What is the best subscription app for Shopify?

How this guide is different, and how we scored it

Every page ranking for this question is either a vendor ranking itself first or an affiliate site recycling stale prices. This one is neither, so the method is worth thirty seconds. Everboost is a retention agency: we run subscription programmes on these platforms for DTC brands every week, and we do not sell software, so we have no app to rank first. Every price, rating and review count below was checked against the live Shopify App Store listings and vendor pricing pages in July 2026, because while researching this guide we found the circulating price lists for two of the ten apps were simply wrong, one recommended app has been delisted entirely, and almost no ranking page has noticed the category’s biggest acquisition.

What we weighted: verified pricing and fee structure at realistic order volumes, retention tooling depth (cancel flows, payment recovery, bundles), contract terms, App Store rating and review volume, integration ecosystem, and ownership stability. What we did not weight: which vendor has the prettiest comparison table of its own competitors.

What changed in the subscription app market in 2026?

More than the listicles have caught up with. Recharge acquired Skio on 30 April 2026 for a reported $105 million, and Skio’s App Store listing now reads “Skio, a Recharge Company”, with a combined product promised within roughly a year; the full implications are in our acquisition guide. Smartrr was acquired by Relay Commerce in 2025. Yotpo Subscriptions has been quietly delisted from the App Store altogether. That is three of the names on a typical “best subscription apps” list either owned by a rival, absorbed into a portfolio, or gone, and it means the two questions that decide your shortlist have changed: not just “which app is best” but “who owns it, and what happens to its roadmap”.

The verified comparison table

All figures from the live App Store listings and vendor pricing pages, July 2026. Ratings move; check the listing before you decide.

App	Best for	Published pricing	Transaction fees	Rating (reviews)	Built for Shopify
Loop Subscriptions	Scaling DTC brands wanting low fees, no lock-in	Free to 50 subs, then $99 or $399/mo	0.75-1.0%, no per-order fee	5.0 (677)	no
Recharge	The biggest ecosystem, largest platform	$25 entry tier, then $99 or $499/mo	1.34-1.49% + 19c	4.8 (2,940)	no
Stay AI	Larger brands centring retention experimentation	$499/mo single plan	1% + 19c	4.9 (134)	no
Skio (a Recharge Company)	Brands accepting Recharge’s roadmap	$599/mo, or $5,988/yr	1% + 20c	5.0 (227)	no
Appstle	SMB brands wanting depth on a budget	Free under $500/mo revenue, then $10/$30/$100	none	5.0 (8,006)	YES
Seal Subscriptions	Small brands, subscriber-count pricing	Free to 50 subs, then $5.95/$9.95/$24.95	none	4.9 (2,910)	YES
Recurpay	Cheapest paid entry point	$9/$19/$99/mo, top tier capped at $100k/mo revenue	none	5.0 (522)	no
Bold Subscriptions	Legacy installs; check the fees	$24.99/$49.99/$74.99/mo	0.9-2%	4.0 (376)	no
Smartrr	Brands wanting bundled loyalty tooling	$99/$299/from $499/mo	1% of subscriber GMV	5.0 (69)	no
Shopify Subscriptions (native)	Testing the waters at zero cost	Free	none	3.7 (719)	first-party

Two corrections to prices you may have read elsewhere, because both circulate widely: Seal’s current tiers are $5.95, $9.95 and $24.95 (both versions in circulation are wrong), and Bold is not “$49.99 flat”: it runs three tiers from $24.99 to $74.99, every one of which carries a transaction fee.

What do they actually cost at your size?

Sticker prices mislead because transaction fees do the real billing at scale. Published rates, worked at a $50 average order value ($10,000 a month = 200 orders; $100,000 = 2,000; $1,000,000 = 20,000). “Custom” means the published tiers cap out below that revenue and you are into a negotiated plan.

App (published plan used)	$10k/mo	$100k/mo	$1m/mo
Loop Subscriptions (Starter, then Pro)	$199	~$1,149	~$7,899
Recharge (Starter, then Plus)	~$286	~$2,219	~$17,699
Stay AI (single plan)	~$637	~$1,879	~$14,299
Skio (Scale)	~$739	~$1,999	~$14,599
Appstle (Business, then Premium)	$30	$100 (at its tier cap)	custom
Seal Subscriptions (by subscriber count)	$24.95	custom	custom
Recurpay (Grow, then Scale)	$19	$99 (at its tier cap)	custom
Bold Subscriptions (Grow, then Scale)	~$150	~$975	~$9,075
Smartrr (Launch, Grow, then Excel)	$199	~$1,299	from ~$10,499
Shopify Subscriptions (native)	$0	$0	$0

Read the table with two caveats. First, at $1,000,000 a month nobody actually pays the published rate: every premium platform runs custom and enterprise tiers, and at that volume the published numbers are your negotiation ceiling, not your bill. The spread still tells you something real, because a platform whose published rate is $17,699 negotiates from a different starting point than one publishing $7,899. Second, the flat-fee SMB apps look absurdly cheap right up until their tier caps, and for a simple replenishment programme they genuinely are; what the premium platforms are charging for is what the table cannot show: managed migrations, reason-mapped cancel flows, network-trained payment recovery, dedicated support, and integration depth. Our own cancellation-panel data says those tools matter: cancel flows save a median 14% of cancel attempts, and half of those saves need no discount. The honest rule: pay flat fees until your churn maths says the tooling gap costs more than the platform gap, then re-run this table with your own volumes before any sales call.

Which app for which brand?

Under 50 active subscribers, or testing subscriptions: run free. Loop’s Free Forever plan, Seal’s free plan, Recharge’s $25 App Store tier (no transaction fees on your first 50 subscribers, 60-day trial), or Appstle’s free tier under $500 a month in revenue. The native Shopify Subscriptions app is the zero-effort floor, with the feature ceiling its 3.7 stars suggest. At this size the app choice is close to free to reverse; decide fast and spend your energy on the offer.

Growing SMB brand, subscription revenue under roughly $5,000 to $15,000 a month: Appstle is the default pick, and its numbers back it: a 5.0 rating across 8,006 reviews, the Built for Shopify badge (which only it and Seal carry), and $10 to $30 a month with no transaction fees. Seal is the quieter alternative with subscriber-count pricing and a 30-day trial; Recurpay undercuts everyone at $9 to $19 with unlimited subscriptions.

Scaling DTC brand where subscriptions are core revenue: this is where the premium tier earns its fees, and the honest starting point is that any of Loop Subscriptions, Recharge, Skio or Stay AI can run a serious programme at scale; we operate on all of them, and platform capability is almost never what separates the brands that retain from the brands that leak. The choice is fit. The compressed version: Loop for the lowest published fees, month-to-month billing and free white-glove migration; Recharge for the largest integration directory and ecosystem, with 12-month terms on its upper plans and the highest published fee structure; Stay AI for one all-inclusive plan and the deepest A/B-testing and win-back tooling, with a $499-a-month floor that filters out smaller brands by design; Skio for a polished product now owned by Recharge, which makes its roadmap a bundled question. The full decision logic, with verified pricing and fee arithmetic, is in our Loop vs Recharge vs Stay AI comparison.

Already on Skio: read the acquisition guide before renewing an annual plan. Skio remains a strong product, but you are now buying Recharge’s roadmap, and the annual discount trades $1,200 a year against your flexibility in the twelve months the two products are being merged.

On Bold or another legacy app: check your effective rate. Bold’s tiers all carry transaction fees (2% on the cheapest tier), which at scale can quietly cost more than a premium platform, without the premium tooling.

Why do the app-ranking listicles disagree with each other?

Because most are not research, and this SERP is unusually bad even by listicle standards. When we audited the pages ranking for this question, every vendor-owned page ranked itself first or second, precisely none was aware Recharge had acquired Skio (including pages updated after the deal), several recommended a delisted app, and the two most independent pages carried no structured data and stale pricing. The circulating price lists for Seal and Bold are both wrong, and one widely-cited “best subscription app” page still quotes Skio at a price it has not charged in years. None of this makes any individual app bad; it makes the genre unreliable. Check prices on the App Store listing (it cannot lie about tiers), check ownership on the listing title, and check any comparison’s publication date against 30 April 2026.

What actually decides your subscription revenue?

Not the app. We analysed nearly 40,000 cancellation events from the subscription brands in our client and audit base for our churn benchmarks research, and the same patterns held on every platform: 78% of cancellations happen by the third order, the top stated reason is having too much product, and payment failures run single-digit shares where recovery is actively managed. Those are offer-design, cancel-flow and dunning problems, and every platform in the top half of the table above gives you the primitives to fix them. The full numbers, with benchmarks by subscription model, are in our DTC subscription churn benchmarks.

So choose the app in an afternoon with the table above, then spend the quarter on the programme: a subscribe-and-save default worth taking, a cancel flow that offers skips before discounts, payment recovery that is configured rather than defaulted, and offers designed so the second and third orders survive. If you want the programme side handled by people who do it weekly, book a call. We will tell you honestly if your current app is fine, because it usually is.