Managed Pricing has no discounts or credits, and that puts new apps at a disadvantage against Billing API apps

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Hi everyone,

I want to raise something that is affecting us as a new partner, and I suspect it affects others too.

We are launching our first apps under Livy. Being new, we decided to build on everything Shopify currently recommends and to avoid legacy code from day one. That includes Managed Pricing (Shopify App Pricing), since the Billing API is now documented as legacy. It felt like the obvious call: why ship something on an API that is already on its way out.

A few months in, we are running into limits that are hard to work around.

1. No discounts of any kind for a specific store.

If a merchant is an early adopter, gives us feedback, or agrees to be a case study, we cannot give them 50 percent off for two months. We cannot give them 3 free months. We cannot hand them 50 dollars in credit to spend on the app over time. There is no mechanism at all, not through the API and not through the Partner Dashboard.

On the Billing API this is a solved problem: appSubscriptionCreate takes a discount with a percentage or a fixed amount and a durationLimitInIntervals. Apps built on it can run promos, win-back offers, and negotiated pricing. Apps built on the recommended path cannot.

2. No cross-app or bundle pricing.

This is standard practice for any partner with more than one app: install the second app, get a discount on both. It is one of the main reasons to build a suite instead of a single product. With Managed Pricing there is no way to express “this store has two of my apps, charge them less”. Every app is priced in isolation, with no awareness of the others in the same partner org.

3. The hybrid model makes it worse.

Our first app charges a monthly fixed fee plus usage on top of the plan limits (extra orders, for example). With that model in place, we have zero levers. No percentage discount, no credit balance against usage, no promotional period. The pricing model that Shopify itself pushes as the modern one is the one with the fewest commercial options.

The net effect

We chose the recommended, non-legacy path, and the result is that we compete at a structural disadvantage against older apps that sit on the Billing API and can run promos we simply cannot match. Being early on the new stack should not be a commercial penalty.

What would solve it

In rough priority order, from our side:

  1. Per-install discounts in Managed Pricing (percentage or fixed amount, limited to N billing periods), settable from the Partner Dashboard or via API.
  2. App credits, a balance a partner can grant to a store that is consumed by subscription and usage charges before the card is billed.
  3. Bundle or multi-app discounts scoped to a partner organization.
  4. In the meantime, if parity is not close, it would help a lot to say so clearly in the docs. Right now Billing API reads as legacy without any note that the recommended replacement cannot do things the legacy one can. New partners are making an architectural decision on incomplete information.

Happy to go deeper on our use cases, share numbers, or test anything in progress. If other partners are hitting the same wall, please add your case below, it helps to show this is not one app’s edge case.

Thanks for your time.