We’re on Shopify App Pricing with usage billing through the App Events API, and every usage event sent during a merchant’s free trial is being refused. We’d like to know whether that’s intended, and how to price around it.
Setup
- Two public plans, both hybrid (recurring fee + usage meter), both with a 30-day free trial:
- Plan A: $10/30 days, first 20,000 units included, then $0.0005/unit
- Plan B: $30/30 days, first 100,000 units included, then $0.0003/unit
- Events go to POST https://api.shopify.com/app/unstable/events in real time (seconds after the usage happens), each with a unique idempotency_key
What we see
- Every event gets 202 Accepted.
- In the Partner Dashboard logs, events from shops in their trial show billing result PERIOD_CLOSED, message “Billing cycle is missing or incomplete for shop_id: …”.
- A trialing subscription returns trialEndsAt and currentBillingCycle: null, so there’s no cycle for the events to land in.
Our expectation came from the legacy Billing API, where a trial only covers the recurring charge and usage is still billed.
- Is usage during an App Pricing trial billable at all? If not, is that intended?
- Can a plan’s trial waive only the recurring fee while overage is still charged?
- If neither, what do you recommend? Stop sending events during trials, cap trial usage, or avoid trials on metered plans?
Right now a trial shop gets unlimited usage free for 30 days, so we’d appreciate a documented answer.