Costs · Margins · The business of ecommerce
We pulled the published plan prices of ten of the most-installed Shopify apps. A modest four-app stack runs about $88 a month, which is more per year than three mid-range paid themes.
The subscription is public and the processing rates are public. The app stack is where store budgets go dark. Nobody publishes “what apps cost,” because every stack is different. So we did the next best thing: pulled the published plan prices from the official App Store listings of ten of the most-installed apps, on one day, into one table.
| App | Category | Published plan prices | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| PageFly | page builder | $24 / $99 / $299 per mo | yes |
| Vitals | all-in-one utilities | $29.99/mo | free trial |
| Privy | popups & email | $24 / $30 / $45 / $150 per mo | no |
| Loox | reviews | $49.99 / $299.99 per mo | trial |
| Omnisend | email & SMS | $16 / $59 / $400 per mo | yes |
| Tidio | live chat | $29 / $39 per mo | yes |
| Back in Stock | restock alerts | $19 / $29 / $49 per mo | yes |
| Rebuy | upsell & personalization | from $25/mo | yes |
| Recharge | subscriptions | from $10 / $20 per mo | free install |
| AfterShip | tracking | $11 / $70 per mo | yes |
Take a deliberately modest store: email marketing (Omnisend, $16), a page builder for landing pages (PageFly, $24), live chat (Tidio, $29) and restock alerts (Back in Stock, $19). Entry tiers only, nothing exotic: $88 a month, $1,056 a year. And entry tiers are where you start, not where you stay, because every one of these prices climbs with your contact list or order count.
For scale: $1,056 a year is three mid-range one-time themes from the official Theme Store. Which is the comparison that matters, because the two categories overlap: quick-buy, popups, sticky carts, product badges and upsell blocks exist both as monthly apps and as built-in features of paid themes. Feature-rich themes turn some of those subscriptions into a single purchase (UTD’s Ultra is a $100-tier example, and every vendor lists built-ins on its store page). Not all of them: a serious email tool has no theme substitute. But before any install, the profitable question is the boring one: is this a forever-bill for something a one-time purchase already does?
Nine of ten apps in the table start free or near-free. That is not generosity; it is pricing the install separately from the usage. The free tier gets the app into the stack, growth walks the store across the limit, and the bill begins. That is why app costs are best audited quarterly, on your own numbers, against the table above.
Individually, published entry tiers of popular apps run $10 to $50/month. Stacks are where it adds up: four common utilities at entry tiers total roughly $88/month, and mid tiers push a serious stack past $200/month.
They are genuinely free but limit-gated by contacts, orders, or impressions. A growing store crosses those limits by design, which is the business model: the free tier prices the install, not the usage.
Audit for overlap (many themes and apps duplicate features), prefer one-time theme features over recurring app features where quality allows, and re-check the stack quarterly, because app pricing pages change often.