Hi,
no, for this project I am actually on Shopify Lite (8€/m) that does not include a Online Store channel but you can still build a basic headless shop with that. They don't sell that plan anymore though.
You should be perfectly fine with Shopify Basic. I don't see any reason why you need Shopify Plus.
If you want to try something totally different I'd go with Medusa (medusajs.com) which is open source.
Thanks for the article, nice summary!
quick question Jannik Wempe, are you on Shopify plus for this?
I'm researching because a relative wants to sell some products and so far I have seen the problem is that you need to be on Shopify plus plan to sort out important limitations like limit access to storefront GQL API (i.e. cannot show current/previous purchases to users or access customer details), no checkout personalization, no way to reuse payment method or coupons, ...etc
UX is not that great so it looks like you are finally forced to go into plus and pay 2K/month regardless the hosting provider is ox or vercel, so shopify itself is quite expensive for headless stores imho
otherwise it is maybe smarter to go with a non headless approach and pay less but then you miss the control on your own storefront and limited to shopify no code tools