Which subscription app should I use?

It depends on how complex your plans are and how much setup work you want to pay for. Shopify's own subscriptions are free and deliberately limited. Seal is inexpensive and genuinely sufficient for a straightforward subscribe-and-save. Recharge is the established option with the deepest feature set and prices accordingly, with a monthly fee and a charge on every transaction. Skio and Loop are newer with better customer portals. We choose after seeing your plan structure, not before.

Can customers cancel by themselves?

Yes, and we build it that way every time. A hidden cancel button does raise retention for about a quarter, and then it produces chargebacks — because a customer who cannot cancel calls their bank instead. Chargebacks cost the order, a fee and eventually the payment account itself. Putting one honest pause offer in front of cancel is fine and it works. Hiding the exit is not.

What is dunning and why is it priced separately?

Dunning is what happens when a subscriber's card fails — the retry schedule and the email sequence that gets them to update it. Cards expire, get replaced after fraud, and get declined for limits every single month, so on any established subscriber base a share of your revenue fails to collect on schedule. How much of it comes back is decided almost entirely by the retry timing and the emails. It is priced separately because it is the most valuable part of the build and it deserves proper attention rather than a default setting.

What happens to my subscriptions if I change platform later?

They generally do not travel. Recurring billing depends on card tokens held by your payment processor, and those are tied to the account and gateway that created them. Sometimes a token migration between accounts on the same processor is possible, but it is a separate request with its own approval. Choose the platform you intend to stay on before you build the subscription programme, not after.

Are there rules about how subscriptions have to be sold?

Yes, and they vary by market — broadly around clear disclosure before purchase, notice before charges, and cancellation being as easy as signing up. We build to those expectations by default because it is also the commercially sound way to run the programme, but the specific obligations for your business are a question for your own adviser rather than for us.

Can the same product be sold one-off and on subscription?

Yes, and that is usually the right structure. The decision that needs care is how the two are presented on the product page and what the subscription discount is, because presenting it badly either buries the recurring option or cannibalises one-off sales you would have had anyway.

E-commerce

Subscription and recurring commerce

Subscribe-and-save, boxes and recurring billing built properly — including the failed-card recovery that quietly decides whether the programme makes money.

From: $1,000–$6,000
Typical time: 2–5 weeks
Usually bought by: DTC brands

Why a store wants recurring revenue

The reason is not really about convenience for the customer. It is about what the first of the month feels like for the owner.

On a one-off business, every month starts at zero. Whatever was sold in March is gone, and April has to be won again from scratch with the same ad spend, the same launches and the same anxiety. Revenue is a series of unrelated events and the owner never stops selling. On a subscription business, the month opens with a known base — a set of customers who will be charged unless something interrupts it — and everything sold on top of that is growth rather than survival. The value of a customer stops being one order and becomes a run of them, which changes what you can afford to pay to acquire one.

That is why coffee, supplements, skincare, pet food and consumables of every kind end up here. The product is consumed on a rhythm, so aligning the billing to the rhythm is a service rather than a trick.

But there is a second, less obvious thing being bought, and it is where most of the money in this work actually sits. Once a subscriber base exists, a share of it fails to collect every month. Cards expire. Cards are reissued after fraud. Cards decline on a limit for one day. None of those customers have chosen to leave — they are simply about to, silently, because nothing brought them back. Whether they return is decided by the retry schedule and by the emails that go with it. A programme with thoughtful recovery and a programme with default settings can have identical marketing and materially different revenue, and the difference compounds every month.

How the work runs

Decide the model and the plans. Subscribe-and-save on existing products, or a curated box where the contents change. Then the intervals, the discount ladder, and whether a first order incentive is appropriate — it lifts sign-ups and it also attracts people who cancel after one delivery, so it is a decision with two sides. Three to four days.
Choose and install the app, and migrate anyone already subscribed. The app decision drives a large part of the remaining effort, and moving existing subscribers from an older setup is its own careful task involving payment tokens rather than a data export. Three to five days.
Build the customer portal. Skip a delivery, pause, change the date, change the address, swap the product, and cancel. Every one of those reachable in a couple of taps from an email. This is the part that determines whether your support inbox fills with requests that the customer should have been able to do themselves. Three to five days.
Design the dunning sequence. How many retries, spaced how far apart, and what email accompanies each one — written to be helpful rather than accusatory, with a direct card-update link that does not require logging in and hunting. This is where a failed payment either becomes a recovered customer or a silent cancellation. Three to four days.
Lifecycle flows, then a full test cycle. Emails before the first box ships, before the second one — the delivery where cancellations cluster hardest, because the novelty has worn off and the second charge is the first one that feels like a commitment — and a sequence for people who do cancel. Then a complete test run including a deliberately failed card, a skip, a pause and a cancellation, checked all the way through billing, fulfilment and email. Four to six days.

What moves the price

The range is $1,000–$6,000 over 2–5 weeks.

Which app the plan structure requires. A simple subscribe-and-save on a lightweight app is a fraction of the setup effort of a full-featured platform with bundles, prepaid plans and complex delivery rules. The app is chosen from your requirements, and the requirements are worth trimming before the app is chosen.

How many products and plans, and whether the box is curated. Six products on three intervals is a contained build. A curated box means someone has to change the contents every cycle, which is a recurring operational workflow rather than a one-off configuration, and it has to be designed as one.

Whether dunning and lifecycle email are in scope. They can be left out and the subscriptions will still bill. They are also the highest-value part of the work by a distance, which is why they are quoted as their own line rather than folded in where they can be quietly dropped to hit a number.

Where subscription builds go wrong

Cancellation is hidden because you asked for it. The request is always reasonable in the moment — leave the cancel button out, they will call and you will save them. What happens instead is that the customer who cannot find the exit calls their bank, and a dispute costs the order, a fee, and a mark against the merchant account that eventually threatens the ability to take card payments at all. A soft pause offer before cancel is legitimate and effective. Removing the exit is a decision that looks profitable for one quarter.

Dunning is left on whatever the app installed with. The retry schedule and the emails are treated as plumbing, so nobody writes them, and failed cards are retried on a default cadence with a default message that reads like a system error. Every month a share of paying subscribers falls out of the base for a reason that had nothing to do with wanting to leave, and nobody notices because the dashboard only shows the ones who cancelled deliberately.

Nothing addresses the second delivery. Almost all the design attention goes into the sign-up, and the cancellations do not happen there. They cluster around the second box, where the introductory offer has expired, the first charge at full price lands, and the customer has enough product to feel no urgency. A programme with no communication in that window is losing people at its weakest point without ever having tried.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

Which subscription app should I use?: It depends on how complex your plans are and how much setup work you want to pay for. Shopify's own subscriptions are free and deliberately limited. Seal is inexpensive and genuinely sufficient for a straightforward subscribe-and-save. Recharge is the established option with the deepest feature set and prices accordingly, with a monthly fee and a charge on every transaction. Skio and Loop are newer with better customer portals. We choose after seeing your plan structure, not before.
Can customers cancel by themselves?: Yes, and we build it that way every time. A hidden cancel button does raise retention for about a quarter, and then it produces chargebacks — because a customer who cannot cancel calls their bank instead. Chargebacks cost the order, a fee and eventually the payment account itself. Putting one honest pause offer in front of cancel is fine and it works. Hiding the exit is not.
What is dunning and why is it priced separately?: Dunning is what happens when a subscriber's card fails — the retry schedule and the email sequence that gets them to update it. Cards expire, get replaced after fraud, and get declined for limits every single month, so on any established subscriber base a share of your revenue fails to collect on schedule. How much of it comes back is decided almost entirely by the retry timing and the emails. It is priced separately because it is the most valuable part of the build and it deserves proper attention rather than a default setting.
What happens to my subscriptions if I change platform later?: They generally do not travel. Recurring billing depends on card tokens held by your payment processor, and those are tied to the account and gateway that created them. Sometimes a token migration between accounts on the same processor is possible, but it is a separate request with its own approval. Choose the platform you intend to stay on before you build the subscription programme, not after.
Are there rules about how subscriptions have to be sold?: Yes, and they vary by market — broadly around clear disclosure before purchase, notice before charges, and cancellation being as easy as signing up. We build to those expectations by default because it is also the commercially sound way to run the programme, but the specific obligations for your business are a question for your own adviser rather than for us.
Can the same product be sold one-off and on subscription?: Yes, and that is usually the right structure. The decision that needs care is how the two are presented on the product page and what the subscription discount is, because presenting it badly either buries the recurring option or cannibalises one-off sales you would have had anyway.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

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