I would like to ask a general question about app recurring subscription billing behavior.
Over the past few months, we have noticed cases where monthly app recurring charges are applied retroactively, with multiple billing cycles (2–3 or sometimes more than 5 months) being charged at the same time, instead of being billed monthly. We understand that delayed billing can happen, but it can be tricky to handle on the app partner side.
A few questions to the community:
Has anyone else experienced similar delayed or retroactive app recurring charges?
When billing is delayed, do you pause app functionality, or do you wait until the charges are eventually applied?
Is there any signal, API, or best practice you use to track unpaid or delayed app subscription charges?
Just to clarify, we are not referring to inconsistent payouts or missing transactions within a payout. We have already reviewed the app history and exported the related transactions as well.
The core issue is visibility and the fact that several months can pass before a merchant is actually charged. During this time, we only see that the subscription is active, but we do not see any associated amounts for the given store.
While the currentPeriodEnd value (retrieved from Shopify GraphQL via the AppSubscription object and used by us to track the end of a billing cycle) is continuously updating as expected, on the Partners Dashboard we do not see any charge amount at the store or subscription level, and nothing appears in payouts either.
This situation can persist for 2–3 months, and in some cases even 4–5 months for certain stores, after which multiple months are charged at once. This lack of visibility makes it difficult for us to clearly understand the billing state of an active subscription and to properly explain it to merchants when questions arise about the more charges.
We have started to see similar problems towards the end of year 2025 and during the start of this year. Not only delayed payments, but totally skipped monthly billings for some merchants as well, also recorded usage charges have been missing from some time periods.
I have been in touch with Partner support about these. So far I’ve only received information that after their investigation “those payments were billed normally, but there might be problems at merchant’s payment methods causing payments not coming through, if you need to know more, you should contact the merchant”.
I don’t believe it’s our position to contact merchant and ask how their Shopify bills are doing?
There has also been some payments coming through from these merchants during this time, and their subscription has been active all along - they don’t have their subscriptions Frozen. Monthly subscriptions are also billed together with Shopify’s monthly invoice and their stores are still active - so I don’t think the problem is with merchant’s payment methods when their subscription is still active.
Thanks for sharing this with us, we really appreciate you taking the time to describe your experience.
We are seeing very similar cases on our side as well. In several situations, we have identified missed billing cycles that were clearly linked to a store becoming inactive or closed, and in those cases it is understandable that the charges are applied retroactively once the store is reopened.
What we are currently trying to better understand are the cases where the store never enters an inactive or closed state. In these situations, the subscription remains active, the store stays live, yet billing cycles appear to be delayed or skipped, and charges are only applied much later or in batches.
(or when the store is closed a few months later, resulting in several months of unpaid subscription fees for that store )
I will share a concrete example shortly to illustrate this scenario more clearly.
In this case, the store has an active app subscription (status: Activated) on the Basic marketplace plan at $39.99 USD / 30 days. The store is US-based and not a Shopify Plus account.
From the billing history shown:
Sep 16, 2025 – Oct 16, 2025 → Invoiced on Dec 27, 2025
Oct 16, 2025 – Nov 15, 2025 → Invoiced on Dec 27, 2025
So both billing cycles were invoiced at the same time, retroactively, on Dec 27, 2025.
Another important detail is that today is January 16, and on our side we still do not see any entry for the Nov–Dec period on the Partners Dashboard or in payouts. At the same time, via Shopify GraphQL (AppSubscription object), the currentPeriodEnd is already showing 2026-01-26, meaning the subscription is active and already moving into the next billing cycle.
So effectively:
the store is active,
the subscription is active,
billing cycles are advancing,
but charges only appear later and sometimes multiple months are invoiced at once.
This raises a few open questions for us:
Is there a recommended way for app partners to handle or anticipate these delayed charges?
Or could this indicate a billing or visibility issue on the Partners Dashboard side?
We’ve had similar cases, where 2 months are billed the same day (one of those retroactively), exactly like in your screenshot. But we also see this kind of behavior:
And with similar skipping in some of the usage charges: there are time periods for some merchants that usage charges were invoiced, but those are not entering our payouts. We can see they are recorded and invoiced. And usage records after and before that period has been entering in our payouts from those merchants. And there haven’t been any pausing/frozen/cancellation of subscriptions or stores in these scenarios.
It would be great if this could be investigated further by Shopify, there really seems to be some problems. and to give some kind of assurance that we’ll receive the payments for the collected payments. So far we’ve trusted the payouts, but are already planning on building an internal system to go through and validate the records history with our payouts history…
EDIT: 2 hours after writing this the missing payments from this particular merchant and some other delayed payments were added to our payouts, also some of the missing usage charges. As of now - at least for the monthly subscription payments - we don’t have many delayed payments anymore (under 5% of all paid customers).
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That is great to hear, and thank you for the update. I am glad it looks resolved on your side.