Shopify Subscription Developer
Skips, swaps, pauses and declined cards handled properly — the things that decide whether someone is still subscribed in six months.
Give a coffee, spread the mission.
A coffee brand on a mission to rescue perfectly good beans wanted a way for subscribers to share it. A discount code didn’t fit; what they wanted was a way to hand someone an actual cup.
We built a bespoke referral flow that lets them gift a free coffee to someone they love — and pass the mission along with every cup.
Every gift shares the mission · and a first taste
Get in touchRetention is where the work is.
Charging a card on a schedule is the easy part. What decides whether a subscription programme works is everything around that charge — how quickly someone can skip a week, what happens when a card expires, whether pausing is an option when life gets busy. That’s the part we build for. We work on top of Shopify’s own selling plans and Subscriptions API, so subscriber data sits in your customer and order records where the rest of your tools can reach it.
The work we do on subscriptions usually includes:
- Skip and swap options a subscriber can use in seconds, before an unwanted delivery turns into a cancellation.
- A pause option that holds someone’s place while life gets in the way.
- Dunning that retries a declined card on a sensible schedule and tells the customer what’s happened, so an expired card stops costing you the subscriber.
- A self-serve portal where changing a plan, an address or a delivery frequency takes seconds.
- Custom flows built around what makes your subscription worth keeping — referrals, loyalty, milestone rewards.
We connect this to your gateway and fulfilment system through webhooks where dunning or fulfilment logic needs to reach outside Shopify.
Already have subscriptions running? Ongoing improvements and fixes to what’s in place can also be handled through a monthly support plan.
Shopify subscription developer, answered.
What does subscription development cost?
It depends on how far you want to go past the standard skip, swap and cancel options — a custom referral flow is a different job from declined-card recovery. We scope your exact requirements first, then give you a fixed, itemised quote before work starts.
Which subscription apps do you work with?
Most of them. Recharge and Bold Subscriptions come up most often, and we also work with Skio, Loop, Seal and Appstle. If you already run one, we build around it and keep what's working. If you're still choosing, we'll tell you which one suits your catalogue and billing rules — they differ more than the marketing suggests. And when the requirements outgrow every app on the list, we build the subscription logic natively on Shopify's Subscriptions API.
Can subscribers manage their own plan without contacting support?
Yes, that's standard in what we build. Skipping a delivery, swapping a product or changing frequency should take a subscriber a few seconds in their own portal.
Can you build something custom, like a referral or gifting feature?
Yes — we've built exactly that, including a gifting flow that let subscribers pass a free product to someone else directly from their account. If there's a reason your subscribers would want to share what they've got, we can build the mechanism for it.
How long does a subscription build take?
Most subscription projects run to a few weeks, with scope depending on how much custom logic you need beyond the standard toolkit. You'll have a firm timeline before any work begins.