for anything.
- Switch to a desktop browser. App generation is desktop only, and some tools are not tuned for mobile.
- Check the staff permission. Generating apps needs the App development "Develop" permission, so a staff login may lack what the owner has.
- Search the help centre for the feature name and read the plan line on that page, since pages are updated more often than articles.
- Ask Sidekick directly whether it can do the task in your store. It will tell you if a skill or code step is unavailable.
- Only then contact Shopify support, with a screenshot of the plan page in your admin.
An example of hitting a limit
Say a store owner asks Sidekick to build an app that reads last quarter's orders and flags customers who bought twice. The first build works, then she asks for six refinements in a row: a different date range, a new column, a filter by discount code, an export, a colour change and a second sheet. Shopify says complex apps and each round of refinements use more of the hourly and weekly limits. On the fifth refinement the tool refuses new work until usage frees up, though anything already running finishes.
The fix is to plan the request instead of refining in drips. Write the full specification in one prompt, with the date range, columns and filters listed, and accept a plainer first version. Then test it on five orders. Batching the requests uses less of the allowance than six separate rounds, and you avoid being stuck midweek.
Reading Pulse and other suggestions with care
Sidekick Pulse surfaces recommendations on the Shopify Home page. They are prompts to look, not instructions. A suggestion such as "reorder this product" is based on the sales it can see, and it cannot know that your supplier has gone out of business or that the item is being discontinued. Treat each as a question: what is the evidence, what does it cost to be wrong, and can I undo it. For the practical sorting, Sidekick review: is it reliable for store decisions lists the checks.
A scoring rubric you can copy
| Question | Score 2 | Score 1 | Score 0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Can I see the data behind it? | Yes, in a report | Partly | No |
| Can I undo it in one click? | Yes | With effort | No |
| Does it touch customers or money? | No | Indirectly | Directly |
Act on anything scoring 5 or 6 the same day. Check anything scoring 3 or 4 against a report first. Leave anything scoring 2 or less until you have talked it through with someone.
A short test before you rely on any of it
- In your admin, look for Sidekick, Inbox and the theme generator and note which are present.
- Ask Sidekick three read-only questions about your own orders and check each against the reports.
- Turn the Inbox agent on for a limited period and read every conversation daily for a week.
- Generate descriptions for five products, edit them, and time yourself against hand-writing.
- Write down the plan limits you hit, if any, and which feature caused them.
If you want help deciding which jobs in your store deserve AI at all, that is what my AI implementation consultation covers; you can book it through the contact page.
Plan and price questions about Shopify AI
Is Sidekick free on every Shopify plan?
Shopify's pricing page lists Sidekick under features that come with every store, with no separate fee shown. Shopify's help pages say most built-in AI features carry no extra cost, but availability can vary by plan, device and language. Usage limits exist, particularly for app generation, so heavy use on a cheap plan can hit a ceiling.
Can Sidekick answer my customers' messages?
No. Shopify's help page says Sidekick cannot handle customer conversations or customer support for you. It is an assistant for you and your staff inside the admin. Customer-facing answers come from the separate Inbox agent, which you opt in to and train on your policies and catalogue.
Do I need to be a Shopify customer to use Tinker?
Shopify's help centre describes Tinker as a free mobile app for iOS and Android. You sign in with an email address or a Google or Apple account and accept Tinker's own terms, and the help page does not mention needing a Shopify store. Monthly usage limits apply and refresh automatically, so read the current terms before you plan heavy use.
Which AI feature is worth upgrading a plan for?
None of the built-in ones, on current information. The features I checked are available from Basic upwards, so the plan choice should follow staff accounts, card and transaction rates, and whether you need live third-party shipping rates. The exception is heavy use of Sidekick app generation, where limits depend on plan and you should test before relying on it.
Further reads
- Best AI Chatbots for Small Shopify Stores (2026) — See which chatbot apps small stores actually pair with Shopify.
- AI Product Recommendations on Shopify: Built-In vs Paid Apps — Check built-in recommendations against paid apps.
- How to Write Shopify Product Descriptions With AI That Convert — Write product descriptions that convert, using the built-in generator.
- Shopify Sidekick Pulse: Which Recommendations to Act On — Decide which Pulse suggestions deserve action.
- llms.txt for Shopify: Test Whether AI Bots Fetch It and Send Traffic — Test whether AI answer engines read your store files.
- Applications of AI in E-Commerce: 9 Uses Mapped to a Small Online Store — Nine uses of AI for a small store, ranked by weekly hours saved and matched to Sidekick, Shopify Inbox, Klaviyo and Gorgias, with plan costs.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Shopify's pricing page and plan comparison table, Shopify help centre pages for AI-powered tools, Sidekick, Sidekick app generation, Shopify Inbox, assigning the Inbox agent and Tinker, and the Shopify Inbox App Store listing (all checked November 2026).