Every comparison of Shopify subscription apps quotes Recharge's transaction fee as a percentage. The percentage is the smaller half of the fee.

Recharge's Starter plan bills $99/month plus 1.49% and 19¢ per transaction. That flat 19¢ does not scale with your order value, which means the effective rate you pay is a function of average order value — and for the replenishment categories that subscriptions actually serve, it roughly doubles the headline number.

Pricing, ratings, and review counts were verified on the en-US Shopify App Store on September 10, 2026. All prices are in USD.

Start with what Shopify gives you for nothing

Shopify has no native subscription engine. Recurring billing arrives only when you install an app, and Shopify's own free one is Shopify Subscriptions.

Source: Shopify App Store (Shopify Subscriptions), retrieved September 10, 2026

It is free, it is built by Shopify, and its listing is unusually candid about scope. Under subscription types the listing tags only digital products and physical products. Under pricing models it tags only subscribe-and-save, fixed pricing, and custom pricing. Recharge and Appstle tag a dozen or more entries in each of those same taxonomies — membership, build-a-box, subscription box, prepaid, trial period, tiered pricing — so the gap is visible on Shopify's own feature labels rather than a matter of interpretation.

The rating tells the rest. Shopify Subscriptions sits at 3.7 across 804 reviews, with 155 one-star reviews against 375 five-star — roughly one review in five is the lowest possible score. For a first-party app that ships with the platform, that distribution is the argument for looking at paid options.

So the real question is not whether to pay. It is which pricing shape to pay in.

What Recharge actually bills

Source: Shopify App Store (Recharge Subscriptions App), retrieved September 10, 2026

Recharge Subscriptions App is rated 4.8 across 3,119 reviews and has been on the App Store since October 14, 2014. It does not carry a Built for Shopify badge. Three plans appear on the listing:

Plan	Monthly fee	Per-transaction fee
25-50	$25	None, up to 50 subscribers
Starter	$99	1.49% + 19¢
Plus	$499	1.34% + 19¢

Two things about that table are easy to miss.

The $25 plan is probably not available to you. Recharge's billing documentation is explicit: "This plan is available only to net-new merchants installing Recharge on or after February 9, 2026. Existing stores are not eligible to downgrade to this plan." The FAQ on the same page repeats it. If your store has ever installed Recharge, the entry price is $99 plus usage.

The counter that moves you off it only goes up. Recharge places you on Starter once you pass 50 cumulative lifetime customers, and defines that count as "the cumulative lifetime number of distinct customers who have made a subscription purchase. This includes active, inactive, and test customers. Deleting a customer from Recharge does not reduce this count." Test customers count. Churned customers count. The documentation adds that once you move to Starter, you are not moved back if the number later falls.

The transaction fee also applies more broadly than the word "subscription" suggests. Recharge charges it on one-time orders as well as recurring ones, calculates it on "the total processed amount, including shipping, taxes, and refunded orders," and keeps the fee on refunds "because Recharge has already processed the transaction."

The 19¢ problem

Take the 1.49% and the 19¢ together and divide by order value. The headline rate is the floor, and no store reaches it.

Average order value	Fee per order	Effective rate
$12	$0.37	3.07%
$25	$0.56	2.25%
$50	$0.94	1.87%
$100	$1.68	1.68%
$200	$3.17	1.58%

A coffee refill at $12, a supplement resupply at $25, a pet treat box at $25 — these are the archetypal subscription products, and they are exactly where the flat component does the most damage. A $12 order pays more than twice the advertised rate. None of this is hidden; it is simply never divided out.

What Appstle actually bills

Source: Shopify App Store (Appstle℠ Subscriptions App), retrieved September 10, 2026

Appstle℠ Subscriptions App — the service mark is part of the official name — is rated 5.0 across 8,640 reviews, carries a Built for Shopify badge, and was published on April 8, 2021 by Appstle Inc. of Menlo Park, California.

Its help center states the model plainly: "Appstle Subscriptions charges a 0% per transaction fee, regardless of which plan our merchants are on."

That is true, and it is not the whole pricing model. Each flat monthly plan is capped by monthly subscription revenue:

Plan	Monthly fee	Annual	Monthly subscription revenue ceiling
FREE	$0	—	$500
STARTER	$10	$96	$5,000
BUSINESS (Biz)	$30	$288	$15,000
BUSINESS PREMIUM	$100	$960	$100,000

Above $100,000/month the listing directs you to contact Appstle for Enterprise, API, and webhook access. No public price exists above that line, so any cost comparison for a large subscription business stops here.

The cap is the denominator that comparison articles drop. A claim that circulates in this category — that a store doing $50,000/month in subscription revenue pays Recharge roughly $15,000/year against Appstle's $360/year — fails on the Appstle side for exactly that reason. At $50,000/month you are past the Business ceiling of $15,000 and into Business Premium at $100/month, or $1,200/year. The $360 figure describes a store less than a third that size.

The comparison at each ceiling

Recharge's cost depends on transaction count, so the table below fixes a $50 average order value and runs each Appstle ceiling through Recharge's Starter formula.

Monthly subscription revenue	Orders at $50 AOV	Recharge Starter	Appstle plan	Ratio
$500	10	$108.35/mo	FREE — $0	—
$5,000	100	$192.50/mo	STARTER — $10	19×
$15,000	300	$379.50/mo	BUSINESS — $30	13×
$100,000	2,000	$1,969.00/mo	BUSINESS PREMIUM — $100	20×

Annualized at the $15,000/month line, that is $4,554 against $288 on Appstle's annual plan. The gap is real and it is large. What matters is whether the gap buys anything.

What the extra money buys — and what it doesn't

This is where most head-to-head articles get careless in Recharge's favor, and where Recharge's own pricing page is worth reading closely.

Bundles, Rewards, Referrals, Concierge SMS, the JavaScript SDK, Storefront API access, and configurable API rate limits are not included on Starter. They begin at Plus — $499/month, on a 12-month term, with downgrades available only when the term expires. Recharge's plan-comparison table marks every bundle row as excluded from Starter.

Appstle puts loyalty features — tiered discounts and rewards — on the $10 Starter plan, and Build-a-Box and bundles on the $30 Business plan.

So the honest framing of the $99 tier is narrower than it looks: Recharge Starter buys a subscription-first product page widget, a no-code customer portal, upsell and cross-sell tools, cancellation-prevention flows, failed-payment recovery, win-back campaigns, gifting, and analytics with industry benchmarks. Those are substantial retention tools. The two apps' listed integrations also point at different stacks — Recharge names Shopify Flow, Attentive, Avalara, Gorgias, Klaviyo, Stripe, and Triple Whale; Appstle names Shopify Flow, Shopify admin, Gorgias, Growave, Klaviyo, PageFly, Stripe, and Zapier. If your retention reporting depends on Attentive or your tax stack on Avalara, that difference is worth more than the monthly delta.

What $99/month plus usage does not buy is bundles or loyalty. If those are the reason you were considering Recharge, the relevant price is $499/month and a year-long commitment.

Two operational notes belong in the same paragraph as the price. Recharge's support target on Starter is an initial response within 8 hours. And Recharge bills monthly on the first while Shopify bills apps on a rolling 30-day cycle, so — in Recharge's own words — "your Shopify invoice may occasionally show multiple Recharge usage fees." Merchants reading that invoice as a single month's cost will misread it.

Two documents that contradict their own vendors

Both vendors' help centers are behind their own listings, in ways that change the arithmetic.

Recharge's billing article, the page a merchant lands on when searching for how Recharge charges, still states the Starter plan as "$99 per month plus 1.25% of the total amount of the transaction, and 19¢ per transaction." The App Store listing and the pricing page both say 1.49%. The 1.25% figure appears to be the pre-2026 rate, and it is still live in the support documentation as of September 10, 2026. Older third-party comparisons quoting 1.25% are not careless so much as reading a page Recharge has not updated.

Appstle's help center article on choosing a plan describes the tiers by number of subscriptions, not by revenue, and was last updated September 19, 2024. The live listing prices by monthly subscription revenue. The denominator changed and the explanation did not follow it.

Neither is a reason to avoid either app. Both are a reason to price from the App Store listing rather than the help center.

Choosing

Shopify Subscriptions is enough if you sell a simple subscribe-and-save on physical or digital products, you can live with the feature ceiling, and you want to validate demand before paying anything.

Appstle is the better fit if cost predictability matters more than depth — low average order value, high order count, or a small operation where a variable fee that grows with every order is the wrong shape. Build-a-Box on the $30/month Business plan is the clearest example: Recharge places bundles on the $499/month Plus plan. The constraint to plan around is the revenue ceiling: crossing $15,000/month moves you from $30 to $100, and crossing $100,000/month takes you off public pricing entirely.

Recharge earns its price when retention tooling is the product decision — cancellation-prevention flows, dunning, win-backs, and cohort benchmarking against other brands — and when average order value is high enough that the 19¢ stops mattering. Above roughly $100 AOV the effective rate converges toward the headline rate. If bundles or loyalty are requirements, budget for Plus at $499/month and a 12-month term, not for Starter.

Check one thing before you model anything. Recharge adds US sales tax to its own invoice for merchants whose primary business address is in any of 16 states or the District of Columbia — the list includes New York, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. If that is you, add it to every figure above.

Caveats

App pricing changes without notice, and this comparison is a snapshot of September 10, 2026. Recharge's Custom plan and Appstle's Enterprise tier are both quote-based, so neither can be compared on public information. The effective-rate table assumes every order carries the transaction fee, which matches Recharge's stated policy of billing on shipping, taxes, and refunded orders. Neither vendor was contacted for this article; every figure comes from the App Store listing or the vendor's own published documentation.

Sources

• Recharge Subscriptions App — Shopify App Store
• Appstle℠ Subscriptions App — Shopify App Store
• Shopify Subscriptions — Shopify App Store
• Recharge billing and pricing — Recharge Help Center
• Subscription pricing plans for every stage of growth — Recharge
• What is the most suitable Appstle Subscriptions payment plan for your store? — Appstle Help Center