Easy Subscriptions app: Sell Subscriptions on Shopify, Priced by Order Count

What Easy Subscriptions Does for Your Store, and What It Doesn't

The unit of work is a subscription plan you attach to products or collections. You name it, choose between One-time + Subscription and Subscription only, set one or more delivery frequencies in years, months, weeks or days, add a subscription discount, and pick the products a subscriber may swap to plus a fallback item. All of that sat on the free Starter plan in our test.

Paid-plan assignments as listed on Easy Subscriptions' App Store page, read September 23, 2026; the three free-plan rows are what the app's own screens showed on its free Starter plan in our development-store install of September 19, 2026.

Installing changes nothing a buyer can see: in our test all four of the app's storefront widgets were marked Not added, and a product page looks exactly as it did until you add the subscription block to your published theme.

The buyer-facing side is a portal the vendor describes as embedded in Shopify's native customer account flow, where a subscriber can pause deliveries, skip orders, swap products, change delivery frequency, update payment, change address and cancel. That list is the vendor's claim: we placed no subscription order, so we never saw the portal.

One dated Shopify rule lands on that portal, and it is written into the badge this app carries:

An app that misses the December 1, 2026 deadline — still ahead as of September 2026 — is at risk of losing Built for Shopify, the changelog says. Easy Subscriptions carries the badge and a self-service portal, so the rule reaches it, and none of the vendor pages we read on September 19, 2026 uses the words “Customer Account API”: if your buyers will use the portal, ask the vendor how it authenticates them. What the badge does and does not certify is in our guide to it.

Dunning is what a subscription app does when a renewal payment fails: it retries the charge and then decides what becomes of the subscription.

Easy Subscriptions' dunning page says the feature comes with the free install, with no separate tier or add-on. In our test the switch was on by default with Pause selected as the final action — Cancel is the alternative — and the number of attempts and the days between retries left for you to set.

Before any of that, your store has to run a gateway Shopify allows for third-party subscriptions: to use third-party subscription apps, your store must use Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Authorize.net, Adyen or Stripe, with availability depending on your region and the provider's terms.

The vendor's own list, read September 19, 2026, is shorter: its FAQ names Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Authorize.net and Stripe, treats Stripe and Braintree as legacy gateways for existing contracts, and leaves Adyen out. If your store runs on Adyen, Braintree or Stripe, get the vendor's written answer on new contracts before you install.

Listing and vendor pages read September 19, 2026; Shopify's Help Center page on selling subscriptions in POS read September 18, 2026.

If all you need is a monthly refill, you may need no paid app at all. Shopify's own Subscriptions app is free and, per its Help Center page, renews weekly, monthly or yearly, lets buyers skip, pause, resume or cancel, and adds four types of discount, a storefront widget, notifications and analytics; on September 19, 2026 its listing showed a 3.7 rating across 819 reviews and no Built for Shopify badge.

It is also the only app Shopify's own CSV import of contracts delivers into, which makes it the fallback that needs no developer. Which paid app usually wins for a store at your stage is answered by profile in our subscription-app comparison.

Where Easy Subscriptions Pays Off, and Where It Bites

One rule decides all three. The app's ceilings count subscription orders, so a costly box and a cheap refill count as one order each. That makes it cheap where a percentage or a revenue tier would bite, and expensive where orders pile up fast.

A Higher-Priced Product on a Slow Refill Cycle

You sell something a customer re-buys on a slow cycle — a refill, a consumable, a replacement part — at a price that makes each order worth having.

Apps that take a share of each transaction get more expensive as that price rises: Loop's first paid tier adds 1.0%, Recharge's $99 tier 1.49% plus 19¢ and Skio's 1% plus 20¢ on top of a monthly fee, as their listings read on September 19, 2026. Easy Subscriptions charges 0% on every plan, and a slow cycle means the free 100 orders last.

1. Create a subscribe-and-save plan of the One-time + Subscription type on the product, with the refill interval as its delivery frequency.
2. Open the saved plan and remove the variants you did not mean to sell on subscription — in our test the form took all three variants of the product we picked.
3. Add a swap list with a fallback item, so a subscriber who tires of one flavour changes it instead of cancelling.

Combine it with the subscription discount on the same form — the subscribe-and-save offer is a field, not a second app — and with the widget block you add to your published theme.

Where it breaks: the free 100 are a lifetime allowance, not a monthly one, and the vendor has not said whether the count ever resets. Build-a-box bundles, curated boxes, trial subscriptions and gift products all sit on Growth at $39 a month and up.

A Low-Ticket Product Shipped Weekly

Coffee, pet food, vitamins, razor blades: a low price and a short interval are the combination this pricing axis punishes. Each delivery is an order, and orders are what the ceiling counts.

How fast it burns depends on a definition the vendor has not given. As of September 23, 2026, nothing on the listing or on the vendor's pages we read says whether a subscription order means the first checkout order, every renewal, every delivery of a prepaid subscription or a manually created one, and as of September 24 the vendor has not answered the question in writing. Plan on the widest reading.

On that reading, 50 subscribers on a weekly cadence spend the free 100 in about two weeks and reach Growth's 1,000 in about five months; the same 50 on a monthly cadence take about two months to spend the free 100.

1. Set the plan's delivery frequency in weeks, and keep your own count of subscription orders from the first one.
2. Before you launch, price the same volume against an app whose free tier counts subscriptions instead: Seal's holds 50 subscriptions and Loop's 50 active ones, as their listings read on September 19, 2026.
3. Decide in advance which plan you will approve, because Shopify starts no app charge until you approve it.

Pair it with dunning set on purpose: at a weekly cadence a failing card comes round faster than anywhere else, and the final action — Pause or Cancel — is yours to choose.

Where it breaks: the upgrade arrives sooner than monthly intuition suggests. The listing's instruction at each ceiling is simply to upgrade when you reach the limit, and what happens to renewals if you do not is the second question the vendor has not answered.

Your Subscriptions Already Live in Another App

Your subscriptions already run in Recharge, Appstle, Loop, Bold or Skio, and you want them here. The record that has to move is a subscription contract, and Shopify's developer reference says who owns one.

In plain terms, the contracts Easy Subscriptions creates are registered to Easy Subscriptions, and a different subscription app installed beside it does not see them. Uninstalling the app that owns them starts a clock: 48 hours after a user uninstalls a subscription app, any subscription contracts owned by that app that haven't been terminated are cancelled, whether their status is active, paused or failed. The SellingPlanGroup reference says the same of the selling plans, and adds: “Back up these records if you need to restore them later.”

In our test the app's selling plan was gone from the product about a minute after the uninstall, so treat an uninstall as immediate whatever the documented window says.

Easy Subscriptions says it migrates from Recharge, Appstle, Loop, Bold and Skio free of charge and moves payment tokens so subscribers never re-enter their card details. Its migrations page says most migrations complete within 3 to 7 business days; its pricing FAQ says a full setup is typically completed within 2 to 5. The vendor does not reconcile the two windows, so ask which applies to your store.

Underneath any such move Shopify documents one mechanism: the receiving app creates a payment method through customerPaymentMethodRemoteCreate or a PayPal billing agreement, then registers the contract to itself with subscriptionContractAtomicCreate — and since API version 2026-04 a contract can be imported with no payment method at all, so subscriptions with expired cards migrate too.

1. Take the current app's export and save it outside Shopify.
2. Get the migration's scope and timeline from the vendor in writing before anything is uninstalled.
3. Keep the old app installed until the contract count in Easy Subscriptions matches that export.

Where it breaks is the order of those three steps: uninstall the old app before the import is confirmed, and the 48-hour rule runs against you.

Leaving costs something too. The vendor promises a full export of subscriber contracts, payment data and order history, which our test could not verify, and Shopify's app-charges page adds that uninstalling stops future billing cycles while a pending charge already generated may still appear on your next invoice.

Our own test· September 19, 2026

What the App Actually Did on a Test Store

Key takeaway

We ran this on September 19, 2026 on a Shopify development store, on the app's free Starter plan, with no test payment provider active and the storefront behind a password, so no subscription order was ever placed, and the test did not cover subscription checkout or a recurring charge, dunning in action, the customer portal, the export, the storefront widget, billing at a plan's ceiling, POS, Markets, a second currency or any volume beyond one plan on one product.

Straight after installation the app's dashboard looked like this:

Zoom

Five results are worth your attention:

What the app did on our test store, read in Shopify's admin

What we checked	What happened	What it means for you
Installing the app	Extensions 0 active, Functions 0 active, a setup guide at 0 of 3, and all four storefront widgets marked Not added	Installing changes nothing a buyer sees — budget a theme edit before launch
Creating a subscribe-and-save plan	The form took the product we picked with all three of its variants, and the saved plan appeared in Shopify's admin as a purchase option on the product	Open the plan after saving and remove variants you never meant to sell on subscription
The free plan from the inside	The Gift product field was visible but covered by the notice “Upgrade your plan to enable this feature”	Gift and trial products are a Growth feature; before paying for any feature, check the app's Billing screen in your own store — it, not the listing, shows what your plan includes
Dunning settings	Enable dunning management was switched on by default with Pause Subscription selected as the final action; the number of attempts and the days between retries were left to set	Choose the final action on purpose — the default pauses a subscriber rather than cancelling
Uninstalling the app	About a minute after the uninstall, the app's selling plan was gone from the product, while Shopify's own demo plan on the same product stayed	Treat the app's selling plans as gone the moment you uninstall; export first

One install on a Shopify development store, Easy Subscriptions' free Starter plan, September 19, 2026; every result read in the Shopify admin. No subscription order was placed: the test payment provider was not activated and the storefront was password-protected.

The uninstall result is faster than the documentation says to expect: Shopify describes a 48-hour window after an uninstall, the plan was gone when we checked about a minute later, and the test cannot tell whether the app cleaned up its own records or Shopify acted at once. The practical reading for a move between apps is the same either way: export and back up before you uninstall anything.

Which Plan Fits Your Volume

Read the limits as running totals. Easy Subscriptions' App Store listing, read September 23, 2026, gives the free plan “0% transaction fees for up to 100 lifetime subscription orders” with the instruction “Upgrade to GROWTH when you reach this limit”, uses the same wording for Growth's 1,000 and Scale's 10,000, and gives Enterprise “unlimited lifetime subscription orders”; the vendor told us in writing on September 23, 2026 that the limits are lifetime subscription orders, not monthly ones.

One vendor page still disagrees. On that same day the FAQ on its own pricing page still read “Easy Subscriptions prices by subscription orders per month, not by revenue”. Budget by the listing and the written correction, not by that FAQ.

Take a store that settles at 100 subscription orders a month, counted from its first order as one running total across plans: the free 100 cover month one, Growth's 1,000 are reached in month ten (1,000 ÷ 100), and from month eleven the store pays Scale's $99 a month until the total reaches 10,000 in month 100 (10,000 ÷ 100), a little over eight years in. Its volume never changed; the bill went from $0 to $39 to $99 because the total grew. If each plan's count started afresh instead, every step after the first would come later.

Ceilings, monthly and annual prices and plan features as listed on Easy Subscriptions' App Store page on September 23, 2026; annual prices are the listing's own “save 10%” figures. The app's Billing screen in our development-store install on September 19, 2026 showed the same ceilings and prices for Starter, Growth and Scale, without naming a period for the count.

Charges are in USD and billed every 30 days, each paid plan carries a 7-day free trial, and the app takes 0% transaction fees on every plan, including the free one — the vendor's pricing FAQ puts it as “The monthly plan fee is the only cost.” That is the app's own fee, and it says nothing about what your payment provider charges to process each renewal.

At a ceiling the listing says only to upgrade when you reach the limit. A bigger bill cannot start behind your back: when an app creates a paid subscription, Shopify returns a confirmation URL where you approve or decline the charges, and billing begins only after approval and after any trial.

What happens to renewals while you decide, and whether the count ever resets — after a reinstall or a downgrade, for example — are questions the vendor has not answered, so keep your own running count of subscription orders from the first one.

What you are choosing against is four different ways of pricing the same job:

Axes, free tiers and entry prices read on each app's Shopify App Store listing on September 19, 2026; the Easy Subscriptions row was re-read on September 23, 2026, when its listing stated the limits in lifetime subscription orders. An axis comparison, not a ranking: ratings and review counts are deliberately not shown.

Two rows need a footnote: Recharge is a hybrid, counting subscribers on its entry tier and adding a share of each transaction above it, and Skio's listing shows one tier only. What a percentage fee costs on top of your gateway's own fees is worked through in our recurring-payments guide.

Set These Up Before You Sell a Subscription

Most of what goes wrong with a subscription app goes wrong before the first order, and every item below comes from a boundary named above — a Shopify rule, a vendor claim, or something we saw in our own install. The list keeps your progress in this browser.

The Bottom Line

Easy Subscriptions is a fair deal on one condition: that a lifetime order count fits your plans. A store testing subscriptions gets up to 100 orders free; a store that means to run them for years should price the plan its total will reach, and compare it with a free tier such as Loop's that counts active subscriptions rather than orders added up.

Frequently Asked Questions