Bold Subscriptions Pricing 2026: How Much Does Bold Subscriptions Really Cost?

Bold Subscriptions publishes three plans on its Shopify App Store listing: Launch at $24.99 per month plus a 2% transaction fee, Grow at $49.99 plus 1%, and Scale at $74.99 plus 0.9%. The monthly numbers are the smallest part of the bill. A brand processing $195,000 a month in subscription orders on the Scale plan pays Bold about $1,830, and $1,755 of that is the percentage. The $74.99 plan fee is rounding error.

Bold is a percentage-of-GMV product wearing a low monthly sticker price. The 0.9% floor on the Scale plan does not decrease at any published volume, so the fee scales linearly and indefinitely. At 15,000 subscription orders a month it reaches roughly $130,500 a year on published rates, against a plan fee of $900.

There is also a scope detail that catches buyers late. Bold's own transaction fee documentation states that fees are "applicable to all purchases that include a recurring order item," and that the fee "applies to the full order, even if it includes a one-time purchase, as long as a subscription product is included in the transaction." The percentage hits the entire order value, not the subscription line, and it applies to the initial order as well as the recurring ones. This teardown works through the published tiers, three volume scenarios with payment processing stacked in, and how the totals compare to Recharge, Skio, Smartrr and native billing on an API-first platform.

Key Takeaways

• Bold Subscriptions publishes four tiers, not three: Launch $24.99 + 2%, Grow $49.99 + 1%, Scale $74.99 + 0.9%, and Ultimate Retention $399.99 + 0.9%, which appears in Bold's help center but not on the app store listing.
• The transaction fee applies to the full order value whenever any subscription item is present, including one-time products in the same cart, and including the first order.
• The Grow to Scale crossover sits at just $25,000 a month in subscription GMV. Above that, Scale is cheaper despite costing $25 more per month. Most brands evaluating Grow should be on Scale.
• At 3,000 subscription orders a month ($195,000 GMV), Bold plus Shopify Payments costs about $7,605 a month, or 3.90% of subscription GMV and $2.53 per order.
• At 15,000 orders a month, Bold alone runs about $130,500 a year, though brands above $1M in annual subscription revenue are pushed to unpublished enterprise pricing.
• On published rates Bold is genuinely the cheapest metered subscription app of the four compared here, undercutting Smartrr, Skio and Recharge at every volume tested.
• Recharge acquired Skio for $105M on April 30, 2026, consolidating two of Bold's three main competitors under one owner.

What Bold Subscriptions Costs in 2026

The published plan tiers

Bold's pricing has two published surfaces that do not entirely agree. The Shopify App Store listing shows three plans, all billed in USD on a 30-day recurring cycle with a 30-day free trial:

• Launch: $24.99 per month plus a 2% transaction fee
• Grow: $49.99 per month plus a 1% transaction fee, flagged as the most popular option
• Scale: $74.99 per month plus a 0.9% transaction fee

Bold's help center pricing overview lists a fourth tier that the app store does not surface: Ultimate Retention at $399.99 per month plus 0.9%. That plan bundles ProsperStack cancellation-prevention flows on top of the Scale feature set. Bold's churn prevention page prices the tier at "$399/mo (over $750 in monthly savings) + 0.9% transaction fees" and says every user is "personally onboarded which includes set up of your cancellation flows." Bold publishes no session allowance, per-session overage or ROI guarantee for the tier.

Above roughly $1M in annual subscription revenue, Bold directs merchants to enterprise pricing that is not published. That threshold matters, because it means the 0.9% published floor is the ceiling of what a buyer can verify independently. Anything past it is a negotiation.

What the transaction fee is actually charged on

This is the single most consequential detail in Bold's pricing, and it is buried in a support article rather than stated on the app store listing. Bold's documentation says transaction fees are "applicable to all purchases that include a recurring order item," and spells out that the fee "applies to the full order, even if it includes a one-time purchase, as long as a subscription product is included in the transaction."

Two things follow. First, the fee is not limited to recurring orders. The initial checkout that creates the subscription is billed too. Second, the fee base is the whole order, so a $200 basket containing one $25 subscription item is charged 0.9% of $200, not 0.9% of $25. Brands that deliberately encourage subscribers to add one-time products to their recurring shipments, which is a standard retention play, are enlarging Bold's fee base every time it works.

Bold bills the percentage through Shopify rather than invoicing directly. The charges appear on the monthly Shopify invoice as usage fees, alongside the app's recurring plan charge.

No per-order flat fee

One structural point in Bold's favour: Bold charges a percentage only, with no per-order flat component. Recharge adds 19 cents per transaction and Skio adds 20 cents. On low-AOV subscription programs, a flat per-order fee is regressive and bites hard. A $15 replenishment order pays Bold 13.5 cents on the Scale plan but would pay Skio 35 cents. Bold's structure is friendlier to cheap, frequent shipments and relatively less friendly as AOV climbs.

Three Real Cost Scenarios

Published rates only become meaningful when payment processing is stacked on top, because processing is the larger line in every realistic scenario. These use Shopify Payments online card rates for the plan a brand at that size would plausibly be on, and assume Bold's Scale plan, which is the cheapest Bold tier above $25,000 a month in subscription GMV.

Scenario one: 500 subscription orders a month

At a $55 average order value, that is $27,500 a month in subscription GMV, or $330,000 a year. On Shopify's Grow plan ($105 a month, 2.7% + 30 cents):

• Bold Scale plan fee: $74.99
• Bold transaction fee (0.9% of $27,500): $247.50
• Payment processing (2.7% + 30 cents x 500): $892.50
• Total: $1,214.99 a month
• Effective cost per order: $2.43
• As a share of subscription GMV: 4.42%

Bold's own take here is $322.49 a month, which is 1.17% of GMV and 64 cents per order. Annualised, Bold costs this brand $3,869.88. That is real money for a $330,000 program, but it is defensible, and cheaper than every metered competitor at this size.

Scenario two: 3,000 subscription orders a month

At a $65 AOV, that is $195,000 a month, or $2.34M a year in subscription revenue. On Shopify Advanced ($399 a month, 2.5% + 30 cents):

• Bold Scale plan fee: $74.99
• Bold transaction fee (0.9% of $195,000): $1,755.00
• Payment processing (2.5% + 30 cents x 3,000): $5,775.00
• Total: $7,604.99 a month
• Effective cost per order: $2.53
• As a share of subscription GMV: 3.90%

Bold's share is now $1,829.99 a month, or $21,959.88 a year. Note what happened to the plan fee: it fell from 23% of Bold's bill in scenario one to 4%. From here on, the plan tier is decoration and the percentage is the product.

Scenario three: 15,000 subscription orders a month

At an $80 AOV, that is $1.2M a month, or $14.4M a year in subscription revenue. On Shopify Plus (from $2,300 a month, 2.25% + 30 cents):

• Bold Scale plan fee: $74.99
• Bold transaction fee (0.9% of $1,200,000): $10,800.00
• Payment processing (2.25% + 30 cents x 15,000): $31,500.00
• Total: $42,374.99 a month
• Effective cost per order: $2.82
• As a share of subscription GMV: 3.53%

Bold alone is $130,499.88 a year at this volume on published rates. In practice a brand doing $14.4M in annual subscription revenue is far past Bold's $1M enterprise threshold and would be on a negotiated contract, so treat $130,500 as the published ceiling rather than a quote. The useful signal is the shape: the cost per order rises from $2.43 to $2.82 across the three scenarios even as the percentage of GMV falls, because AOV is climbing and the percentage rides it.

What the scenarios show

Across all three, Bold accounts for between 24% and 27% of the combined app-plus-processing bill. Processing dominates. Any evaluation that compares subscription apps without modelling processing alongside them is optimising the smaller number. The second observation is that Bold's percentage of GMV barely moves, from 1.17% down to 0.91%, and the only reason it moves at all is the fixed plan fee amortising away. The metered rate itself is flat.

The Plan Tier Crossovers Most Merchants Miss

Bold's tiers are priced so that the correct plan flips at surprisingly low volumes, and the app store's "most popular" flag on Grow points a lot of merchants at the wrong one.

Launch to Grow crosses over at $2,500 a month in subscription GMV. Grow costs $25 more per month but saves a full percentage point, so $25 divided by 1% gives $2,500. Practically any store with a functioning subscription program is past this on day one.

Grow to Scale crosses over at $25,000 a month in subscription GMV. Scale costs $25 more than Grow but saves only 0.1%, so the breakeven is $25 divided by 0.1%. Above $25,000 a month, Scale wins. At the scenario-one volume of $27,500 the two plans are within $2.50 of each other, and every dollar above that favours Scale.

A brand doing $100,000 a month in subscription GMV that stayed on Grow because it was labelled most popular overpays by $75 a month, or $900 a year, for an identical fee structure with a worse rate. The check takes thirty seconds and is worth doing at every volume review.

Reality Check: The Parts Buyers Discover Late

The fee rises with AOV, and AOV is supposed to rise

Every percentage-based subscription fee has this property, and it deserves stating plainly. Upsells, bundles, larger box sizes, price increases and one-time add-ons all raise the fee base. Bold's structure amplifies it because the fee applies to the full order rather than the subscription line. A successful add-on program that lifts AOV from $65 to $85 raises Bold's annual take in scenario two from $21,960 to about $28,440 with no additional subscribers and no additional work from the app. The vendor's revenue is indexed to merchandising wins the merchant paid for.

Shopify spending caps can silently interrupt billing

Because Bold's percentage is billed as a Shopify usage charge, it is subject to Shopify's app spending limit. Shopify's app billing documentation states that apps charging on usage "can include a spending limit that prevents app charges from exceeding a maximum threshold over the duration of the billing period," and that once reached, "no additional charges for the app are permitted until a new billing cycle starts." Fast-growing brands and brands running a large seasonal spike should confirm the cap is set well above projected usage before the spike, not during it. Shopify also notes that because app billing cycles can differ from Shopify's, usage from one app cycle "might be distributed across two different Shopify subscription bills," which makes month-over-month reconciliation harder than it looks.

Contract terms

Bold's published tiers bill on a 30-day recurring cycle with no stated annual commitment, which compares well against Recharge's Plus plan and its 12-month commitment. Enterprise agreements above the $1M subscription revenue threshold are negotiated and will carry their own terms, so a brand approaching that line should ask about commitment length and rate floors before the conversation starts rather than after.

Migration in is free, migration out is someone else's job

Bold markets white-glove migration from any subscription platform at no cost, moving subscription contracts, payment data, subscriber history, product mappings and billing schedules, with three months free for new migrants. That is a genuinely strong offer and lowers the cost of entry close to zero.

Leaving is a different exercise. Because Bold Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout uses Shopify's native subscription contracts, the contracts and vaulted payment methods live in Shopify rather than inside Bold, which makes moving between Shopify subscription apps far more tractable than the old model. The practical friction is that subscription apps hold a scope permitting them to write their own contracts, so a receiving app generally recreates contracts rather than inheriting them. Budget for a migration window, expect some subscriber-facing churn risk around payment method re-association, and confirm in writing what historical data comes across. Bold's own V1 migration guidance is instructive here: when Shopify required that move, stating that "subscription apps not directly integrated with Shopify Checkout will no longer be able to accept or process subscription orders after October 18, 2024," Bold moved active subscription data across but did not publish a commitment on historical records.

Support tiers

Support is where Bold's low sticker price shows its edges. Dedicated onboarding is attached to the $399.99 Ultimate Retention tier and to enterprise agreements. Launch, Grow and Scale merchants use standard channels. Bold's app store listing currently sits at 4.0 stars across 384 reviews, with 71% five-star and 13% one-star, a bimodal distribution typical of apps where setup complexity and support responsiveness determine the experience. Read the one-star reviews before committing, because they cluster around specific failure modes rather than general dissatisfaction.

How Bold Compares on Price

Using scenario two (3,000 subscription orders, $195,000 monthly GMV) and scenario three (15,000 orders, $1.2M monthly GMV), on each vendor's published rates, excluding payment processing since it is common to all:

• Bold Scale ($74.99 + 0.9%): $1,829.99 at 3,000 orders, $10,874.99 at 15,000
• Smartrr Grow / Excel ($299 or $499 + 1% of subscriber GMV): $2,249 and $12,499
• Skio Scale ($499 annual + 1% + 20 cents): $3,049 and $15,499
• Recharge Starter ($99 + 1.49% + 19 cents): $3,574.50 and $20,829
• Recharge Plus ($499 + 1.34% + 19 cents): $3,682 and $19,429

Bold is the cheapest of the four at both volumes, and it is not close. That is the honest headline of this teardown.

Recharge

Recharge is the category incumbent and earns that position on depth: retention tooling, analytics, bundles and a mature partner ecosystem. Starter is $99 a month plus 1.49% and 19 cents per transaction with a 60-day trial and month-to-month terms. Plus is $499 plus 1.34% and 19 cents on a 12-month commitment. One counterintuitive result: Plus does not pay for itself on rate alone until roughly $267,000 a month in subscription GMV, because the $400 additional monthly fee buys only 0.15% in rate. Below that, merchants upgrade for gated features rather than economics. The fuller breakdown is in the Recharge pricing teardown.

Skio

Skio charges $499 a month billed annually or $599 monthly, plus 1% and 20 cents on orders involving a subscription. It built a strong reputation on passwordless subscriber portals and clean developer ergonomics. The material change in 2026 is ownership: Recharge acquired Skio for $105M on April 30, 2026, at $32M ARR, with the combined entity citing 20,000+ merchants and $20B+ in annual GMV. Recharge says "nothing is changing today" and that "both Recharge and Skio will continue to operate as they have," but it has also said it will spend the coming months "reviewing elements of both platforms" — a combined roadmap review, not a commitment to separate ones. Buyers should still price in the possibility of roadmap convergence over a multi-year horizon, since evaluating Skio against Recharge is now partly a comparison between two products with the same owner. See the Skio alternatives comparison for the detail.

Smartrr

Smartrr prices at $99, $299 or from $499 a month, each plus 1% of subscriber GMV, on month-to-month terms with no per-order fee. Smartrr is explicit that its GMV base includes "first orders that are a subscription and all subsequent reorders attached to the original subscription purchase," which is a clearer disclosure than most and worth noting as a standard the category should meet. Smartrr is the closest competitor to Bold on structure, and lands between Bold and Skio on cost.

Native billing on an API-first platform

The structural alternative is a platform where recurring billing is part of the core API rather than a metered app sitting on top of checkout. On Swell, subscriptions are a first-class object in the backend API, with billing schedules defined on a product's purchase options, proration handled by adding a line item when a subscriber changes plan, dunning and card-expiry notifications, pausing and resuming, and mixed carts containing both one-time and subscription items. There is no separate subscription vendor to meter the relationship.

The cost comparison has to be made honestly, because it is a stack comparison rather than a line-item one. Swell's pricing is revenue-tier based: published plans at $29, $79, $299 and $2,250 a month billed yearly, each carrying a trailing-twelve-month revenue ceiling of $50K, $250K, $1M and $5M, with an overage beyond that ceiling of 2%, 1.5%, 1% and 0.4% respectively, plus custom pricing above $10M in annual sales. Usage beyond plan limits is billed at $5 per 100,000 API requests and $5 per additional GB of storage.

Run scenario two through both stacks. A brand at $2.34M in annual subscription revenue pays Shopify Advanced $399 a month plus Bold's $1,829.99, for $2,228.99. The same revenue sits inside Swell's Unlimited tier at $2,250 a month with no overage. Those are effectively the same number, and anyone claiming a dramatic saving at that volume is selling something. The difference is directional rather than immediate: Bold's 0.9% applies to every qualifying order from the first dollar and does not fall, while Swell's overage applies only to revenue above the included ceiling and the published rate steps down to 0.4% at the top tier. One curve is flat and the other flattens.

The other half of the comparison is architectural rather than financial. Consolidating billing into the platform removes a class of failure that metered apps introduce: contract state split between two systems, webhook drift, and subscription logic that cannot be extended without the vendor's roadmap. That matters more for brands running B2B or wholesale recurring orders, multi-currency programs, or headless storefronts where the subscriber portal is custom. It matters less for a straightforward DTC replenishment program on a Shopify theme, where Bold's deep checkout integration is a genuine advantage. Brands weighing the full move can start with the Shopify to Swell migration guide, and a broader field comparison is in the Bold Subscriptions alternatives roundup.

What Bold Genuinely Does Well

Bold has a longer track record in Shopify apps than almost anyone. The company was founded in Winnipeg in 2012 by four co-founders who built their first app, Product Upsell, while holding full-time jobs, as documented in Shopify's own partner blog. Fourteen years of continuous operation in an app category with heavy churn is a real signal about operational durability.

Three specific strengths stand out. Bold Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout is integrated directly with Shopify's native checkout, which means subscribers use Shop Pay and accelerated wallets without a redirect, and subscription contracts live in Shopify where the rest of the order data lives. The free white-glove migration with three months included genuinely removes the switching cost that keeps brands stuck on incumbents. And Bold's other commerce products, including its checkout, upsell and customer pricing apps, give merchants an integrated path if they want more than subscriptions from one vendor.

On price alone, Bold is the strongest published offer among the metered Shopify subscription apps. Any evaluation that dismisses it without running the numbers is doing the merchant a disservice.

Which One to Choose

Choose Bold Subscriptions if the brand is committed to Shopify, runs a straightforward replenishment or subscribe-and-save program, and wants the lowest published metered cost. Bold's advantage is widest on low-AOV, high-frequency programs where competitors' per-order flat fees hurt. Confirm the Scale plan rather than Grow above $25,000 a month in subscription GMV, and model the full-order fee base honestly if add-ons are part of the strategy.

Choose Recharge if retention tooling, analytics depth and ecosystem breadth justify paying roughly double Bold's rate, or if a specific integration only exists there. Price the Starter plan first; Plus rarely pays for itself on rate below $267,000 a month.

Choose Skio if subscriber portal experience is the priority and the team values its developer ergonomics, with the Recharge ownership question priced into a multi-year view.

Choose Smartrr if month-to-month flexibility and transparent GMV definitions matter more than the last few basis points, and the middle tier's feature set fits.

Choose native billing on an API-first platform like Swell if subscription revenue is a large and growing share of the business, the subscriber experience needs to be custom, or the program involves B2B, multi-currency or unusual billing schedules that a metered app cannot express. The economics favour this most clearly at scale, where a flat percentage on every order becomes the dominant recurring cost. The economics are closer to neutral in the low millions, and the decision there should turn on architecture and roadmap control rather than on a spreadsheet.

The test that cuts through all of it: multiply projected subscription GMV three years out by the vendor's percentage. If that annual number is larger than the cost of owning the billing logic, the metered app is the more expensive answer, whatever the monthly sticker price says.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Bold Subscriptions cost per month?

Bold publishes Launch at $24.99, Grow at $49.99 and Scale at $74.99 per month on its Shopify App Store listing, plus a fourth tier, Ultimate Retention, at $399.99 in its help center. Each carries a transaction fee of 2%, 1%, 0.9% and 0.9% respectively. The monthly fee is a small fraction of the real bill at any meaningful volume; the percentage dominates above roughly $10,000 a month in subscription GMV.

Does the Bold transaction fee apply to the first order or only recurring orders?

Both. Bold's documentation states the fee applies to all purchases that include a recurring order item, which covers the initial checkout that creates the subscription as well as every subsequent billing. There is no exemption for the first order.

Is the fee charged on the subscription item or the whole order?

The whole order. Bold states explicitly that the fee applies to the full order even when it includes one-time purchases, as long as a subscription product is in the transaction. A $150 order containing one $20 subscription item is charged the percentage on $150. This makes add-on and upsell strategies more expensive than a line-item fee base would.

Which Bold plan is cheapest for my volume?

Grow beats Launch above $2,500 a month in subscription GMV, and Scale beats Grow above $25,000 a month. Because the rate gap between Grow and Scale is only 0.1% while the fee gap is $25, the crossover arrives early. Most established subscription programs should be on Scale, despite Grow carrying the most popular label on the app store.

Does Bold charge a per-order fee like Recharge and Skio?

No. Bold charges a percentage only, with no flat per-transaction component. Recharge adds 19 cents and Skio adds 20 cents per transaction. This makes Bold structurally cheaper for low-AOV, high-frequency subscription programs, and it is the main reason Bold undercuts competitors at every volume tested here.

Is Bold Subscriptions locked into an annual contract?

The published tiers bill on a 30-day recurring cycle with no stated annual commitment, which is more flexible than Recharge's Plus plan and its 12-month term. Enterprise agreements above roughly $1M in annual subscription revenue are negotiated separately and may carry commitment terms, so ask before crossing that threshold.

How hard is it to migrate off Bold Subscriptions?

Easier than it once was, but not trivial. Because Bold Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout uses Shopify's native subscription contracts, contract and payment method data lives in Shopify rather than exclusively inside Bold. The receiving app still generally has to recreate contracts rather than inherit them, so plan a migration window and confirm in writing which historical data transfers. Most competing vendors, Bold included, offer free migration assistance to win the business.