8 Best Subscription Apps for Shopify (2024)

There’s nothing better than selling products that no one can seem to get enough of. Unless of course, you’re a drug dealer. That’s just not cool – very unprofessional… But seriously – repeat customers are what all of us in eCommerce strive for, to create an unparalleled customer experience that keeps them jonesing for more. 

A fantastic option for your store may be to offer a subscription service. And, if you’re on the hunt for the best subscription apps for Shopify, you’ve come to the right place…

Here’s what we’ll be filling your noggin up with today:

• What Is A Shopify Subscription App?
• The 8 Best Shopify Subscription Apps
  • 1. Subify Subscriptions
  • 2. RecurrinGO!
  • 3. Recharge Subscriptions
  • 4. Appstle Subscriptions
  • 5. Seal Subscriptions & Loyalty
  • 6. Ongoing Subscriptions
  • 7. Loop Subscriptions
  • 8. Subscriptions Recurring Orders
• What Type of Store Could Benefit From Subscriptions?
• FAQ
• Final Thoughts

What Is A Shopify Subscription App?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you understand what a subscription service is. A subscription app is simply the vehicle for which the service is provided to your customers via your Shopify store. So, let’s say you sell something like office supplies, and you have several customers hopping on your store every month to buy the same amount of the same things. You could offer a subscription that would send them these items on a set schedule and have their card charged automatically. Think about it, less work for you, and they don’t have to remember to re-order, everybody’s happy.

That’s really what it’s all about, making your already happy, repeat customers even more psychotic over your products while creating less work for yourself. If your store sells anything that could be bought several times, you should be highly considering taking this route. If you sell fine leather furniture, not sure how this could help you. But, what do we know? We don’t sell couches.

The 8 Best Shopify Subscription Apps

Subscriptions themselves have been around since dirt was created, everyone alive has partaken in at least one. Whether that subscription came in the form of magazines, newspapers, or even DVDs or CDs. They’re highly effective.

Nowadays, almost anything can be set up with a subscription, so take advantage and hop on this train! But with so many different options in subscription apps for Shopify, which one is right for you? You may have entered into the magic Google box something like “What is the best subscription app for Shopify?” You most likely found out that question is loaded as hell. Far too many variables to consider, the “best” app for one seller, may not be the case for your situation. Below are 8 of the finest subscription apps currently available on Shopify’s app store.

1. Subify Subscriptions

Subify Subscriptions is an incredibly accessible solution to get your subscription business off the ground. Whether you’re offering physical (or digital) products or services to your customers, Subify can help increase revenue by transforming those single purchasers into ecstatic repeat customers by offering adjustable discounts, custom subscription boxes, membership plans, and much more!

Subify has many features; the standard includes:

• Lightning-fast setup with an “auto-add” widget. Seamlessly integrates with your store, and is accessed through Shopify Admin.
• Intuitive customer portal where they can skip, pause or cancel subscriptions themselves.
• Numerous widget templates that are completely customizable to match your store’s theme.
• The expert customer support staff is always on deck to assist you with setup or any other questions or concerns you may have.

→ See our full Subify app review for more details.

Subify’s pricing tiers are easy to remember, there are only two. We all can appreciate a no-B.S. approach to pricing structures such as this:

• Essential: No monthly fee, with a 2% transaction fee, and absolutely no limits to the number of subscriptions or revenue being made on subscriptions.
• Pro: $49 per month, 1% transaction fee, and again, no limitations. Plus, a ton of features that you’ll be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

As you can see above, Subify Subscriptions has a 4.9-star rating with only 49 reviews thus far. It is a fairly new app to Shopify’s App Store, but people are raving about it! If you’re just starting a subscription business, make Subify the first on your list to check out. We highly doubt you’ll be disappointed.

2. RecurrinGO!

Ready to take your sales to the next level? Say hello to RecurrinGO! – your new best friend when it comes to selling subscriptions and boosting your revenue.

With this nifty little Shopify subscription app, you can easily create and manage subscriptions without breaking a sweat. Whether you want to charge customers automatically or send them recurring invoices, RecurrinGO! has your back.

You can also increase your average order value by letting customers purchase both one-time and subscription products. And the best part? You get to set flexible subscription rules – from delivery frequencies to discounts and customer notes.

RecurrinGO! is fully integrated with Shopify Checkout, so your customers will enjoy a seamless shopping experience that will keep them coming back for more.

But what if someone wants to cancel their subscription? Don’t sweat it! RecurrinGO! has got a cancellation and dunning management to help reduce churn.

Read more about RecurrinGO! here →

So what are you waiting for? Say goodbye to boring sales and hello to RecurrinGO! – the Shopify subscription app that’s here to help you increase your LTV and drive sales like never before.

3. Recharge Subscriptions

Recharge Subscriptions allows you to create and manage subscription products on your store and is one of the most well-known on the Shopify app store, with thousands of downloads and over 1300 reviews. With Recharge, offer your customers the option to receive their products on an adjustable, recurring basis, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

Recharge Subscriptions’ standard features include:

• Easy setup of subscription products
• Customization of subscription intervals, billing cycles, and trial periods
• Automatic charging and fulfillment of orders
• Customer self-service portal for managing their subscriptions
• Integration with Shopify’s checkout and payment gateway, or whatever payment processor you use.

Recharge Subscriptions will help you establish a recurring revenue stream and build up that customer loyalty. Automating the fulfillment process will save you time (and future migraines).

However, a couple of potential downsides with Recharge is that while they do offer a free plan with standard features, they do charge a fee per transaction, which could potentially affect your bottom line. Also, the PRO tier is pretty spendy, and best suited for stores that sell a hefty volume of products. 

4. Appstle Subscriptions

Appstle Subscriptions is still one of the most highly rated and reviewed subscription apps for Shopify. With thousands of downloads, over 1800 raving reviews, and a solid 4.9-star rating, you can be certain you’ll be offering something premium to your customers.

The standard Appstle Subscriptions features include:

• Creation and management of your subscription program
• Offer both prepaid and pay-as-you-go plans to your customers
• Customizable delivery dates and frequencies
• Unlimited emails, so your beloved customers will never be left in the dark
• A payment retry option, in case a customer’s card expires or something
• A robust analytics system to help you adjust the program to best suit your needs
• Unparalleled customer support, available 24/7/365

As for the cost, Appstle Subscriptions offers several different pricing tiers:

• Free: No monthly fee until over $500 a month is being sold through Appstle. No transaction fees, ever.
• Starter: $10 per month for revenues between $500-$5000 a month. No transaction fees.
• Business: $30 per month for revenues up to $30,000 a month. Again, zero transaction fees.
• Business Premium: $100/month, or get a discount of 20% if you pay for a whole year at once. For subscription revenues of up to $100,000, NO TRANSACTION FEES!

If you’re looking to start a subscription-based eCommerce business on Shopify, you NEED to consider using Appstle. They’re freaking awesome, but as I said before, not all features are necessary for every business scenario, do what’s best for you, not what everyone else is doing.

5. Seal Subscriptions & Loyalty

Seal Subscriptions allows you to offer subscription-based products to your customers. With this app, you can create and manage subscription products, set the frequency of deliveries, and manage customer billing. Customers can easily sign up for subscriptions and manage them, including changing the frequency of deliveries or even canceling subscriptions altogether.

That may sound like all the rest, but what sets Seal Subscriptions apart is that it also includes a loyalty program feature so you can reward your customers for their loyalty. This can be done through the use of points or other reward systems. Show your customers some love! They can earn points for their purchases or other actions, such as referring friends or leaving reviews, and can redeem these points for discounts or many other reward options.

Key features of Seal Subscriptions include:

• Classic or prepaid subscriptions with a free trial, discounts, and more!
• Completely customizable loyalty program.
• A customized customer portal that’s easy for them to use and make updates to their own subscriptions.
• View statistics in real-time, to keep you in the know about your business’ performance
• Whitelabel branding with customized email domains

Seal Subscriptions has several pricing options to choose from:

• Free for Life: $0 per month, no transaction fees, up to 150 subscriptions.
• Supersale: $4.95 per month, no transaction fees, up to 750 subscriptions.
• Rising Star: $7.95 per month, no transaction fees, up to 1500 subscriptions.
• Legend: $20 per month, no transaction fees, up to 15,000 subscriptions.

With around 586 reviews, and commanding a 4.9-star rating, there’s really not much more we can say about Seal Subscriptions. It’s a rock-solid subscription and customer loyalty program.

Looks like there are a couple of negative reviews in regard to compatibility issues (not with Shopify), and a couple of people complaining about the free version. But as we all know, you always get what you pay for… Check these guys out, and let us know what you think.

6. Ongoing Subscriptions

With Ongoing Subscriptions, you can create and manage your subscription products, set the frequency of deliveries, and manage customer billing. Customers can also easily sign up for, and manage their own subscriptions, including changing the frequency of deliveries or canceling their subscriptions altogether.

Here’s what Ongoing Subscriptions can do for you:

• Easy setup: Brainless installation and setup. Integrates seamlessly with your Shopify store.
• Flexible billing: Merchants can set the frequency of deliveries and billing for their subscription products, including options for monthly, quarterly, or annual billing.
• Customer management: Customers can easily manage their own subscriptions, including changing the frequency of deliveries or canceling their subscriptions.
• Subscription variants: Offer different subscription variants, such as different sizes or quantities that customers can easily switch between.
• Automatic renewals: Subscriptions can be set to automatically renew, so customers won’t need to remember to renew their subscriptions manually.

To fit your needs, Ongoing Subscriptions has several different pricing levels:

• Starter: $0 per month with a 3% per transaction fee, no limit on subscriptions or revenue.
• Pro: $99 per month with a 2% per transaction fee, no limit on subscriptions or revenue.
• Enterprise: $299 per month with a 1% per transaction fee, no limit on subscriptions or revenue.

If you look at the starter and pro plans side-by-side you’ll notice that they include the same standard features. The only difference is the percentage of transaction fees.

Let me break this down a bit further for you; let’s say you sell $100 per month subscriptions and you have 10 customers, that’s $1000 revenue for the month. With the starter plan, the fees would be $30 ($20 for Pro). Make sense?

(Honesty time: By our calculations, the breaking point in which it would be more cost-effective to upgrade would be a monthly revenue of above $10,000). 

All-in-all, Ongoing Subscriptions is a super convenient and easy-to-use app that can help you increase customer loyalty and sales by offering a hassle-free way for customers to purchase and receive products regularly. This equates to more profits for you! (I’m sure you’re not in this for fun, right?)

7. Loop Subscriptions

Subscriptions by Loop is by far the most user-friendly app on the market right now. It’s incredibly easy to download and integrate with your store. From a customer’s standpoint, they’re going to swoon over Loop’s mobile-friendly interface with an optional widget they can install as a shortcut to their portal to make adjustments to their subscriptions.

Loop’s standard features include:

• Easy setup: The app is easy to install and set up, and it integrates seamlessly with your Shopify store.
• Flexible billing: Set the frequency of deliveries and billing for your customer’s subscription products, including options for monthly, quarterly, or annual billing.
• Customer management: Customers can easily manage their own subscriptions, including changing the frequency of deliveries or canceling their subscriptions.
• Subscription variants: Offer different subscription variants, such as different sizes or quantities, and customers can easily switch between these variants.
• Automatic renewals: Subscriptions can be set to automatically renew.
• Email notifications: The app can send email notifications to customers to remind them of upcoming deliveries or billing.
• Analytics: The app provides analytics and reporting to help merchants track and understand their subscription business.

Subscriptions by Loop has a 14-day free trial period, with 3 different pricing tiers.

• Free: No monthly fee, limited to 50 subscriptions, 0% transaction fees.
• Growth: $99 monthly, unlimited subscriptions, 1% transaction fees.
• Enterprise: $399 a month, unlimited subscriptions, 0.75% transaction fees, and more features than you can shake a stick at!

Loop gets a solid 5-star rating with only a couple of negative reviews. The only downside with the app that I can see is that the free version includes very few features. So, if you have a fledgling subscription business, this one may not have enough “pep in its step” to start with. But, a rock-solid choice once you’ve got more than 50 subscribers! Go check ‘em out.

8. Subscriptions Recurring Orders

Subscriptions Recurring Orders by Propel Commerce is yet another ultra-simplified subscription app that was built mobile-first with a dummy-proof customer interface. They’re advertising that the app installs and integrates with your store in minutes. We’re thinking that’s probably a big stretch, but who knows, we’re not ashamed to tell you we’ve been wrong a million times before…

Subscriptions Recurring orders standard features include:

• An intelligent interface to help you set up, and easily manage subscriptions. (Even if your I.Q. is 12)
• Robust subscription management: Notify your customers and process payments automatically. 
• Customizable subscription widget that can match (or come close) to your store’s branding.
• Customer portal for self-management of their subscriptions.
• Send custom, personalized emails to your customers regarding their next delivery date, payment fails, and so much more.   
• Smooth integration with Shopify Checkout.
• Support staff at your beck and call 24/7/365.

Great, so what does it cost? Legit question – this app has 4 different pricing tiers, like so:

• Free: Up to $200/month revenue.
• Starter: $9.95 per month and you can bring in up to $1000/ month revenue from subscriptions.
• Business: $19.95 per month, up to $2000 a month subscription revenue.
• Enterprise: $49.95 per month, no limit on subscription revenue!

Subscriptions Recurring Orders is pretty friggin’ great. They get a very respectable 4.9-star rating out of 181 reviews, with the only negative thing people have to complain about being the customer support response time. We find that suspicious though, if you read the reviews, over 95% are responded to, including the negative ones. Sometimes you’ve got to take bad reviews with a grain of salt and go see for yourself.

What Types of Stores Benefit From Subscriptions?

Earlier in this post, we gave one example about selling office supplies; this is kind of a no-brainer. Anything that your customer base may buy more than once can easily be turned into a subscription. 

As you may have noticed from reading some of the above descriptions, many of these apps can handle more than just simple subscriptions. Some even include features such as setting up a loyalty discount program or offering other membership-style programs that keep your customers coming back for more.

In that case, we stand corrected: You absolutely can sell couches and benefit from one of these apps by utilizing the loyalty or membership features. Learn something new every day, don’t we?

FAQ

Final Thoughts

There is competition everywhere you look in the eCommerce arena. Offering a subscription service, membership, or loyalty rewards program to your existing business could be the advantage you need to gain tons of repeat customers.

If you’ve decided to start a subscription-based business, by using one of the above-mentioned apps you can automate many of the mundane processes while making your customers feel like a million bucks! That’s what we should be striving for, making customers excited to hand over their money to you, time and time again.

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