Shopify subscription guides,
all in one place.

The complete overview — pricing, features, comparison, FAQ in one place. Begin here, branch out to the specific guides below.

Broad overview of the Shopify subscription landscape — the apps, patterns, market trends, and where the space is heading.

Definitional guide — what counts as a subscription service on Shopify, the terminology, and how subscribers experience it.

Cross-platform landscape — Shopify+app, Recharge headless, Stripe Billing, Chargebee. When to choose which.

Feature-oriented overview of subscription apps — selling plans, customer portal, billing engine, retention tools.

Catalog overview of the Shopify subscription-app category — the categories, the players, how the App Store organises them.

Our positioning — why we built SimpleSubscription, who it's for, who it isn't for. The honest pitch.

Step-by-step beginner guide — from picking a model to wiring up selling plans and checkout.

The primitive every subscription app builds on. Billing policy, delivery policy, pricing policy — and the edge cases.

What to check before installing, what changes in your storefront, and how long migration actually takes.

Free white-glove migration from Recharge, Bold, Loop, or Skio — contracts, billing dates, and payment methods preserved.

Honest breakdown of the top subscription apps — pricing, features, and which fits which kind of store.

Side-by-side feature and pricing matrix across every major Shopify subscription app.

What merchants actually say about each subscription app — recurring complaints, recurring praise.

Replenishment cadence, roast freshness, and retention tactics specific to coffee subscriptions.

Dose-based cadence, compliance copy, and reorder timing for supplement subscriptions.

How transaction fees compound at $10k, $50k, and $100k MRR — and what a flat-fee app saves you.

How vaulted cards, the subscription contract, and Shopify's billing cron actually create a recurring charge — and what breaks.

Developer guide to the Subscription Contract API — GraphQL endpoints, the contract object, webhooks, and integration patterns.

Retry schedules that work, soft vs hard declines, account updater services, and when to stop trying — the operational playbook.

Subject lines, body templates, send timing, and deliverability for failed-payment recovery emails — with steal-this examples.

Cancel-flow design, win-back cadence, cohort analysis, and the retention features that should ship on day one.

What "free" really means in this market — the apps with genuine free tiers, the catches, and when free is a false economy.

What you actually need at <$25k MRR — and what's over-engineering. The right-sized recommendation for indie / founder-led stores.

How to find the right subscription app on the App Store — search terms, ratings, badges, and the questions reviews never answer.

Connect Shopify's Sidekick AI to your subscription data — ask MRR/churn questions in chat, get ranked action plans, read-only by design.

How to price subscriptions for retention and margin — annual vs monthly, plan-tier psychology, when to test pricing.

What recurring billing is, how it evolved, the models in use, and why getting it right is harder than it looks.

Annual prepaid, per-cycle, credit-based, hybrid — which model fits which business and what gateways support each.

How to measure churn correctly, leading indicators, cohort analysis, prediction models, the dashboards merchants actually need.

Custom domain, magic-link email branding, multi-language portal, and configurable retention offers — the configuration side.

Which Shopify subscription app fits box-style commerce? Mystery-box rotation, build-a-box, sample packs — honest from a box-merchant POV.