Two things. The build fee pays for the app being designed and written around how your business works, which is a one-off piece of work. The monthly pays for me running it: hosting, monitoring, keeping it working through Shopify's API changes every quarter, and making changes when your process changes. The build fee is not a purchase of software, it is payment for the work of building it.

No, and that is deliberate. You license it for as long as you are subscribed. Keeping the code and the hosting on my side is exactly what lets the monthly be £50 instead of the £400 or more you would pay for the rented equivalent at your volume. What is yours throughout: your store, your customers, and your subscription contracts, which sit on Shopify's own native layer inside your account rather than in a system I control.

You get ninety days' notice, and inside that window I either hand the running system over to a developer you choose, with the code and everything needed to keep it going, or help you move to another app. No extra charge either way. Your subscription contracts are on Shopify's native layer the whole time, so your customers keep their plans and their next charge date regardless of whether I am still here.

Because you are not paying for a sales team, a support org, a marketing budget, or investors. Recharge takes a platform fee plus a percentage of what you process. At £40,000 a month that is several hundred pounds before you count per-transaction fees. Mine is a flat figure that does not move when your revenue does.

They keep their plan, price, frequency and next charge date. Contracts are recreated on Shopify's native layer and mapped one to one. Nobody re-enters a card and nobody re-subscribes.

A subscription app is about a month. The inventory system and support desk are usually two to three weeks. Fixes are one to three days. You get a date in writing with the quote.

That is most of the point. Small changes are included in the monthly. Anything large enough to be its own project gets quoted separately, and I will tell you which it is before doing anything. This is the part a rented app cannot do at any price, because you are one of thousands of stores on the same codebase.

Collaborator access to your Shopify store as a developer. For a subscription app with its own customer portal we may also need a subdomain, and I will tell you before we start, not after.

No. Native subscription contracts work on Basic, Grow and Advanced. You do need Shopify Payments, since that is what vaults the card.

I do. There is no team, no account manager, no handover to someone junior after you sign, and nothing outsourced. If something breaks at seven in the morning, it is me looking at it.