Outgrowing Shopify’s free Subscriptions app? Keep paying $0.
Shopify’s native Subscriptions app is a genuinely fine start: free, built by Shopify, and enough to get subscribe & save live. What it doesn’t do is chase the money. When a renewal charge is declined, there is no retry ladder comparable to a dedicated app, no card-update outreach, and no report telling you what leaked. RefillKit Free closes that gap at the same price: $0 up to 50 active subscriptions, with every feature included. And because your customers’ cards are already saved with Shopify, switching does not require card re-entry.
The gap, feature by feature
Both are free. Only one chases failed payments.
The native app covers the basics well. The gap shows up the first time a card is declined, and grows with every renewal after that. Here is where the two differ, stated plainly.
| Capability | Shopify Subscriptions (native) | RefillKit Free |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free up to 50 active subscriptions, all features included |
| Failed-payment recovery | Basic handling; no retry ladder comparable to dedicated apps | +1 / +3 / +5 / +7 day retry ladder, merchant-set offsets, fire window, and final action |
| Card-update emails | Minimal dunning outreach | Automatic, Shopify-hosted card-update emails at the +3 rung, and immediately for hard declines |
| Save offers on cancel | Not offered | One targeted save offer per cancel reason: a discount, swap, or pause |
| Customer portal actions | Minimal portal, basic management | Skip, swap variant, pause, change frequency and quantity, update payment, cancel with a save offer, in the customer’s own Shopify account |
| Analytics | Minimal | MRR, churn, skip rate, save rate, and a recovered-revenue report, exportable to CSV |
| CSV import / export | No migration tooling | CSV wizard with validation report, dry run, paused create, activation, and one-click rollback |
Native-app feature set checked July 2026 against Shopify’s App Store listing and documentation. RefillKit Free includes every feature of the paid plans, capped only by subscription count.
The easiest migration there is
No card re-entry. Your customers may never notice.
Because the native app runs on Shopify’s own subscription and payment APIs, your customers’ cards are already saved with Shopify. Switching to RefillKit does not require card re-entry, no card-update email campaign, no vault-token detective work. That is the part that makes leaving Recharge or Bold hard, and it simply does not apply here.
The move follows the same reversible sequence as every RefillKit migration: validate your rows, read the dry run, contracts are created paused with billing dates preserved, and nothing bills until you activate. One click rolls it back before that. Want to sanity-check your data first? The free preflight check reads your CSV entirely in your browser. The full path is on the switching hub.
The honest part
When staying on the native app is the right call.
The native app is free at any scale and maintained by Shopify itself. Staying put is reasonable if any of these describe you:
- You have a handful of subscribers and no failed payments yet. The leak grows with volume; if renewals are few and clean, there is nothing to recover.
- Basic subscribe & save is genuinely all you need. No save offers, no analytics, no portal actions beyond the basics, and you are fine with that.
- You want zero third-party apps on the store. A defensible policy, and the native app is the only subscription option that satisfies it.
Same $0. Stop the failed-payment leak.
RefillKit Free is every feature, up to 50 active subscriptions, and the recovery ladder starts covering your next declined charge the day you switch.