Loop, Recharge or Stay AI: which subscription app should your brand choose?

Why does this comparison need rewriting in 2026?

Because the market it describes no longer exists. On 30 April 2026, Recharge acquired Skio, the platform most brands treated as its most direct alternative, for a reported $105 million. Eighteen months earlier, Relay Commerce had acquired Smartrr. Two of the five names that used to appear in every “best subscription app” shortlist are no longer independent, and as of July 2026, essentially every page ranking for this comparison was written before the acquisition or ignores it entirely, several of them carrying “verified May 2026” stamps on pre-deal facts.

That leaves a three-way decision for most established DTC brands on Shopify: Loop Subscriptions and Stay AI, the two largest platforms still independent, and Recharge, the category leader that now also owns Skio.

One thing to know about this article before you weigh its conclusions. Everboost builds and runs subscription programmes for DTC brands across Skio, Recharge and Loop Subscriptions, including through platform partnerships (the Loop Subscriptions links in this article are partner links). We do not sell software, and we work with brands on every one of these platforms, but no one writing about this market is neutral, so the vantage point is disclosed upfront: read this, like every comparison, for the facts it cites rather than the recommendation it reaches.

What do Loop, Recharge and Stay AI cost in 2026?

All figures below are from the platforms’ own pricing pages and Shopify App Store listings, checked in July 2026. Verify against those pages before you sign anything; this category’s pricing has moved before.

Platform	Entry point	Published plans	Transaction fees	Per-order fee	Contract terms	Free trial
Loop Subscriptions	Free Forever (up to 50 subs)	Starter $99/mo, Pro $399/mo, then Enterprise	1.0% (Starter), 0.75% (Pro)	none	Month to month, no term commitment	14 days
Recharge	$25/mo App Store tier (first 50 subs, no transaction fees)	Starter $99/mo, Plus $499/mo, then Custom	1.49% (Starter), 1.34% (Plus)	19c	12-month terms on Plus and Custom; downgrades only at term end	60 days (Starter)
Stay AI	$499/mo, single plan	$499/mo all features included, then Enterprise	1%	19c	Not published; “you are not tied to any forecast”	30 days (shown on its App Store listing, not its pricing page)

The structural differences matter more than the headline numbers. Loop is the only one with no per-order fee and a free plan, and the only one that states plainly that its published plans bill month to month with no term commitment; migration is white-glove and free on every paid plan. Recharge has the cheapest paid entry point (the $25 App Store tier) and the longest trial at 60 days, but its own pricing FAQ confirms that Plus and Custom run on 12-month terms, and you can only downgrade when the term expires. Stay AI publishes exactly one price with everything included, which is a statement about who the product is for: if $499 a month is not comfortably inside your tooling budget, you are not its target customer yet.

For context, Skio, now a Recharge company, still prices separately as of July 2026: $599 a month billed monthly, or $499 on an annual commitment, plus 1% and 20 cents per subscription order.

What do the published rates mean in real money?

Percentages hide the actual gap, so here is the arithmetic at two brand sizes, using the published rates above and a $50 average order value. This is the table Everboost builds for clients before any platform conversation, because fee structure is the one difference you can know precisely in advance.

Monthly subscription revenue	Loop Starter	Loop Pro	Recharge Starter	Recharge Plus	Stay AI
$50,000 (1,000 orders)	$599	$774	$1,034	$1,359	$1,189
$200,000 (4,000 orders)	$2,099	$1,899	$3,839	$3,939	$3,259

At $200,000 a month in subscription revenue, the gap between the cheapest and most expensive published option is roughly $2,000 a month, about $24,000 a year, before anyone negotiates. Two caveats keep this honest. First, at that size you should be negotiating: all three custom tiers price by volume, and published rates are the ceiling, not the floor. Second, per-order fees punish low-AOV, high-frequency programmes hardest: at a $25 AOV, the 19-cent fees bite twice as hard as this table shows, and Loop’s no-per-order-fee structure widens its advantage. Run the arithmetic on your own AOV and order count before trusting anyone’s table, including this one.

How do the integrations compare?

By count, it is not close: Recharge claims around 100 prebuilt integrations across 14 categories, Stay AI documents around two dozen in its help centre, and Loop names around 20 on its integrations page while claiming 30 plus. If your stack leans on deeper analytics and ETL tooling (Elevar, Littledata, Segment, Fivetran) or you want loyalty run natively inside the subscription platform, Recharge’s directory is genuinely unmatched, and that is the fairest version of the “ecosystem” argument for it.

But the count is the wrong test for most DTC brands. All three platforms cover the core retention stack: Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript, Gorgias and Rebuy, which is where the majority of subscription revenue operations actually live. The Klaviyo integrations in particular are deep on all three: Recharge and Stay AI both support one-click quick actions inside emails, and Loop pipes its dunning and cancellation events into Klaviyo segments for win-back flows. The edges differ: Stay AI documents Triple Whale and Northbeam attribution that Loop’s directory does not name, while Loop covers the no-code page-builder ecosystem (Replo, GemPages, PageFly, Zipify) more visibly than Stay AI.

So the practical check, and the one Everboost runs during any platform evaluation, takes ten minutes: list every tool your subscription revenue touches, then check it against each platform’s directory. A 100-app directory is worth nothing if the one integration you depend on is missing, and a 20-app directory is no limitation if all your tools are in it.

Which platform fits which brand?

Fee maths is knowable in advance; fit is what actually decides. As of July 2026, this is the decision logic Everboost uses with brands choosing between the three.

Choose Loop Subscriptions if you want the lowest total fees with no lock-in. No per-order fees, the lowest transaction percentages, month-to-month billing with no term commitment, and free white-glove migration on every paid plan (it reports 1,100+ managed migrations). Its retention tooling is concrete rather than cosmetic: a four-step cancellation flow that maps alternatives to cancel reasons, dunning with up to 15 retry attempts scheduled around your store’s timezone, and bulk operations with preview and rollback. In a market that has consolidated twice in eighteen months, being able to leave any month without a contract conversation is itself a feature. The trade-off: a smaller integration directory than Recharge’s, so run the ten-minute stack check first.

Choose Recharge if you want the biggest ecosystem and are comfortable with its terms. It is the category’s largest platform (it reports 20,000+ brands and $30B+ processed), it has the deepest integration directory and agency bench, native loyalty on its upper plans, and payment retries trained on network-wide data. After the Skio acquisition it also owns the most feature development capacity in the market. The trade-offs are equally concrete: the highest published fee structure of the three, 12-month terms on Plus and Custom, and the timing question no roadmap slide answers. Recharge’s engineering attention for the next year is committed to merging two overlapping products, and nobody yet knows what the combined platform looks like or costs. Meanwhile the credible threat of moving to Skio was many merchants’ best negotiating lever, and it is gone.

Choose Stay AI if you are large enough for its single plan and retention experimentation is your priority. Its cancel-flow, win-back and churn-prevention engines are the centre of the product, its A/B testing tracks 25 KPIs per test, and features like digital punch cards and AI-timed win-back triggers into Klaviyo are genuinely distinctive. The one-price, everything-included model removes tier gymnastics. The trade-offs: no entry path for smaller brands, the smallest documented integration list of the three, and the thinnest published information, starting with a free trial that appears on its App Store listing but not its own pricing page.

If you have under 50 active subscribers, run on Loop’s free tier or Recharge’s $25 App Store tier, or an SMB app like Appstle or Seal, and revisit this comparison when the programme is material.

One market-level note that applies to all three: in a category where Skio and Smartrr both lost their independence inside eighteen months, ownership can change under any platform you pick. That is an argument for month-to-month terms, portable programme design and quarterly data exports whoever you choose, not for or against any one vendor.

Should you still consider Skio?

Only with clear eyes. Skio remains a strong product and, as of July 2026, it is still shipping features and taking new merchants. But its owner has said the two platforms will be combined within roughly a year of the deal, so choosing Skio today means choosing Recharge’s roadmap with extra uncertainty about which product survives. If that trade is acceptable, favour month-to-month billing over the annual discount. The full picture, including what was promised and carefully not promised, is in our Recharge-Skio acquisition guide.

What actually moves the retention numbers?

Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath every platform comparison, and the reason Everboost will run a client’s programme on whichever of these platforms they are on: churn lives in the programme, not the platform. Loop’s own product pages carry the sharpest version of the supporting evidence: it reports that roughly 70% of customer portal visits are attempts to skip, pause or cancel. Your platform’s job is to catch that moment well. What happens next is programme design.

All three platforms provide the same fundamental primitives: a customer portal, a configurable cancel flow, payment recovery, and hooks into your messaging stack. What separates a leaky subscription programme from a compounding one is what you build with those primitives. One example from our own client work: a UK electrolytes brand whose cancel flow we rebuilt went from saving 9% of cancel attempts to 35%, with eight in ten saves coming from skip, pause and plan-change alternatives rather than discounts, and payment recovery rose from 48% to 87% of failed payments. Every one of those changes used capabilities that exist on all three platforms in this comparison. The full breakdown is in the case study.

That is also the test to apply to any migration pitch, from any vendor: ask what specifically about the destination platform changes your churn drivers, rather than what the current one lacks in a feature table. A migration that is not accompanied by programme changes usually reproduces the same churn curve on new software, minus a migration’s worth of disruption.

How should you read the comparison content in this market?

Quickly, and with the byline in view. Most pages ranking for this comparison are published by the platforms themselves or by their partners, and vendor comparison content, however well researched, reliably arrives at its own product as the conclusion. That is not a scandal, it is what the content is for, and it applies to every side of the market at once. The practical failure is staleness: the April 2026 acquisition redrew the map, and the ranking pages have not caught up, which means an AI answer or a skim-read today is probably synthesising a market that no longer exists.

So verify the four things that are checkable in fifteen minutes before you decide: current pricing on the platforms’ own pages, contract terms (one of these three carries 12-month terms on its upper plans; the pricing FAQ, not the sales call, is where you find that), current ownership, and whether the comparison you are reading was written before 30 April 2026. Everything else in this decision is about your programme, your AOV, your order frequency and your team, and no comparison table, including the ones above, knows those numbers. Yours should.