Start with the total cost at your target revenue
The first filter should be cost at scale, not cost at launch. Calculate the total monthly cost of each app at your current MRR, at 2x your current MRR, and at 5x. For percentage-based apps, the cost grows proportionally with revenue. For flat-fee apps, the cost is fixed. The crossover point where flat beats percentage is typically around $5–10k MRR for most pricing tiers. If you expect to grow beyond that within 12 months, start with a flat-fee app.
- Calculate total cost at 1x, 2x, and 5x your current MRR for each app
- Include all fees: platform fee + per-transaction fee + Shopify payment fees
- Flat-fee apps typically win above $5–10k MRR — model your breakeven
Evaluate the portal your customers will use
The customer portal directly affects subscriber satisfaction and support ticket volume. Before committing, use the demo store of every app you're evaluating as a subscriber would: skip an order, swap a product, update a payment method, pause the subscription. Note how many clicks each action takes, whether the experience is mobile-friendly, and whether the portal loads quickly. A clunky portal increases churn even when everything else is configured correctly.
Verify dunning and billing reliability
Billing reliability is harder to evaluate from a product listing than feature richness, but it matters more. Ask the app's support team for their billing success rate and their dunning recovery statistics. Request references from stores of a similar size. The best apps will have data on payment recovery rates — a good dunning system typically recovers 35–50% of initially failed payments.
- Ask for billing success rate data and dunning recovery statistics
- Confirm retry schedule and customer communication on failed payments
- Check whether the app handles card expiry proactively before billing date
Consider the analytics you actually need
Early-stage stores need basic MRR tracking and a view of which products are driving subscriptions. As the programme matures, cohort retention analysis, per-product churn rates, and LTV by acquisition channel become important. Check whether the app provides these natively or whether you'd need to export data to a BI tool — and check whether analytics are gated behind higher plan tiers.
Support quality is a tier-1 requirement for subscription apps
Unlike most Shopify apps, billing errors in subscription apps are time-sensitive and customer-visible. A failed payment email sent at the wrong time, a renewal processed twice, or a customer who cannot update their payment method before a billing date all create urgent support situations. Evaluate how quickly the app's team responds — ideally with a documented response time SLA — and whether support is handled by the engineering team or a third-party service desk.
- Test support response time during your trial with a non-urgent ticket
- Confirm escalation path for billing-critical issues
- Prefer apps where support can actually access your account data to debug