Recharge Costs €11,400/Year at 5,000 Subscription Orders. Here's When Custom Wins.

If you run a subscription business on Shopify, there is a strong chance you are on Recharge. The app dominates the subscription-management category on Shopify and powers everything from coffee boxes to vitamin bundles to recurring pet food orders. It also has one of the most expensive per-order fee structures of any major Shopify app, and the math gets worse the more successful your subscription business becomes.

Here is what Recharge actually charges in 2026:

Standard plan: $25/month, hard-capped at 50 subscribers, no transaction fees. This is essentially a trial tier.

Pro plan: $99/month + 1.49% + $0.19 per transaction. No subscriber cap.

Custom plan: $499/month + 1.34% + $0.19 per transaction (12-month commitment), aimed at higher-volume stores.

Enterprise: negotiated. Usually starts above $999/month with a percentage that scales by gross subscription volume.

The number that surprises most merchants is not the monthly fee — it is the $0.19 per transaction. At low volumes that sounds like nothing. At 1,000 subscription orders per month it is $2,280 per year in per-order fees alone. At 5,000 orders per month it is $11,400 per year. At 50,000 orders per month it is $9,500 per month — over $114,000 per year in per-transaction fees on top of the percentage and the base. And that is just the variable side. The percentage fee (1.34-1.49%) compounds on top.

A store doing $50,000/month in subscription revenue with 3,000 subscription orders pays roughly: $99 base + $570 from the percentage (1.49% of $50K subset to subscription portion) + $570 in per-transaction fees ($0.19 × 3,000). That is about $14,300 per year, just for Recharge, before any of Shopify's own transaction fees and before payment processor charges. Most subscription store owners have not added those numbers up recently.

Recharge is not expensive because it is bad. It is expensive because it does a non-trivial amount of work that subscription businesses cannot easily replicate without engineering effort. To evaluate whether to replace it, you have to be honest about which of these features your store actually uses.

Recurring billing engine: Charges the customer's saved payment method on the schedule the customer selected. Handles card-on-file vaulting, retry logic for failed payments, and dunning emails. This is the core of any subscription system and the part that quietly breaks businesses when it fails.

Customer subscription portal: A logged-in page where customers skip orders, swap products, change frequency, pause, or cancel. Most subscription businesses lose 5-15% of revenue per month to churn, and the quality of this portal directly affects how much of that is preventable churn versus permanent.

Build-a-box / bundle logic: Letting customers configure what is in each shipment, sometimes with a swap rule ("swap two items per month, free"). Coffee, snacks, vitamins, and pet food businesses depend on this. Building it from scratch is a multi-month engineering project.

Pre-paid subscriptions: 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month prepay options, where the customer pays upfront and the shipments are released on schedule. Hard to do correctly with refund accounting and partial cancellations.

Smart retry and decline recovery: When a card fails, Recharge retries on a schedule that maximizes recovery rate. The dunning logic is not glamorous but is worth several percent of subscription revenue annually.

Native Shopify Checkout integration: Subscription items go through Shopify's checkout (since the 2023 Shopify Subscriptions API rewrite), inheriting Shop Pay, address-on-file, and tax calculation correctly.

For a store that uses two of those features lightly, Recharge is overkill and the percentage fee is hard to justify. For a store that uses all six and has 5,000+ monthly subscription orders, Recharge is doing real work, and the question is whether it is doing $14,000+ of work or whether that money is better spent on a custom build that does only what your business actually needs.

If you Google "Recharge alternatives" you find the same five or six names: Loop Subscriptions, Skio, Appstle, Bold, Smartrr, Stay AI. Each has a slightly different pricing structure, and the picture is more nuanced than the comparison blogs suggest.

Appstle Subscriptions: Free up to 50 orders/month, then $10-100/month with 0% transaction fees. This is the clear winner for stores under 500 subscription orders per month. Once you cross that line the feature set starts feeling thin and the customer portal is functional but unloved.

Loop Subscriptions: Starter at $99/month with no per-order fees, plus bundles and loyalty included. Strong fit for mid-market stores in the $25K-100K monthly subscription revenue range. The catch is that pricing scales with monthly recurring revenue once you grow, and at $500K+ subscription MRR you are paying more than you would have on Recharge.

Skio: Pricing is usage-based, scaling with subscription order volume. Skio markets itself as the modern alternative to Recharge and is genuinely strong at the customer portal and analytics side. The per-order math at 5,000+ subscription orders is similar to Recharge once you get above the entry tier, with a slightly lower percentage and a slightly higher base.

Smartrr: Brand-focused, with strong customer portal customization and loyalty integration. Pricing scales with MRR, similar to Loop. Best for stores that care a lot about subscription brand experience and have the budget to pay for it.

Bold Subscriptions: Base around $50/month plus 1-2% transaction fees. Bold has been around the longest and shows it — the UX is dated but the engine is reliable. Fine for stores that just need recurring billing and a basic portal.

The honest summary: at small scale, Appstle is the right answer and saves a meaningful amount of money. In the middle ($25K-200K subscription MRR), Loop or Skio are usually wins over Recharge. Above $500K subscription MRR, every SaaS option charges enough that the conversation should switch to whether a custom build pays back.

Custom subscription billing is more involved than custom invoicing or custom address validation. The reason is the surface area: you need to handle vaulted payment methods, retry logic, dunning, refunds, subscription state transitions, customer self-service, prepay accounting, and a half-dozen edge cases involving cancellations mid-cycle. Anyone who tells you a custom subscription app is a 2-week build has not done one before.

A realistic budget for a custom subscription app that replaces Recharge end-to-end, including customer portal, dunning, build-a-box, and Shopify Checkout integration, is €18,000-35,000 as a one-time investment, depending on how many of those features your store actually needs. Ongoing cost after launch is hosting, monitoring, and minor maintenance — call it €100-200/month.

The breakeven math against Recharge:

Store at $30K monthly subscription revenue, 2,000 subscription orders/month: Recharge cost ~$8,400/year. Custom build at €25K pays back in roughly 3 years against Recharge alone. That is a soft case — the SaaS option is cheaper.

Store at $75K monthly subscription revenue, 5,000 subscription orders/month: Recharge cost ~$18,000/year. Custom build at €25K pays back in roughly 14 months. Becoming a clearer case.

Store at $200K monthly subscription revenue, 12,000 subscription orders/month: Recharge cost ~$45,000/year. Custom build at €30K pays back in 8 months. This is the case where it is hard to argue against custom.

Store at $500K+ monthly subscription revenue: Recharge cost north of $80K/year. Custom build at €35K pays back in 5 months and saves $60K+ annually thereafter.

There is a second factor most blogs ignore. Custom subscription apps can integrate directly with the rest of your operations — your warehouse system, your accounting, your customer support tooling — in ways that Recharge cannot, because Recharge is built to serve thousands of merchants with a generic data model. A custom subscription module that knows exactly how your fulfillment workflow operates can shave another 5-10 hours of weekly operations time. That is not in the Recharge bill, but it is in your team's payroll.

If a custom subscription app pays back on paper, there are still ways the project can go wrong. The most common failure patterns we see:

Underestimating dunning and recovery logic. A naive retry-three-times-then-cancel system leaves 5-10% of recoverable revenue on the table compared to Recharge's smart retry. Make sure your build budget includes proper card-on-file retry windows, intelligent decline-reason handling, and customer-facing recovery emails. Cutting this part to save €3,000 in build cost can cost €15,000/year in lost revenue.

Ignoring the customer portal. The cheapest subscription app to build is one without a self-service portal — the customer emails you to skip an order. This is fine until your store hits 200+ active subscribers and the support load makes your team hate the system. Build the portal from day one.

Shopify Subscriptions API vs vaulted-card billing. Since Shopify rewrote the Subscriptions API in 2023, custom subscription apps can use Shopify's native Checkout for the first sale and inherit Shop Pay, automatic tax calculation, and saved addresses. Older Recharge-style apps run a parallel checkout outside Shopify, which is harder to maintain and worse for conversion. Make sure your developer uses the official Subscriptions API path.

Tax compliance for EU subscriptions. Subscription revenue is taxed in the customer's country in most cases, and the rate may change between the original signup and the next billing cycle if the customer moves. Shopify Tax handles this for one-time orders but does not always handle it for subscriptions correctly. Build in explicit logic for recurring tax recalculation, especially for DACH and EU OSS-VAT cases.

The migration itself. Moving live subscribers from Recharge to a new system is the highest-risk part of any subscription app project. Vaulted payment methods cannot always be transferred between providers without re-authenticating customers (PSD2 SCA rules in the EU), which means some subscribers will have to consent to the new billing relationship. Plan for 10-25% customer attrition during a migration and structure the project so it happens in a slow month, not in Q4.

For European subscription businesses — and especially DACH stores where OSS-VAT, EAA accessibility requirements, and the upcoming e-invoicing mandate all add complexity — the case for a custom subscription module integrated with the rest of your stack is stronger than for US stores, because the EU compliance surface is genuinely harder. A SaaS like Recharge built primarily for the US market handles EU tax and invoicing as a side feature; a custom build can make EU compliance the primary design constraint. Services like NoRentApps build subscription apps for European Shopify stores that handle EU VAT, SCA, and e-invoicing correctly from day one, replacing both Recharge and your invoicing SaaS with one owned codebase.