How much does Recharge actually cost? A transaction-fee breakdown
Most merchants pick a Shopify subscription app on the monthly price and don’t notice the second number: the per-transaction fee. On a subscription app that number compounds, because it’s charged on every recurring order — not just the first sale.
What Recharge charges
Recharge publishes two main paid tiers, priced identically on its Shopify App Store listing and on its own pricing page:
- $99/month, plus 1.49% + 19¢ per transaction.
- $499/month, plus 1.34% + 19¢ per transaction, at rates Recharge describes as scaling with volume.
Below those sits a $25/month Starter tier for stores with up to 50 active subscribers, at 0% transaction fees, and above them a custom, volume-priced tier.
Sources, both retrieved 25 August 2026: Recharge on the Shopify App Store and Recharge’s own pricing page. Note that the two label the tiers differently — the App Store listing calls the $99 plan “Plus” and the $499 plan “Pro”, while Recharge’s pricing page calls them “Starter” and “Plus” — so match on the fee structure rather than the plan name. Pricing changes; confirm both before you decide.
The percentage and the flat $0.19 apply to the whole order value on every billing cycle — including shipping. That’s the part merchants underestimate.
What that looks like at scale
Take a store with 500 active subscribers paying an average of $40/order, billed monthly. That’s 500 orders × $40 = $20,000 in recurring revenue a month. On the $99 tier:
- Percentage fee: 1.49% of $20,000 = $298
- Per-order fee: 500 × $0.19 = $95
- Monthly platform fee: $99
That’s roughly $492/month — and it grows with every new subscriber and every price increase you make. The transaction fees, not the base plan, are what move. The fee follows a price rise automatically; your existing subscribers do not, which is why raising prices takes a contract edit rather than a plan edit.
Why the fee model matters more than the sticker price
A subscription business is a volume business. The whole point is that the same customer bills you app fees 12, 24, 36 times. A per-transaction cut turns your growth into the app vendor’s growth. The faster you scale, the more you pay — for software that does the same work on order #1 and order #500.
Several subscription apps have moved to flat pricing with 0% transaction fees on their paid plans precisely because merchants noticed this. Curobi is built the same way: you pay for the software, not a percentage of every recurring order. The Curobi vs Recharge comparison puts the two fee models side by side at the same order volume.
The takeaway
When you compare subscription apps, don’t stop at the monthly price. Multiply the per-transaction fee by your expected order count and average order value — that’s the number that actually scales with you. For a full walkthrough of where these fees hide and how to avoid them, see our guide on avoiding transaction fees on Shopify subscriptions. And if you’re already on Recharge, moving off it doesn’t have to mean losing subscribers — see how to switch subscription apps without losing subscribers, or, on why the fear of migrating keeps merchants overpaying in the first place, migration fear is why you’re overpaying for your subscription app.
