Triple Whale has a free plan worth knowing about. Beyond that, this category runs from about $220 a month to $1,500 and well past it, scaling with revenue, because it is built for brands doing $20M and up. Meanwhile Shopify keeps sales, customer and profit reports on its higher plans. If you are doing $30k a month, you are stuck between a $39 plan (or $29 annual) that will not answer your questions and tools priced for someone forty times your size.
| Tool | Entry price | Does it scale with revenue? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dashlytics | $19/month flat | No, flat at any store size | Stores under $1M wanting margin and stock answers |
| Shopify built-in | Included, but limited on Basic | Sales, customer and profit reports need Grow or Advanced ($399/mo, $299 annual) | Daily store management, not analysis |
| Glew | Quote only (reported ~$199-799/month) | Yes, and Pro requires annual prepay | Growing stores wanting deeper cohorts |
| Triple Whale | Free plan; Foundation $219/month | Yes, by plan and annual GMV | Ad-heavy DTC brands focused on attribution |
| Daasity | From $1,499/month (Starter Essentials) | Yes: $1,999 Essentials, Enterprise custom | Multi-channel brands needing a data warehouse |
| Polar Analytics | From $750/month (under $5M GMV) | Yes: $2,950 at $20-25M GMV | Established DTC teams with an analyst |
Pricing checked August 2026. Glew and Polar publish no figures on their own pricing pages, so theirs are reported rather than quoted; treat them as indicative. Most of this category is banded by revenue or GMV, so your actual quote depends on your store size.
The gap nobody in this category talks about
The pricing gives it away. Glew does not publish prices at all: Pro requires annual prepayment and Plus is custom-quoted after a demo, which is itself a signal about who they expect to be selling to. Daasity's Starter Essentials is $1,499 a month, Essentials $1,999, and reported deployments run $1,500 to $5,000 with a four to eight week setup. Polar's Core plan is $750 a month for a brand under $5M GMV and $2,950 by $20-25M. Triple Whale's Foundation tier is $219. These are sensible prices for a brand with a growth team. They are not sensible for a store doing $30,000 a month where the owner is also doing customer service.
And the obvious fallback, Shopify's own reporting, has a catch most people discover after they need it.
What Shopify's own reports do not include
- Sales reports
- Full customer reports
- Order reports
- Inventory reports
- Profit reports
Those sit on Grow and Advanced. Custom report building and profit reporting require Advanced, at $399 a month or $299 billed annually. So the cheapest official route to knowing which products actually make you money is a tenfold jump in your Shopify bill.
This is not a criticism of Shopify. Its dashboard is built for running a store day to day, and it does that well. It just is not an analytics product, and the plan structure makes that explicit.
What a small store actually needs to know
Which products actually make money? Revenue by product is easy and misleading. Your best seller can be your worst earner once cost and discounting are in. That needs cost data joined to sales data.
What stock is dead? Inventory that has not moved in 90 days is cash sitting on a shelf. Most small stores find this out at stocktake.
Which channel is genuinely paying? Not per-platform ROAS, which each ad platform reports flatteringly on its own terms, but spend against actual orders.
Who buys again? Repeat rate and time between orders, which decide whether acquisition spend is worth anything.
Dashlytics — for stores under $1M
You export orders from Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon or your POS, upload the file, and get a dashboard in about 60 seconds. Add a second file with cost, stock or expiry per product and it computes margins, dead stock and expiry risk by joining them on the product column.
$19 a month flat, at any store size, with 2 dashboards free and every feature included so you can judge it on your own numbers first. Files are processed in session and never stored. Every figure is computed from your rows, never generated by a model.
Choose it if you want the four answers above without a connector setup, a per-revenue price band, or a $399 Shopify upgrade ($299 annual).
Do not choose it if you need live multi-touch attribution across ad platforms, automatic hourly refreshes, or a warehouse your data team can query. Triple Whale, Northbeam and Daasity exist for those and do them properly.
When the expensive tools are worth it
Triple Whale or Northbeam once ad spend is large enough that attribution accuracy changes decisions. If you are spending six figures a month across Meta and Google, knowing which touch drove the order is worth more than the subscription.
Daasity when you sell across several channels and genuinely need a warehouse with modelled, reusable data.
Polar or Glew when you have someone whose job is analysis and they want deeper cohort and LTV work than a spreadsheet upload will give.
Shopify Advanced if you are already close to needing its other features and the custom report builder tips it over.
The honest line: those are all real reasons, and none of them describes a store doing $30k a month.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest ecommerce reporting tool?
Triple Whale has a genuinely free plan, so if attribution is all you need, start there. Among paid tools, Dashlytics is $19 per month flat regardless of store size, with 2 dashboards free first. Triple Whale Foundation is $219 per month. Above that the category jumps sharply: Polar starts at $750 a month under $5M GMV, Daasity at $1,499, and Glew is quote-only with annual prepay. Those all scale with your revenue; we do not.
Why can I not see sales reports in Shopify?
Shopify's Basic plan, $39 a month billed monthly or $29 billed annually, includes the dashboard, live view, finance reports and basic acquisition reports, but sales, customer, order, inventory and profit reports require Grow or Advanced. Custom report building and profit reports need Advanced, at $399 monthly or $299 annually.
Is there an AI-based reporting tool for ecommerce dashboards?
Yes, though it is worth asking what the AI actually does. In Dashlytics the analytics engine computes every figure from your rows and AI only writes the plain-language summary, so numbers are never generated by a model. Tools that let an AI produce the numbers themselves can be confidently wrong, which is a poor trade in a report you plan to act on.
Do I need a reporting tool if my store is small?
Not necessarily a $200 a month one. But the questions that decide whether a small store is profitable, which products actually make money after cost, what stock is dead, and which channel is genuinely paying, are not answered by Shopify's default reports on the lower plans. That is the gap worth filling cheaply.
Can I get ecommerce reports without connecting my store?
Yes. Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon and every ad platform export CSV. Dashlytics reads those exports directly, so there is no OAuth connection, no integration to configure, and nothing that breaks when an API changes.
Export your orders. See the answers.
2 dashboards free, every feature included, no credit card and no connector setup. Works with any store that can export a CSV.
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