The math behind our new transaction-fee structure

Pricing a SaaS product that sits on top of a marketplace is genuinely hard. You're not just pricing your own value — you're pricing your value minus the friction your presence creates. Get it wrong and merchants feel taxed for success.

The old structure and why it broke down

Our original pricing was a flat 2% transaction fee on all plans. It was simple to explain and simple to bill. But as merchants scaled past $20,000 MRR, the math got uncomfortable. A merchant doing $50,000/month in digital subscriptions was paying us $1,000/month in fees alone — before their plan cost.

We were hearing two things from these merchants: either they were building spreadsheets to figure out at what point they should switch to a flat-fee Shopify Plus plan and build their own digital delivery, or they were churning to competitor platforms with capped fee structures.

The new tiered structure

The new structure decouples platform access from transaction fees, and degresses the transaction fee as volume grows:

• Pay As You Go: free, 2.95% + $0.25 transaction fee — no monthly commitment
• Starter plan: $29/month, 1.95% + $0.15 transaction fee
• Scale plan: $49/month, 0.95% + $0.10 transaction fee
• Plus plan: $99/month, 0.50% transaction fee

Why 0.5% and not zero

A few competitors have moved to zero transaction fees, funded entirely by the monthly plan price. We considered this and decided against it for one reason: alignment.

When we have a small transaction fee stake in your revenue, we have a direct incentive to make your store convert better, reduce your churn, and help you grow your catalog. The fee is our skin in the game. When it's pure SaaS, that incentive disappears.

The crossover math: Starter ($29/month, 1.95%) versus Scale ($49/month, 0.95%) has a $20/month cost delta and a 1.0 percentage-point fee reduction. Break-even is at $2,000 MRR — above that, Scale saves money. Scale versus Plus ($99/month, 0.50%) has a $50/month delta and a 0.45 percentage-point reduction. Break-even is at roughly $11,111 MRR.

“A 0.5% fee on a $50,000 MRR store is $250. That's less than most merchants spend on a single Shopify app. But it means we're still thinking about your conversion rate, not just your renewal date.”

Migration for existing merchants

If you're an existing merchant, you were automatically migrated to the new plan that most closely matches your current usage. If the new plan has a higher monthly fee but a lower effective transaction rate than what you were paying, we'll credit the difference for the first 60 days so you can verify the math before committing.