Recharge's transaction fee model: how the math compounds

Recharge Standard charges 1.49% + 19c per recurring transaction. On a typical subscription with a $40 average order value, each recurring charge costs the merchant approximately 78 cents above the payment processor's own fee. At 500 recurring orders per month, that is $390 going to Recharge every month on top of the base plan fee — and the number scales linearly with revenue. SimpleSubscription charges zero transaction fees on every plan.

  • 1.49% + 19c per transaction: explicit per-order cost regardless of plan
  • 500 orders/mo at $40 AOV: approximately $390/mo in transaction fees to Recharge
  • 1,000 orders/mo: approximately $780/mo in transaction fees — before base plan
  • Transaction fees compound with subscription growth: the more you succeed, the more you pay
  • SimpleSubscription: $0 transaction fees, $79/mo annual flat regardless of order volume

Feature parity: what Recharge has that SimpleSubscription also has

The reason Recharge is worth comparing seriously is its feature depth. The good news for merchants considering a switch is that SimpleSubscription covers the full feature set that drives retention outcomes for the vast majority of DTC stores. The places where Recharge genuinely leads are edge cases in enterprise customisation that most merchants will never need.

  • Recurring subscriptions with all interval types: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly
  • Customer portal with skip, swap, pause, reschedule, address update
  • Build-a-box with product selection and quantity rules
  • Prepaid plans, gift subscriptions, trial offers
  • Smart dunning with retry scheduling and pre-dunning notifications
  • Full analytics: MRR, churn, LTV, cohort retention, ARPU
  • REST API for custom integrations

Where Recharge genuinely has an edge

Recharge's years in market and enterprise customer base have produced features that SimpleSubscription has not yet built — primarily around highly custom checkout flows, deep ERP integrations, and very large-scale order processing. If your store is running $10M+ ARR in subscription revenue and has a developer team maintaining custom integrations, Recharge's depth may justify its price. For the other 95% of stores, the features are equivalent.

  • Largest library of direct integrations with third-party apps
  • Custom checkout flows for complex subscription bundles at enterprise scale
  • Dedicated enterprise support contracts and SLAs
  • Longer track record on extreme transaction volumes

The migration process: what actually happens

Migrating from Recharge to SimpleSubscription involves transferring subscription contracts, recreating selling plans, and mapping payment methods. Because both apps use Shopify's Subscription Contracts API, the contracts themselves are Shopify-native objects — the migration re-points them to SimpleSubscription's billing engine rather than Recharge's. Active billing dates, subscription histories, and pause/skip states all transfer. Customers see no change.

  • Selling plans recreated in SimpleSubscription to match Recharge's offering structure
  • Active subscription contracts migrated in batches — no subscriber disruption
  • Payment methods remain stored by Shopify — no customer action required
  • Billing dates and histories preserved through migration
  • Both apps run simultaneously during transition — no revenue gap
  • Typical migration timeline: 5–10 business days

The ROI case: running the actual numbers

The ROI calculation for switching from Recharge is straightforward. Take your monthly recurring order count, multiply by the per-transaction fee ($0.0149 × AOV + $0.19), add the Recharge base plan fee, and compare to SimpleSubscription's $79/mo. The crossover point — where SimpleSubscription costs less — is remarkably low: most stores hit it at fewer than 200 recurring orders per month.

  • Monthly Recharge cost = base plan + (order count × (0.0149 × AOV + 0.19))
  • Break-even vs SimpleSubscription at approximately 100–200 recurring orders/month
  • At 500 orders/mo, typical annual saving: $4,000–$6,000
  • At 2,000 orders/mo, typical annual saving: $15,000–$25,000
  • Savings scale with revenue — the higher your MRR, the stronger the case