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A 2026 buyer’s guide to Recharge and Stay.ai, with Skio named for context, for Shopify brands deciding whether to build, keep, or replace a subscription program. Pricing verified October 22, 2026.

What follows is the same walkthrough we give a brand that already has Recharge running and is quietly wondering whether to leave it, a far more common conversation than “which platform should we start with,” since most mid-market Shopify merchants in this category are already years into a program by the time they call us. It takes about eight minutes, and you will finish knowing whether your product justifies a subscription at all, what Recharge, Stay.ai and Skio actually cost as of this morning’s pricing pages, and what a migration between them really requires before you commit a quarter of engineering time to it.

What this guide covers

• Whether your catalog has a genuine consumable repurchase pattern or whether a subscription program is quietly funding its own churn.

• Recharge, Stay.ai and Skio, each assessed the same way: pricing, our read, the vendor in its own words where it has spoken to us, and who it suits, with Skio named for comparison though we hold no relationship with it.

• The four signals that tell a brand already on Recharge whether migrating is worth the disruption, versus optimizing what is already installed.

• A side-by-side table, then a recommendation sorted by where you are today rather than by feature count.

• The questions founders ask us before touching a live subscription program, including what happens to active subscribers mid-migration.

The short version. A brand with a true consumable, something that runs out on a schedule and gets reordered without much persuasion, should be running a subscription program regardless of which platform sits underneath it, since the alternative is re-earning the same purchase decision every month at full acquisition cost. Recharge remains the default for a mid-market brand already comfortable inside a tiered, usage-metered pricing structure and looking for the deepest bench of integrations and the most established migration tooling in the category, and its Shopify listing now carries a $25 entry plan for brands with their first fifty subscribers. Stay.ai is the better fit for a brand that has outgrown Recharge’s transaction-fee creep and wants every feature available on one flat-rate plan rather than gated behind a tier upgrade, and it has become the most common destination we see brands migrating to rather than away from. Skio, which we name here because founders ask about it constantly and with which we hold no relationship, occupies a similar space to Stay.ai on paper, charging a comparable flat rate plus a small per-transaction fee, though we have not run a client migration onto it and cannot speak to its retention tooling with the same confidence. None of this changes the obligation underneath the decision: a subscription program only compounds if the reorder cadence is real, otherwise the nicest platform in the category is still financing a discount nobody asked for.

The question worth asking before any of this

The volume threshold most subscription platforms price around sits near a thousand orders a month, roughly the point where a monthly subscription-management fee stops being a rounding error and starts being a line item finance asks about by name, and it should be read as directional rather than a strict cutoff. A lower-volume brand selling a high-AOV consumable, a premium supplement or a specialty food subscription, can justify a higher tier than the order count alone would suggest. The second qualifying question is whether existing churn is a platform problem or a product problem, because a program losing subscribers fast within three months is rarely solved by switching from Recharge to Stay.ai, and far more often solved by fixing the cadence itself, the price point, or the flexibility a subscriber has to skip a shipment before she cancels out of frustration. The third is whether a migration is being driven by genuine platform limitations, missing analytics, clunky churn flows, a transaction fee that has crept upward as volume scaled, or by a sales conversation that made a competitor sound better than a live trial actually proved it to be.

What independent evidence shows about subscription churn

Recharge’s own live pricing page states plainly that its Starter and Plus tiers carry per-transaction processing fees on top of the flat monthly rate, 1.49% plus nineteen cents on Starter and 1.34% plus nineteen cents on Plus, a structure that scales with revenue rather than staying fixed, and that is the exact mechanic brands cite when they describe a subscription platform’s cost quietly climbing as volume grows. Beyond the platforms’ own disclosures, the clearest independent signal on subscriber behavior comes from the Federal Trade Commission’s 2024 “click-to-cancel” rulemaking record, which documented widespread consumer complaints about subscription cancellation friction across the negative-option billing category broadly, built from public comment and enforcement history rather than any vendor’s own marketing. It is a useful reminder that how easily a customer can pause or cancel a subscription is now a regulatory question in the United States, not merely a retention tactic a brand can treat as optional, and that a cancel flow designed to save subscribers has to do so by offering something genuinely better, a skip, a swap, a slower cadence, rather than by hiding the exit.

What actually separates these platforms

The pricing structure itself signals what each platform expects you to become. Recharge’s transaction fee steps down as a brand moves from Starter to Plus, rewarding growth with a lower marginal rate, while Stay.ai and Skio both charge a flat monthly rate plus a small transaction fee that does not change with volume, a simpler model that does not reward scale the way Recharge’s ladder does but is far easier to forecast.

Migration support is where the real cost of switching lives, not in the monthly fee. Recharge markets end-to-end migration support as part of its Plus tier, Skio advertises zero-downtime migration on its Scale plan, and Stay.ai’s live pricing page now lists one-to-one migration and onboarding with its team among the Enterprise inclusions, so a brand coming to Stay.ai on Pro should ask exactly what migration help the Pro plan carries before signing. In practice the deciding factor is rarely the fee difference but whether your subscriber base, payment methods and billing history can move without a gap that triggers failed charges.

Feature gating is the quiet reason so many brands eventually leave Recharge. Recharge places hands-on implementation, customizable bundles and tiered discounts, Concierge SMS, and its loyalty rewards and referral modules behind the Plus tier rather than including them at Starter, while Stay.ai’s stated model is “No hidden fees. All features included.” on Pro, the single most common reason cited by brands who describe outgrowing Recharge’s entry tier faster than expected.

Neither platform publishes a churn benchmark, so do not let a sales conversation supply one. Every retention statistic quoted in a sales call is drawn from a platform’s own customer base rather than an independent audit, and a founder evaluating any of them should ask for a reference call in a comparable category rather than accept an aggregate number at face value.

Recharge

Monthly plan plus a per-transaction processing fee that steps down as you climb. Shopify. 4.8 stars from 3,144 reviews on the Shopify App Store.

The platform most mid-market Shopify subscription brands already have installed, with the deepest bench of integrations in the category and a pricing ladder that rewards volume with a lower marginal rate. Recharge runs a 60-day free trial on its Starter plan.

Pricing

Verified October 22, 2026 on rechargepayments.com/pricing and the Recharge Shopify App Store listing; the $25 plan appears on the Shopify listing but not on the vendor pricing page.

Our read

Recharge’s Starter tier at ninety-nine dollars a month gives a genuinely small brand a workable subscription widget, a customer portal and basic churn-prevention tooling without a five-figure annual commitment before the program has proven itself, and the new $25 plan on its Shopify listing, which waives transaction fees for a brand’s first fifty subscribers, lowers that first step further still. The tradeoff shows up the moment a brand wants the features that actually move retention, since hands-on implementation, tiered bundle discounts, Concierge SMS and the loyalty and referral modules all sit behind Plus at roughly five times the Starter price and on a twelve-month term, and that jump is the single most common trigger for a brand to start shopping the category again rather than simply upgrading in place. The processing fee deserves a close reading too, because it steps down from 1.49% on Starter to 1.34% on Plus, which rewards scale but also means the true cost of the platform is the flat monthly number plus a percentage of every subscription order processed through it, and Recharge’s own FAQ is clear that those fees are separate from any underlying ecommerce platform fees.

Who it suits

Brands launching a first subscription program that want the most established tooling and a free trial to prove the cadence, brands already on Recharge whose program is stable and well optimized, and larger brands that value a deep integration bench and a transaction rate that keeps falling as volume climbs.

Stay.ai

One flat monthly plan with every feature, plus a per-transaction fee. Shopify.

The subscription platform built around a single all-inclusive tier, and the destination we see most often for brands leaving Recharge rather than arriving at it.

Pricing

Verified October 22, 2026 on stay.ai/pricing and confirmed by Stay AI. Brands referred by an agency partner pay a $299 monthly platform fee on Pro, per Stay AI.

Our read

Stay.ai’s pitch is structural rather than feature-based, since instead of gating retention tooling behind a higher tier every brand on Pro gets the same set, from AI-driven cancellation flows to advanced A/B testing to branded digital punch cards, at a single published price with a transaction fee meaningfully lower than Recharge’s comparable rate. Stay describes its differentiation as the way those retention tools work together, cancel flows, segmented subscriber experiences, testing, smart dunning and a customizable portal that does product discovery and upsells alongside order management, and that matches what we see when a brand that outgrew Starter and balked at Plus finds a single flat tier easier to budget against than a ladder that keeps moving. Two details change the arithmetic. The first is that a brand referred by an agency partner pays $299 a month rather than $499, which puts Pro within reach of brands that would otherwise sit on Recharge Starter. The second is that the live pricing page now lists one-to-one migration and onboarding as an Enterprise inclusion, so a brand moving over on Pro should confirm in writing what migration support comes with it, because the actual cost of switching platforms almost always lives in subscriber and billing-history migration rather than in the monthly fee itself.

In their words

By Stay AI’s own account it is built for Shopify brands that want to actively grow and optimize their subscription programs, and it is a strong fit for teams that want to test what drives repeat purchases and subscriber value without relying on developers for every change.

“A subscription platform should help brands earn the next order. We give teams the tools to make the subscriber experience more relevant, test what works, and turn those learnings into long-term growth.” Linslee Peel, Agency Partnerships, Stay AI

On working with Atelier, Linslee Peel of Stay AI added: “I’ve had the pleasure of working with Michael and the Atelier team for several years, and I’ve always admired their beautiful work and the care and attention to detail they bring to each client. Shared clients have consistently had wonderful things to say about working with them. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Atelier to a brand looking for a thoughtfully designed, bespoke website experience.”

Linslee Peel

Agency Partnerships, Stay AI

Who it suits

Shopify brands that intend to actively grow a subscription program rather than simply run one, teams that want to test cancel flows, portal offers and subscriber segments without waiting on a developer, and brands on Recharge Starter that want Plus-level retention tooling without the twelve-month ladder. It is a weaker fit for a brand still proving whether its product earns a subscription at all, where a $99 or $25 entry point with a free trial is the more sensible first step, and for brands that are not on Shopify.

Skio

One flat monthly plan plus a per-transaction fee on orders involving a subscription. Shopify. 5.0 stars from 244 reviews on the Shopify App Store. No relationship with Atelier.

A Shopify-only subscription platform priced close to Stay.ai’s structure rather than Recharge’s tiered one, named here because founders researching the category ask about it constantly and deserve an honest answer rather than a silent omission.

Pricing

Verified October 22, 2026 on skio.com/pricing and the Skio Shopify App Store listing.

Our read

On paper Skio and Stay.ai are close cousins, a flat monthly rate, a transaction fee of about one percent plus twenty cents, and a feature set that does not hide its retention tooling behind a second tier, with Skio’s annual discount bringing it level with Stay’s published Pro price and its month-to-month rate sitting a hundred dollars above it. Skio is candid that it does not offer a free trial and that it focuses on brands with a “pay money to make money” mentality, which tells a founder plainly who it is courting. We say just as plainly that Atelier holds no partner relationship with Skio, has not run a client migration onto it, and cannot speak from direct implementation experience the way we can for Recharge and Stay.ai, so treat this section as a fair description of what Skio publishes rather than a recommendation.

Who it suits

Shopify brands past product-market fit that want a flat-rate platform, are comfortable committing without a free trial, and are willing to run their own reference calls in a comparable category before signing.

Side by side

All figures verified live October 22, 2026 from rechargepayments.com/pricing, stay.ai/pricing, skio.com/pricing and the Shopify App Store. We refresh pricing in this guide every quarter.

The recommendation, by where you are today

A brand just launching its first subscription program, with a genuinely consumable product and modest order volume, should start on Recharge, either on the $25 plan its Shopify listing offers for the first fifty subscribers or on Starter at ninety-nine dollars a month, since either buys a real widget, a real customer portal and real churn-prevention tooling before the program has a single proven cohort behind it. A brand already on Recharge Starter bumping into its feature ceiling, wanting bundle discounts or hands-on support without the jump to Plus pricing and a twelve-month term, should treat Stay.ai as the honest comparison point, since its flat rate and lower transaction fee frequently land close to or below what Plus would cost at the same volume, and at the $299 agency-referred rate the comparison tilts further. A brand already on Recharge Plus and paying for concierge support it barely uses should run the arithmetic before assuming migration is worth the disruption, since a stable, well-optimized program is rarely improved by a platform swap alone, and any churn problem is more often a cadence or pricing issue than a software one. A brand evaluating Skio alongside Stay.ai should treat both as structurally similar and choose based on a live demo and direct reference calls, since neither this article nor most public sources can responsibly rank one above the other without an implementation to point to.

Questions we get asked

Should every Shopify brand have a subscription program?

No, and the honest test is whether your product is genuinely consumed on a repeat schedule; a true consumable justifies a subscription, while a considered, durable purchase forced into a subscription model usually just churns quickly and erodes margin instead of building loyalty.

What does it actually cost to migrate from Recharge to Stay.ai?

The direct software cost is the new platform’s monthly fee, $499 on Pro or $299 when an agency partner refers the brand, but the real cost is the operational work of moving active subscribers, payment methods and billing history without a gap that causes a failed charge, so ask Stay.ai exactly what migration help your plan includes, since its pricing page lists one-to-one migration and onboarding on Enterprise.

Why do subscription programs churn so heavily in the first three months?

Most early churn traces back to a mismatch between the reorder cadence offered at signup and the customer’s actual consumption pace, so a subscriber who runs out of product two weeks before her next scheduled shipment, or who has a cupboard full of it, cancels out of frustration rather than out of dissatisfaction with the platform itself.

Is a lower transaction fee always the better deal?

Not necessarily, since a lower fee on a platform missing the retention features that reduce churn can cost far more in lost subscribers than it saves in processing costs, so weigh the fee against the full feature set and the monthly platform charge rather than comparing it in isolation.

Can a brand run Recharge and a loyalty program on the same customer record?

Yes, and pairing subscription cadence with a loyalty mechanic tends to reward the right behavior, staying subscribed rather than only spending more, provided the two systems share data rather than operating as separate silos a service team has to reconcile manually; Recharge now sells its own loyalty rewards and referral modules on Plus.

What happens to active subscribers during a platform migration?

A properly run migration preserves each subscriber’s next billing date, payment method and product selection so no customer notices the change, and any platform quoting a migration timeline should be asked directly how it prevents a duplicate or missed charge during the cutover window.

Does order volume alone determine which tier a brand should buy?

Not entirely; a lower-volume brand selling a high-AOV consumable, a premium supplement or specialty food program, can often justify a higher tier than order count alone would suggest, since every platform here charges a percentage of subscription revenue on top of the monthly fee rather than pricing on raw order count.

Where to go next

If your team is trying to work out whether your churn problem is a platform problem or a product problem before spending a quarter migrating anything, that is the diagnostic we run as part of retention and loyalty strategy, often alongside the lifecycle messaging that actually reminds a subscriber her box is coming before she thinks to cancel it. We have built exactly this kind of compounding program for Bully Sticks Direct, a genuinely consumable category where reorder cadence does the heavy lifting, and for KeraFactor, where recurring revenue had to be layered onto an already complex channel mix. If a migration between platforms is on the table, our replatforming team has run this exact cutover before, and we can connect the resulting subscriber data into Klaviyo rather than leaving it stranded in a dashboard nobody checks. Reach out through our contact page and we will walk through your actual subscriber file rather than a hypothetical one.