Shopify's Help Center opens its guidance on closing up shop with a sentence most merchants never see: "Although Shopify doesn't have a vacation setting, there are two ways that you can temporarily close your store to the general public."

There are actually four states a Shopify store can be in when it stops selling, and merchants routinely pick one expecting another one's billing behavior. The most expensive misunderstanding is this: the plan literally named Pause and Build pauses your checkout and your subscription fee. It does not pause your apps.

Here is what the primary sources say about each state, and what each one does to the app charges on your bill.

The four states, side by side

	Private mode	Pause and Build	Deactivated	Frozen
How you get there	Turn on the storefront password	Switch plans in Settings > Plan	Cancel your plan	Miss a bill payment
Shopify subscription fee	Your normal plan fee	$9 USD per month	Stops at end of cycle	Billing attempts stop
Storefront	Password page only	Public, browsable, no checkout	Offline	Customers can't view it
Shopify admin	Full access	Full access	Lost at end of cycle	No access
Apps installed	All stay	All stay	All force-uninstalled	All stay
Shopify-billed app charges	Continue	Continue	Charged immediately, then stop	Frozen
Externally billed app charges	Not affected by Shopify — cancel with the developer	Same	Same	Same

The column that surprises people is Pause and Build. The one that surprises them more is Frozen.

Private mode: the two-week answer

For a short closure, Shopify's recommendation is private mode — the storefront password page. Without the password, customers can't access your site, view products, view pages, or complete orders.

The billing line is unambiguous: "When you restrict access to your store, your subscription charges and any other recurring charges continue as expected." You pay your normal plan fee, and every app keeps billing on its normal cycle. Nothing changes except that nobody can get in.

That is the correct trade for a holiday closure or a two-week production gap. Nothing breaks, nothing has to be rebuilt, and there is no plan change to unwind.

Pause and Build: $9 a month, and every app still running

Pause and Build changes your subscription fee to $9 USD per month. To use it you must be the store owner, past your free trial, and on a paid plan. Stores and organizations on the Shopify Plus plan aren't eligible.

What it switches off is broader than most merchants expect. According to Shopify, the plan deactivates:

• the online store checkout
• the Point of Sale channel
• discounts
• abandoned checkout recovery
• gift cards
• publishing your products to third-party integrations, such as Facebook and Google

You can still send draft order invoices, but the order can't be completed through the checkout or your Shopify admin. Your products stay visible and browsable unless you also turn on private mode.

And then the sentence that this whole article exists for, from Shopify's own page on pausing:

All your apps remain active after you pause your store. If you want to pause your apps, then you need to cancel them individually.

The vacation-closing guide repeats it: "Third-party apps with recurring charges also remain active, so you might want to consider uninstalling any apps that you don't plan to use during the time your store is paused."

So a store paying $9/month for Shopify can still be paying $79/month for a loyalty app, $60/month for a helpdesk, and whatever its email platform charges. Shopify's guidance is to uninstall them yourself, one at a time, before or immediately after pausing.

The meters that don't know your checkout is off

This gets sharper when you look at how app pricing is actually metered. Smile: Loyalty Program Rewards prices in monthly-order bands: Free up to 200 monthly orders, Essential at $15/month up to 500, Standard at $79/month up to 1,000, and Growth at $199/month including 2,500 orders and then $20 per additional 100. On Pause and Build you will process zero orders — but a recurring plan charge is a flat monthly fee, not a usage charge. The band you signed up for keeps billing on a volume you are structurally incapable of producing.

Gorgias: AI, Helpdesk & Chat is a fairer case in the same shape: $10/month for 50 tickets, $60/month for 300, $360/month for 2,000, $900/month for 5,000, with overage charges above each allowance. Support tickets from past orders keep arriving while you're paused, so the app is still doing work. Whether it's worth $360 during a closure is a judgment call — but it is a call you have to actively make, because Shopify won't make it for you.

Two timing traps

The plan change is scheduled, not immediate. Shopify's troubleshooting section is explicit: when you switch to Pause and Build, the change takes effect at the end of your current billing cycle, and the admin may display a future effective date. Until that date your store continues to operate normally, including accepting orders. If you needed selling to stop today, Shopify's own advice is to turn on private mode in the meantime.

Your app's billing cycle is not your Shopify billing cycle. Apps with subscription charges run on their own independent 30-day cycle. Shopify's guidance on unexpected charges after a pause: "If you were charged for an app subscription after pausing your store, then the app's billing cycle might have renewed before you uninstalled it." A charge generated before you uninstalled lands on the next invoice regardless, and Shopify states it can't remove or cancel a pending third-party app charge once it has been added to your upcoming invoice. Your only recourse is to ask the developer for a credit before the invoice is paid, or a refund after.

Reopening costs more than you paused at

When you unpause, you must select a new plan, because your old plan is no longer valid. You start a new billing cycle and are charged the remaining amount after any account credits are applied.

If you were on grandfathered or promotional pricing, that is what you are giving up for $9/month. For a two-month closure the math rarely works; for a seasonal store dark for six months it often does. Run the arithmetic before you click, because the old rate does not come back.

Deactivation: Shopify uninstalls everything for you

Deactivating is the opposite failure mode. Shopify's page is blunt: "When you deactivate your store, all apps are automatically uninstalled and any pending charges on your account are charged." The confirmation checkbox in the admin literally reads Cancel my plan and uninstall all apps.

Those pending charges include outstanding app usage charges, transaction fees, and shipping label charges, and they are collected immediately — your store only deactivates at the end of the billing cycle after that payment succeeds.

After a successful deactivation, app charges billed through Shopify stop. What doesn't stop:

• Externally billed apps. Shopify's warning: "Review any apps that are charged outside of Shopify billing to ensure that you're not charged for the app after your store closes." You may still receive post-deactivation invoices for third-party charges.
• Domain renewals. "Your domain renewals aren't canceled when canceling your store." Turn off auto-renewal at Shopify or at your third-party registrar first.

Three deadlines worth writing down: account credits remain available for 60 days after deactivation and then expire; your store's information is guaranteed for 2 years if you want to reopen; and if you request personal-data deletion, the data is deleted within 14 days, is not recoverable, and the store can never be reopened.

Frozen: the only state that stops app charges by itself

Here is the genuinely counterintuitive part. If you miss a bill, Shopify freezes the store — you lose admin access, customers can't view your store, and your custom domains become disconnected. But on app billing specifically:

If you stop paying your bills, or deactivate your store, then Shopify freezes your account and your recurring app charges. If you start your payments again, or re-open your store within 30 days, then Shopify unfreezes your account and your recurring app charges resume.

Missing a payment is the only one of the four states where Shopify pauses recurring app charges without you touching anything. It is also, obviously, the worst option available — and it isn't free. An invoice unpaid for 28 days moves the store to frozen, charges continue to accumulate during those 28 days, and the next billing cycle lands 2 days after the freeze. Reactivating can require paying two invoices: the one that caused the freeze, plus everything that accrued while the store was still live.

Mentioning it is not a recommendation. It's the clearest available proof that "apps keep billing on Pause and Build" is a deliberate design choice rather than a technical limitation.

Uninstalling is not the same as canceling

The single most common way merchants keep paying after closing a store is assuming those two words mean the same thing. They don't, and it cuts both ways:

• Canceling in the app doesn't uninstall it. Shopify: "Canceling your subscription within an app or on the developer's website doesn't uninstall the app from your Shopify store. To stop Shopify billing, you must also uninstall the app from Settings > Apps."
• Uninstalling doesn't cancel an external subscription. For apps that bill you directly, you also have to cancel with the developer.

You can check which kind you have before you touch anything. Listings that can bill you outside Shopify carry an explicit line in the Pricing section. Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS shows "External charges may be billed by Klaviyo separately from your Shopify invoice." Yotpo: Product Reviews App shows the same note naming Yotpo. The Gorgias and Smile listings do not show that note, which points to their plans billing through Shopify — but if you're unsure for any app, the definitive answer is whether the charge appears on your Shopify bill under Settings > Billing.

Sorting your installed apps into those two piles is the highest-value thing you can do before pausing or closing, because the second pile survives everything Shopify does to your account.

Which state fits which situation

Closing for one to three weeks — private mode. Everything keeps billing, but nothing has to be rebuilt and you keep your plan pricing.

Seasonal store, dark for several months — Pause and Build, plus a deliberate app audit. Uninstall Shopify-billed apps you won't use, cancel externally billed ones with the developer, and accept that reopening means picking a new plan at current rates.

Rebuilding a live store without selling — Pause and Build, but switch on private mode too, and remember the plan change may not take effect until your cycle ends.

Winding the business down — deactivate. Before you do: export your data, turn off domain auto-renewal, cancel externally billed app subscriptions, and check Settings > Billing > View current charges, because that balance is charged on cancellation.

Cash-flow trouble — none of the above by default. Shopify publishes options for merchants who can't pay on the due date, and using them is better than letting the store freeze.

The pre-pause checklist

1. Open Settings > Apps and list every installed app.
2. For each, check its App Store listing for the "External charges may be billed by…" line in the Pricing section.
3. Cancel the external ones directly with the developer, then uninstall.
4. Uninstall the Shopify-billed ones you won't use while closed — before your pause takes effect, not after.
5. Check Settings > Billing > View current charges for pending charges already generated.
6. Turn off domain auto-renewal if you're deactivating.
7. Note your current plan and rate, so you know exactly what reopening at today's prices will cost.

None of this is hidden. All of it is in the Help Center, spread across five pages that merchants only read one of.

Sources

• Closing for vacations — Shopify Help Center
• Pausing your store — Shopify Help Center
• Deactivating and reactivating your Shopify store — Shopify Help Center
• Understanding billing implications before pausing or deactivating your Shopify store — Shopify Help Center
• App charges on your Shopify bills — Shopify Help Center
• Frozen stores after missed bill payments — Shopify Help Center
• Shopify App Store listings for Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS, Yotpo: Product Reviews App, Gorgias: AI, Helpdesk & Chat, and Smile: Loyalty Program Rewards, retrieved September 6, 2026