Choosing
Recharge alternatives for Shopify: the four real options
There are only four honest answers here, and one of them is to stay. Which fits depends almost entirely on your subscription revenue and how unusual your delivery logic is.
Checked 1 October 2026
Option one: a cheaper app on the same model
Bold Subscriptions and similar still charge a monthly fee plus a percentage, just a smaller one. Bold's tiers run $24.99 plus 2 percent, $49.99 plus 1 percent, and $74.99 plus 0.9 percent.
This fixes the size of the problem without changing its shape. Your bill still rises with your revenue, and you will have this same conversation again two years from now at a larger number. Worth doing if the migration effort has to be minimal and you just need the bleeding to slow.
Option two: an app with no percentage
Appstle charges no transaction percentage on its paid plans. The tiers are capped by monthly revenue: free to $500, $10 to $5,000, $30 to $15,000, $100 to $100,000. It has close to nine thousand reviews at five stars.
For a large number of stores this is simply the right answer and the rest of this page is academic. If you are under $100,000 a month of subscription revenue and your delivery logic is ordinary, £100 a month with no percentage is very hard to beat and nobody should talk you out of it.
The limits are the revenue cap above that, and that you are still working inside somebody else's settings page.
Option three: native contracts plus a build
Shopify's own subscription contracts handle the billing and cost nothing. What they do not include is the customer portal, the delivery calendar, dunning, or anything a customer or an operator actually touches. Those get built.
£1,000 to build and £50 a month, flat, regardless of what you process. This is the option that makes sense when the percentage has become real money, or when your delivery logic is the thing no app quite handles.
Option four: stay on Recharge
Recharge is a serious product with a large amount of software around the billing engine, and under roughly ten thousand a month of subscription revenue the percentage is not costing you enough to justify moving. Migrations carry risk and consume attention you could spend on selling more.
If nothing about Recharge is actually blocking you and the bill is annoying rather than painful, staying is a legitimate answer and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
Which one is yours
| Your situation | Probably |
|---|---|
| Under $10k a month subscription revenue | Stay, or Appstle |
| Under $100k, ordinary delivery logic | Appstle |
| Over $100k, ordinary delivery logic | Build, or negotiate with Recharge |
| Delivery windows, cut offs, production schedules | Build, at any size |
| Migration effort must be near zero | Bold or stay |
Prices for each option are on the fees page, with the arithmetic run at four revenue levels.
Get told which one it is
Send me your subscription revenue, your order count and what Recharge charges you. You get a straight answer, including when that answer is to stay where you are.