Looking to start or grow an eCommerce subscription business? Great - in this guide, we'll break down our top 14 picks for eCommerce subscription platforms and share our thoughts on who should be using each.
To understand the competitive landscape of the subscription tool market today, it’s helpful to cover a bit of history. Four score and many years ago (aka 2014) Recharge launched. It was founded by Oisin O’Connor and his business partner Mike Flynn who owned an agency and were also developing SaaS products. The Shopify app store launched in 2009 and was still nascent in 2014. There were tons of eCommerce stores that wanted to offer subscriptions, and Recharge met this need.
However, Shopify didn’t make it easy for Recharge. In order to offer subscriptions, Recharge had to create its own checkout page, duplicate all of the products in a merchants store, and create draft orders that were pushed into Shopify. Essentially a lot of hacks and workarounds in order to offer subscriptions. There was a feeling at the time that Shopify didn’t want to make it easy to offer subscriptions because unscrupulous companies were offering subscription products (like vitamins and supplements) that would gouge unwitting consumers with ongoing overpriced subscriptions. There were lots of bad actors in the rebill (subscription) space.
All of this changed in October of 2020 when Shopify announced the launch of their subscriptions API. This allowed subscription app makers to plug directly into Shopify via an API and did away with all of the hacky workarounds that Recharge needed to operate. Shopify wanted to push more orders through their own payment gateway rather than pushing subscription orders to third-party gateways like Recharge.
Recharge which had operated almost without competition suddenly had a slew of new entrants that built subscription products on top of Shopify’s subscriptions API. These new entrants were funded by a mountain of venture capital that flooded into the subscription space at the height of the ZIRP era. Although Recharge had a huge lead in the subscriptions space, they essentially had to rebuild their product from the ground up to work on the subscriptions API.
Meanwhile, Recharge’s legacy merchants preferred to stay on their third-party payment gateway since they didn’t have to pay Shopify payment processing fees on those subscription orders. This forced Recharge to maintain their legacy product while also developing the new product that works on top of the subscriptions API. At some point Shopify will cut off access to the legacy version of the cart which allows these third-party payments to occur (it’s been announced and pushed several times with the latest announced cutoff date being October 2024). At some point in the future all brands will have to migrate to Shopify native checkout. Recharge is still the largest incumbent in the space, but many of the new entrants have eaten into their market share.
Today, there is an arms race among subscription companies to offer new features. Of all the categories we’ve reviewed, subscriptions is one of the most crowded. There are over 40 subscription apps in the Shopify app store. The upshot of this competition is that as soon as one subscription app launches a new / differentiated feature, the other apps race to copy that feature. The new upstarts have pushed ReCharge and other incumbents to add features. This fierce competition benefits merchants no matter which app you choose.
Also in the Shopify Winter 2024 editions release Shopify announced their own subscription offering that is free and is disrupting the low end of the market.
Another result of Recharge’s dominance is that they have set pricing in the industry which most competitors have matched. They charge a 1% fee on all subscription payments plus a monthly fee of $499 for their most fully featured offering. Most of the new entrants have matched Recharge’s pricing and decided instead to compete on features.
Subscriptions don’t make sense for every category, but for those that do, subscriptions can be extremely powerful. For food & beverage, vitamins, beauty, and any CPG product subscriptions work really well. If your product is consumed on a regular basis, you should strongly consider offering a subscription. Even products that you wouldn’t immediately associate with subscriptions like socks and T-shirts have done really well by adding subscription options.
Subscriptions offer a host of benefits:
Subscribers are your best customers, so you will want to treat them that way
Some brands have custom developed their own subscription offering. This is definitely possible, and for massive brands ($100M+) it might make sense. However, we think most brands should use a subscription app. The time and effort required to create your own custom subscription offering from scratch will far outweigh any potential cost savings. We think it's better to outsource to a company that is laser focused on making the best possible subscription experience. Brands can then focus their efforts on customizing and tailoring the customer experience on top of the subscription app’s core.
Shopify announced a free subscriptions app in their Winter 2024 Editions. The app is free to use and integrates directly into the Shopify admin. It’s an okay starting place for small merchants that are looking to offer subscriptions. However, similar to Shopify’s email or help desk product, it is severely lacking features. Based on our past experience with their email and help desk products, we think Shopify tends to neglect these basic offerings. It’s just not their focus. They’d prefer to build out the core platform and let their app partners build more fully featured offerings. Shopify’s subscriptions app offers bare bones basics, but misses many features that brands will want as they grow their subscription program.
What features is the Shopify subscriptions app missing?
Shopify’s free subscriptions app is built purely around subscribe and save subscriptions.
The current Shopify subscription app is very limited, and we don’t recommend it for most brands. We think there are better low / no cost alternatives for smaller brands who want to test subscriptions.
Given the state of fierce competition in the subscription space, we think the decision of which app to choose is more difficult.
However, the upshot of the intense competition is that we think it’s harder to go wrong by choosing any subscription app on our list. As soon as one subscription app adds a new differentiating feature, the others race to follow.
From a feature perspective, they are 85-90% the same. Frankly, a lot of the difference between the subscription apps comes down to branding (primarily what you see on their website / in their dashboards and to a lesser extent what your customer will see in the subscription portal).
Don’t let the marketing teams at these apps fool you into thinking any one is dramatically different from the others. Subscription apps are beginning to tout tinier and tinier features. An app which shall go unnamed recently announced the ability to gift a single subscription send instead of pausing or delaying it. We’re dubious of the usefulness of features like these.
We think consolidation in the space is very likely in the future.
Entry - Appstle
Pro - Stay Ai, Skio, and Loop
Enterprise - Recharge
Best affordable option - great for SMBs and beyond
Appstle is both affordable and feature rich which we think is an excellent combination. Their tag line is “Compelling apps at compelling prices”, and we think it’s an apt description of Appstle. We recommend brands skip Shopify’s native subscriptions app and just start their subscriptions offering with Appstle.
Unlike nearly every other subscription app on our list, Appstle doesn’t charge a % fee on subscription orders. This is huge. The typical 1% transaction fee may not sound like much, but it will add up especially as your subscription business grows. For a company that does $40M in subscription revenue annually, the transaction fee will be a whopping $400k per year. That’s a pretty penny.
Instead of a transaction fee, Appstle charges a monthly subscription fee. This fee starts at $10 per month and scales up from there based on monthly subscription revenue. This is much more affordable than the $500 per month fee competitors charge (in addition to the transaction fee). Appstle has a free offering, but it’s only for brands doing less than $500 per month in subscription revenue. Appstle makes it easy to turn on features and move up their plan tiers and their pricing is both more affordable for smaller brands and offers larger brands the ability to save a ton of money.
In terms of the product itself, Appstle offers all of the core features that companies need to run their subscription business: dunning (billing), customizable subscriptions, build a box, bundling, upsells, analytics and more. Appstle covers every core feature.
Given their attractive pricing, the majority of their client base are small and medium sized businesses. They don’t have any blue chip enterprise logos on their homepage. However, they have the largest number of Shopify Plus brands of all their competitors except Recharge. So we don’t necessarily agree when people say that Appstle isn’t an enterprise level tool. We actually think it can be. Birchbox and some other large brands use them for their subscriptions.
Appstle isn’t perfect. There are a couple reasons that folks will choose alternatives. The first and biggest factor is design. Quickly browsing their website will show you that design is not an area they focus. It’s generally a bit dated. Utilitarian might be a kind way to describe it. We are generally willing to overlook the design of the app, but the one area that will impact your customers is the design of the customer portal (where customers go to edit / update their subscriptions). It’s important to note that the vast majority of your customers won't interact with your customer portal on a monthly basis, however, the customer portal will look worse with Appstle than competitors. Additionally, making changes to your subscription program will happen within the Shopify dashboard as opposed to a slick website outside of Shopify. Some might find this a bit clunkier vs other apps, but we don’t think this should be a deal breaker. Finally, the service and attention you will get with a more expensive subscription offering is likely to be better.
We think all merchants should consider Appstle based on pricing alone and be intentional on the reasons you select a more expensive competitor.
The next tools are part of the newer cohort of subscription apps that are pushing the boundaries on subscription tech and worth considering for medium sized brands:
Innovative and tech forward: Skio and Stay Ai
Slightly cheaper with great service: Loop
Best innovative tool for mid-size brands
Skio was founded by Kennan Davidson, a software engineer who worked at Pinterest before founding Skio. He took the company through Y combinator in 2020.
Skio (along with Stay Ai) are two of the best new subscription app offerings that are innovating at a rapid clip. They’re pushing the bounds on what is expected / possible with a subscription app and are similar in many ways. Both are willing to add features quickly to win customers from competitors or to prevent current customers from switching to competitors.
Of the two apps, we think Skio is probably the most robust. From the beginning, it's been extremely product and developer focused. We think this stems from its founder's technical background.
Like all the other apps to launch after 2020, Skio is built on top of the Shopify subscriptions API. This is great because it uses the Shopify native checkout and directly references Shopify’s data so will integrate more easily with all other apps.
One point of differentiation for Skio vs their competitors is their customer portal. They have a hosted customer portal which is essentially an app proxy. The Skio team will customize your portal to match the look and feel of your website (match colors, fonts etc.) during your onboarding, but you won't have complete customization ability (injecting custom CSS for example). The upshot of giving up that ability is a more stable customer portal. Things are less likely to break / become out of date with this model. You also save money by not having to pay a developer to customize. As with most things in the tech world, there’s a tension between stability and customization, and with Skio’s customer portal you will be choosing stability.
Another differentiator for Skio is their bundle builder (aka build a box). They have a template which allows you to create bundle builders on the front end, but they also offer the ability for complete customization of the look and feel of the bundle builder. All of this feeds into an open end point on the backend. Skio handles all of the complex box management logic for you. This type of customization would be much more difficult with a tool like Recharge.
You can also allow your customers to edit their box subscription without churning out of the box. No need to create your own portal experience to deal with box management. For example, let's say you order 3 different types of beers from Athletic Brewing and decide you don’t like 1 of the 3 beers. With Skio, you can update your subscription and choose a different beer or remove it from your box without having to churn away from your subscription. All of that box management logic is owned on the Skio side.
Skio also has great analytics and dashboarding.
The final reason we recommend Skio is on the service side. They’ve invested heavily in making migration to Skio as easy as possible. They have launch engineers who are Shopify developers (many from a Shopify Plus agency they acquired) that will help you design plan pickers on your product pages, style your customer portal, configure discounts and more. Crucially they will also help with the migration of payment tokens from other providers to Skio. This migration process is mission critical for subscription businesses and with Skio you will get top notch assistance. This is all done at no cost to merchants and is included in the cost of the service. With other subscription apps you might be charged $50k plus migration fees. This helps de-risk the proposition of switching to Skio.
Pricing for Skio matches Recharge’s pricing and is $499 per month ($399 when billed annually) plus a 1% transaction fee on subscription revenue (plus 20 cents per transaction).
[💡 Mention Head West sent you and receive a discount]
Best innovative tool for mid-size brands
Stay Ai (formerly known as Retextion) was launched in 2021 by Gina Perrelli and Pierson Krass, who previously co-founded the eCommerce agency Lunar Solar Group and also helped start the post purchase survey tool KnoCommerce which was sold to WeCommerce in 2022.
The founding team has been deep in eCommerce for a long time and their experience is reflected in the Stay Ai product.
Like Skio, Stay Ai is built on top of the Shopify subscriptions API with all of the benefits that entails (seamless cart integration and easier integrations with other tools).
Where Stay Ai differentiates itself is with Ai features that allow for personalization, rewards, and upsells. Stay bought RetentionEngine in January 2023 which bolstered their feature offering. Stay calls this product their ExperienceEngine. Aside from a catchy alliterative name, it actually helps brands to do some interesting things. With it, brands are able to offer promotions (upsells, cross-sells, Gift With Purchase (GWP), etc.) based on a variety of unique attributes (e.g., upsell product X if they are subscribed to product Y etc). Stay maps out actions that can occur at various stages in a subscriber’s lifecycle (e.g, upsell at order #3). In addition to this, Stay offers A/B testing features which allow you to test offerings at various stages of a subscribers lifecycle (e.g, test offering a GWP at order #4 vs no GWP). They recently rolled out a live learning model which segments out in real time your high churn risk subscribers. This allows brands to optimize offers to ensure high risk customers don’t churn at their next order.
Like Skio, Stay offers great analytics and dashboarding. In addition to their churn analytics, they pull in a bunch of data points so that you can analyze cohorts based on SKU, order number, total spend (LTV), or days subscribed.
Skio also offers a carousel, which shows upsells and cross-sells to customers in their portal. They have recently begun to personalize the upsell and cross-sell recommendations via AI.
Pricing for Stay Ai matches Recharge’s pricing and is $499 per month plus a 1% transaction fee on subscription revenue (plus 19 cents per transaction).
Good pricing and great service for mid-size brands
Loop Subscriptions (no affiliation with Loop returns - confusing we know) was founded by Piyush Jain in India in 2021. The major competitive differentiator for Loop is their pricing. For smaller merchants, they have a $99 per month plan with a 1% transaction fee. For larger merchants, they have a $399 per month plan with a 0.75% subscription fee. Most competitors to Loop charge a 1% transaction fee. The 25 basis point savings adds up quickly when your subscription business grows. Their monthly fee of $399 is lower than the $499 that Recharge and others charge, but the bigger differentiator is the lower transaction fee.
Another key differentiator for Loop is their customer support. Everyone who we chatted with about Loop mentioned their incredible support. Their support team responds very quickly to customer issues. You will receive great support no matter how large your brand is (not true for many competitors). Their founder is known to hop in and help customers directly. This also includes developing features requested by customers.
Loop has also invested heavily in their gamification system. Within their customer portal customers can earn gifts and prizes for meeting certain criteria. This is a great way to incentivize your subscription customers. The feature is similar to the free shipping progress bar that many brands use in their pop out carts.
Loop has a bundle builder, but we don’t think it’s as strong as Skios (single page and less flexibility).
Our pick for Enterprise customers
Recharge is the 800 lb Gorilla in the subscriptions space and is by far the largest. Founded in 2014, they offered subscriptions before Shopify launched their subscriptions API in October 2020. They’ve used their head start to become the dominant player in the subscriptions category with over 20,000 merchants using their product. Recharge clients have over 100M subscribers receiving a Recharge subscription. The size of Recharge is mind blowing.
They have a mix of SMB and enterprise size eCommerce merchants using their platform. Their customer list includes huge brands like P&G, Cometeer, Billie, and Curology along with many smaller merchants.
While everyone is gunning for Recharge’s throne, we think there’s a reason why they’re still number one. Where Recharge shines is with enterprise size customers. Why are they good for these brands? They have a ton of custom developers, they have an older product that’s been battle tested and is extremely stable, and they offer a lot of customization ability on top of their core platform. Agencies love working with Recharge because of this customization ability.
Recharge is also a leader in integrations. They arguably have the best Klaviyo integration as well as tight integrations with many other apps that will surround your subscription experience. From an integration partner perspective, this makes sense. All other apps want to work with the leader in the subscriptions space so have invested time in their integration partnership with Recharge. Newer subscription apps are adding integrations at a quick clip, but they all trail Recharge.
Additionally, as new entrants have added features, Recharge has kept pace by copying those features (e.g., cancellation flows and upsell opportunities). Some might have said Recharge was slow to innovate in the past, but that isn’t the case today.
The biggest reason people choose Recharge’s alternatives is the desire to get better service and support from one of the newer, smaller, upstart subscription apps. If you’re not doing $30 or $40M plus in subscription revenue, you’re not a big fish to Recharge. They’re not set up with support teams that will help SMBs the way some of their competitors do. Smaller brands that still have significant subscription revenue (think $5-10M per year) won’t get white glove treatment (i.e. you probably won't have a dedicated account manager etc.) These smaller brands often find better support with Recharge’s smaller competitors.
Yotpo, the company that’s best known for their reviews product, launched a subscriptions app in 2022. Unlike their reviews product which we think is overpriced, their subscription offering doesn’t charge a monthly fee and only charges the 1% transaction fee that most other subscription products charge. So from a pricing perspective Yotpo’s subscription app is actually cheaper than many alternatives.
They are one of the newest subscription tools to hit the market, but they’re building really quickly.
We think it’s worth considering Yotpo for subscriptions especially if you are using Yotpo’s other tools for reviews, loyalty, SMS, or email. Yotpo is building strong integrations in their subscriptions product into their other native tools. For example, they have their loyalty point program natively integrated in their subscription portal. They can also send an email that integrates their review CTA along with your next subscription order announcement.
The combo of fair pricing plus interesting integrations with their existing tools make Yotpo a tool to consider for subscriptions.
👉 Try Yotpo Subscriptions here
Upscribe was founded in 2019 and primarily differentiates on price. They charge the standard 1% transaction fee, but their fully featured plan only costs $100 per month (vs $499 with competitors). They have two large hero customers Ryze and Athletic Greens who have built massive subscription businesses using Upscribe’s product.
From a feature perspective, they don’t yet offer build a box or bundle features but plan to roll them out in 2024.
Smartrr is part of the wave of subscription apps that launched after the Shopify Subscriptions API update. Smartrr was founded by Roger Beaman in 2020, however, he was forced out of the company in 2021 and has since gone on to found the loyalty app Novel.
Where Smartrr differentiates from the other subscription apps is in their loyalty and memberships. They are one of the only apps to have built a native membership program into their subscription offering. With Smartrr you won’t have to use a third-party point solution for your loyalty program. Customers can view and redeem loyalty points within their subscription portal.
Smartrr has three subscription tiers and pricing for their most fully featured plan matches Recharge’s pricing and is $499 per month plus a 1% transaction fee on subscription revenue.
Prive is another one of the wave of subscription apps to raise money and launch after the Shopify Subscriptions API update. They were founded by Claudia Laurie and Alex Craciun who previously worked together at Uber.
Prive’s pricing matches that of Recharge and others. Their most fully featured plan costs $499 per month plus a 1% transaction fee.
Bold Subscriptions is the subscription product built by Bold Commerce which are developers of a suite of Shopify apps including Bold Upsells, Bold Discounts, and Bold Bundles. Launched in 2012, Bold is part of the old guard of subscription products (along with Recharge and Ordergroove) that were around before the Shopify subscriptions API update. Like Recharge, Bold had to scramble to create an offering that was compatible with the Shopify subscriptions API while still maintaining support for their legacy product.
Bold charges $49.99 per month plus a 1% transaction fee on all subscription orders. The transaction fee is similar to the competition, but their monthly fee is cheaper than the $499 that many subscription apps charge.
Awtomic is another one of the apps to launch after the release of the Shopify Subscriptions API. Awtomic was founded by Emily Yuhas who took the company through Y Combinator in the Spring of 2020 (in the same Y Combinator class as Skio). Emily was previously a product lead at Eventbrite.
Where Awtomic differentiates is on their build a box / bundle feature. We think Skio and Awtomic have two of the best build a box features. If you’re a company that will rely heavily on build a box (e.g., meal kits), then we think you should strongly consider Awtomic.
Awtomic has also partnered with the well known analytics company Peel to offer great subscription analytics and dashboards.
Awtomic is one of the only companies to offer their build a box functionality as a stand alone product without requiring you to use their subscription offering. Pricing for their build a box only feature (without subscriptions) starts at $49 per month. On this plan you won't be charged a transaction fee. This is great for brands that don’t necessarily want to offer subscriptions but want to use build a box features to increase Average Order Values (AOVs).
Pricing for their subscription offering starts at $99 per month plus a 1% transaction fee on all subscription orders. Awtomic’s most fully featured plan is $249 per month plus a 1% transaction fee which is slightly cheaper than the $499 per month that Recharge and others charge.
Bottomless is innovating in the subscription category with their use of a smart scale which weighs customers' product in their homes and only re-orders when it's below a certain weight. Their flagship market is coffee. If you’re a coffee brand, we think Bottomless is an interesting option to consider.
Ordergroove was founded in 2010 making it the oldest of the subscription offerings. They advertise themselves as “Subscriptions for serious brands”, and we think they’re right, if by ‘serious’, they mean enterprise brands. They’re more enterprise focused than other competitors and have large brands like L’Oreal, Clif Bar, and Daily Harvest in their roster of clients. They are the number one alternative to Recharge for enterprise brands.
Ordergroove supports large Shopify brands, but they focus more than Recharge on brands that aren’t using Shopify. They support Salesforce, Magento, Commercetools and other large enterprise focused eCommerce platforms.
They advertise no hidden per transaction fees (i.e. they don’t take a % of every transaction), but they charge based on the total GMV of your subscription business, so they effectively have a transaction fee that they simply call something different. It’s also likely that their fees will end up being higher than other competitors despite not charging a “hidden transaction fee”.
They compete directly with ReCharge for enterprise customers. They recently won Dollar Shave Club from Recharge, but they also have ongoing litigation with MeUndies over an “unusable app”. We typically recommend Recharge over Ordergroove for enterprise brands. Historically, Ordergroove was very bespoke and exerted a lot of control over their platform (more so than Recharge). They’re trying to make their platform more open, but there’s still a lot of wood to chop here.
Seal Subscriptions is similar to Appstle and is one of the cheapest offerings we reviewed. They don’t charge a % transaction fee on subscription sales and instead only charge a monthly fee based on subscription orders. This fee ranges from $99 per month on their lowest tier to $380 per month on their highest tier. We think Seal has a solid product for smaller companies, but typically recommend Appstle for brands that are looking for the “cheap but good” combination.
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