Hi everyone,
I wanted to start a discussion about a few gaps we’re running into with Shopify App Pricing, especially for multi-store brands.
We still have some use cases that feel better supported by the legacy Billing API, so I’m trying to understand the practical implications of staying on it for now.
A few questions for the Shopify team and other app developers:
• If an app continues using the legacy Billing API, what are the actual repercussions?
• Is there a deprecation timeline in mind for Billing API?
• Are there any App Store or platform-level disadvantages to not adopting App Pricing yet, such as ranking, promotion, or review impact?
There are also a few feature gaps we’d love clarity on:
• Any plans to support test charges without requiring store whitelisting?
• Any plans to support filtering or targeting by merchant attributes, such as tags, plan, or similar criteria?
• Any plans to increase the limits of 10 private plans and 20 stores per private plan?
Would love to hear how others are handling these constraints too, especially teams supporting multi-store brands or more customized pricing setups.
Hi @prakhar
Thanks for these questions - we’re in the process of making progressive enhancements to Shopify App Pricing so it’s great to get these questions and perspectives.
First off there’s no deprecation timeline for the legacy Billing API but we do encourage devs to migrate apps as soon as possible, however there’s currently no disadvantages to being on the Billing API, ie: no penalisation on app store ranking.
To dig into some of your questions, it would be helpful for us to get clarity on the use case for being able to target merchant attributes like store plan? Could you expand on what you’d expect to achieve with this? If there’s additional features that stores on specific Shopify plans would need to pay extra for, have you explored if usage charges would support this?
Any plans to increase the limits of 10 private plans and 20 stores per private plan?
What would be the use case for higher limits on private plans?
Great question, Liam!
As of now, we can only have 4 Public Plans.
Some brands are reluctant to go for usage based plans because it becomes unpredictable for them and sometimes they get charged more than they expect.
We use subscription plans based on tiers (for eg: Plan A upto $X USD Bundle Sales/mo).
That way, brands can upgrade or downgrade based pro actively based on the requirement.
We do have some tiers where the bundle sales become really high. Whenever that happens, we do not want to whitelist every single brand on our bigger plans.
It would make sense for them to automatically opt for higher plans when they breach the limit of current plan.
Does that make sense?
Thanks Prakhar - this is useful context for our team to have.