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Every Shopify store you build or migrate can pay you 20% of that merchant's subscription for as long as the store exists — and since July 2025 that includes 20% of a Plus merchant's entire platform fee
Shopify Plus pays 20% of total platform fees, so at least ~$460/mo per merchant against the $2,300 minimum, and 20% of $5,000-$10,000 for larger brands · a portfolio of 15 Basic + 5 Grow + 3 Advanced + 2 Plus is described as roughly $1,000/mo · the creator says he has seen agency partner dashboards running $5,000-$15,000/mo · a bootcamp student recently added about $400/mo from one Plus referral on a store he did not build
"As a developer, you can just ask yourself every day, how can I raise my salary today?" One Shopify Plus referral is a floor of about $460 a month, recurring, on a store you were going to build anyway.
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Shopify pays a recurring share of a merchant's subscription revenue to the partner who brought that merchant to the platform, for as long as the store exists. The mechanic is boring, published, and almost entirely ignored by the developers and freelancers who are already doing the qualifying work. Jan states it plainly at the top: "if a developer brings a new merchant to Shopify, the developer gets paid an ongoing recurring commission for as long as the store exists and based on what the merchant pays for their subscription." He then pulls up Shopify's own partner earnings documentation on screen and reads from it, which makes this one of the few entries in this index where the revenue mechanism itself is independently verifiable rather than asserted. The critical property is that the lead stays attached to you. "The commissions also upgrade. So if you onboard a merchant on basic because they're just starting out on Shopify, for example, and then later they upgrade to the advanced plan, your commissions would also upgrade, but they also downgrade for fairness. So you always have the lead assigned and you grow or your commission grows with them pretty much." That symmetry is the whole investment thesis. You are not being paid for a transaction; you are taking a 20% position in the growth of every merchant you have ever helped. A client you set up on Basic today who scales to Plus in three years takes your commission from six dollars a month to four hundred and sixty, without you doing anything further. This is not a business on its own. It is a revenue layer that attaches to work a Shopify developer, freelancer or agency is already performing and currently being paid once for.
There is no prospecting in this model, because the first referrals are stores a developer was already being paid to build. You register as a Shopify Partner, create each new merchant under that account, and the 20% commission attaches with no sales conversation at all.
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Data credibility: Unusual for this index in that the revenue mechanism is verifiable and the revenue figures are not. Jan reads Shopify's own partner earnings documentation on screen, so the rate card — 20% of Basic, Grow and Advanced subscriptions, and since July 2025 20% of a Shopify Plus merchant's total platform fees rather than just the base fee — can be checked directly against Shopify's published terms rather than taken on trust. He is careful to date it himself: "by the time I'm recording this." The derived figures ($6/$16/$60 per month on the standard plans, at least ~$460 on a $2,300 Plus minimum) follow arithmetically from that rate card. The portfolio scenarios ($29, $165 and roughly $1,000 a month) are his illustrative maths, not measured results. Two figures are genuinely secondhand: agency partner dashboards "ranging from 5 to 15,000 per month," which he describes as things he has personally seen rather than his own earnings, and a bootcamp student who "just recently" picked up "the extra 400 per month or whatever it is" from a single Plus referral — reported by the person who runs that bootcamp, with the hedge included. No dashboard is shown for either. Jan's own partner earnings are never disclosed. The video is short (roughly four minutes of substance, 104 views at capture) and is a clip aimed at developers who already have Shopify clients, which is the correct frame for reading all of it.
The first dollar is claimed rather than sold, and it is unusually small. A Basic merchant paying $30 a month returns $6 to the partner, arriving monthly for as long as that store exists.
Compounding comes from one clause: the lead stays assigned. "The commissions also upgrade... but they also downgrade for fairness.
The dead stretch is the first two or three years, when the dashboard reads $29, then $165, and nothing about it feels like income. There is no feedback loop to read either, because merchants never know a partner is earning and Shopify sends no signal beyond a monthly total.
The standard plans pay 20% of the merchant's subscription: "for the plans basic grow and advanced the developer basically gets 20%. So that would be 20% of either 30 bucks, 80 bucks or 300 bucks depending on what the merchant currently pays." That is $6, $16 and $60 a month respectively — pocket change per store, which is exactly why most developers never bother to submit their clients. Shopify Plus is where the arithmetic changes character, and the reason is a rule change with a date on it. "By the time I'm recording this, you also get 20% of whatever the merchant's platform fees are... you basically get at least 20% of the 2,300 here. So, at least 400 per month, but 2,300 is also the minimum that the merchants pay. So on Shopify Plus, this is like the base fee, but if the business grows, there's also a variable fee that comes on top. So some brands, depending on their size, pay like 5,000, 6,000, 10,000 for their Shopify Plus subscription, and then you also get 20% of that." He is explicit that this is new: "in the past, it was that you only get 20% on the base subscription... Before July 2025, it was just 20% of the base subscription. Now it's 20% of the platform fees." His read on why: "I think this is to accommodate larger agencies who also onboard like enterprise clients and just to make it fair for them that they earn a bit more on these enterprise clients because yeah arguably it's also more work to onboard them and support them ongoing." So the shape of the opportunity inverted in July 2025. Before, a Plus referral paid a flat share of a base fee. Now it scales with the merchant's actual volume, which means one genuinely successful enterprise client can be worth more than a hundred Basic stores. That is the window, and it is a window precisely because Shopify wrote the rule and can rewrite it.
Jan runs three scenarios, in ascending order, and the honesty of starting small is what makes them useful. Five clients on Basic: "you'd be making an extra 29 bucks a month. Not crazy yet." He does not oversell it. Ten on Basic with some older clients having upgraded to Grow or Advanced: "you'd be making 165 per month in additional revenue." A mature freelance or small-agency portfolio — 15 on Basic, five on Grow, three on Advanced, two on Plus: "you'd be making an extra 1,000 per month in completely passive income. So I think that's pretty sweet. And this also shows how powerful the Shopify Plus referrals are." Note the composition: the two Plus merchants are producing roughly the same as the other twenty-three combined. The figure he offers from observation rather than arithmetic is the one worth writing down: "personally, I've seen agency dashboards ranging from 5 to 15,000 per month in partner earnings, which is pretty sweet because even if the founders now decided to step down, they could still make a living just based on their partner earnings or the ongoing partner earnings." That is the endgame of the model and it reframes what an agency actually is. An agency that has been submitting every client for a decade has accidentally built an annuity that survives the agency's own operations winding down. It is the closest thing to equity a services business can accumulate without selling anything. His closing argument is about compounding small amounts, and it is aimed at the developer who dismisses $6 a month: "even if it's just like an additional 100 bucks per month, there would already be 1,200 per year. So it's almost like a small salary raise or salary increase. And yeah, as a developer, you can just ask yourself every day, how can I raise my salary today? And then it adds up over time."
You do not sell anything new. You submit work you are already doing. For a store you build from scratch, the merchant is created under your partner account and the commission attaches automatically. That is the base case and it requires nothing beyond remembering to do it. The non-obvious move — and the most actionable thing in the video — is that you do not need to have built the store to claim a Plus referral. "If you're wondering about the freelancing space, it's also possible to get these Shopify Plus referrals because let's say you work with a new client and they're close to upgrading or maybe a few months prior to that. Then you can still submit them like even if you didn't create the store from scratch, you can still submit them for the plus referral and then basically help them upgrade to Shopify Plus and you would still get the ongoing partner earnings just for helping them make the shift from like one of the normal plans to Shopify Plus." He confirms this is not theoretical: "this exact scenario actually just happened recently to one of our bootcamp students. So now he's making the extra 400 per month or whatever it is in monthly recurring revenue, which is awesome." Read that carefully, because it changes the target list. Every existing client on Advanced who is approaching the volume where Plus makes sense is a $460-per-month recurring position, available by submitting them and then doing the migration you would have been hired for anyway. A freelancer with a client book has an inventory of these sitting unclaimed. Our read: the acquisition strategy that follows is not "get more clients," it is "audit the clients you already have for upgrade proximity, and bias new client selection toward businesses likely to grow." The same hour of client work is worth radically different amounts depending on where that merchant ends up in three years, and the referral is the only mechanism that captures the difference.
Copy the habit before the strategy: submit every single store, every time, including the ones on Basic. Six dollars a month is trivially dismissible, which is exactly why the developers who dismiss it end up with nothing and the agencies who do it mechanically end up with dashboards in the five figures. The value is not in any individual submission, it is in the fact that the lead stays attached and the commission upgrades with the merchant. Copy the client-book audit. Go through every existing client, identify anyone on Advanced whose volume is approaching Plus territory, submit them for the Plus referral before the upgrade, and then run the migration. One of these is worth roughly seventy-five Basic stores. A bootcamp student did exactly this and picked up about $400 a month. Copy the selection bias toward growth. Between two otherwise identical prospects, take the one more likely to scale, because your 20% position rides their trajectory. That is a genuinely different decision rule from "take the client who pays more today," and it is the one this mechanic rewards. Copy the framing for anyone doing client work on any platform: the question is not what this project pays, it is whether the platform underneath it has a partner program that pays you for the client's future. Shopify's is unusually generous post-July-2025; most are not, but almost nobody checks. What to change: do not treat this as a business. Nothing here generates a client — it monetises clients you already have. Anyone reading this as a standalone income stream has the causality backwards, and the video does not claim otherwise. And read the terms yourself rather than trusting this summary or the video's. The rate card changed in July 2025 and Jan is explicit that he is describing the rules "by the time I'm recording this." A commission structure that a platform can rewrite unilaterally is a structure you need to re-check annually. One more change: the $5,000-$15,000 agency dashboards are the output of years of accumulated stores, not a target. Model your own first year as tens of dollars a month and the fifth year as something that might matter.
Shopify controls the rate card unilaterally. The July 2025 change moved in partners' favour — from 20% of the Plus base fee to 20% of total platform fees — which demonstrates that the number is a policy decision rather than a contract. It can move the other way with the same notice. Anyone building a plan around $460 a month per Plus merchant should treat that figure as revocable. The commissions downgrade. Jan says so directly: "they also downgrade for fairness." Your income tracks your clients' business health, so a recession that pushes merchants from Advanced back to Grow cuts your earnings at exactly the moment your project work also dries up. This is correlated risk, not diversification. Churn is invisible and total. "For as long as the store exists" means a merchant who closes takes the whole line item with them. A portfolio of small merchants has meaningful annual attrition, and nothing in the model replaces it except new submissions. Attribution and eligibility. Everything depends on the merchant being correctly created or submitted under your partner account, and on remaining a Shopify Partner in good standing. A store set up by the client themselves, or by another agency first, is generally not claimable — the Plus-upgrade route is the documented exception, and it has its own timing requirement ("a few months prior" to the upgrade). The observed figures are secondhand and survivorship-selected. "I've seen agency dashboards ranging from 5 to 15,000 per month" is the creator reporting on other people's screens, and those agencies are the ones still operating after years of accumulating stores. The bootcamp student's $400 a month is a single data point, reported by the person who runs the bootcamp — which is worth noting even though the number is small enough to be uncontroversial and the underlying rate is published. And the honest limitation: this is a margin improvement on a services business, not an opportunity. If you are not already building or migrating Shopify stores, there is nothing here for you until you are. The video is a five-minute clip aimed at developers who already have clients, and it should be read that way.
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