🔁 Free · no signup · no app install · read-only
Six of the eight subscription apps we check take a cut of every recurring order. Shopify's own one does not.
We read your storefront HTML and your public product JSON to work out which subscription platform is running, whether selling plans are genuinely live on real products, and how deeply the app is wired into your theme. Then we put the vendor's own published list pricing — quoted with the date we read it off their pricing page — next to Shopify's native Subscriptions app, which is free to install and charges no platform fee.
Based on publicly available data only. Informational, not legal advice.
What this checks
- Which subscription app is actually loading — Recharge, Bold, Appstle, Seal, Skio, Loop, Smartrr or PayWhirl
- Whether subscriptions are genuinely live: selling plans and selling_plan_allocations on real products in Shopify's public product JSON
- How that vendor bills, read off its own published pricing page and quoted with the date we read it: a share of every subscription order, or a flat monthly tier
- What the same volume bands cost on Shopify's native Subscriptions app, which has no platform fee and no revenue share
- How many references to the app are baked into your theme's HTML, and whether a third-party customer portal is answering
- How complex your selling plans are — prepaid, tiered discounts, multiple groups — which is what makes a migration slow
- Whether a subscription policy page exists for the recurring terms you are billing under
FAQ
Is the cost table my actual bill?
No, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We cannot see your plan, your negotiated rate, or your subscription volume, and we do not guess them. The table takes each vendor's own published list pricing — transcribed from their pricing page on a date we print in the report — and runs it across a few assumed volume bands, so you can see the shape of the cost: a revenue share grows with you, a flat monthly tier does not. Where a vendor publishes nothing we can quote exactly, we print no figure rather than model one. List prices move, so check the vendor's page before acting on a number.
Why do some checks say 'could not tell'?
Two reasons. First, we read the HTML and JSON exactly as your server returns them and do not execute JavaScript, so a picker that a widget injects after load is simply not in what we receive. Second, we fingerprint eight named subscription apps across two pages — your home page and one product page — and the app store carries many more, so when selling plans are live but nothing we recognise owns them, we say we cannot name the vendor instead of calling the store clean.
Is Shopify's native subscription app really free?
The Shopify Subscriptions app is free to install and adds no platform fee and no revenue share; subscription orders are charged at your normal payment processing rate, the same as any other order. It also does less than the mature third-party platforms — this tool shows you the cost structure so you can weigh that trade, not make the decision for you.
Want to move onto Shopify's native subscriptions without losing the customers you already have?
We are a Shopify studio. The audit is free; the fix is yours to make — or ours to ship.
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