Shopify subscription apps: Seal Subscriptions vs. Recharge Subscriptions

Have you ever wondered that your Shopify store is in need of a subscription feature, but you were never sure which app to pick? In the Shopify app store, there are dozens of subscription apps for you to choose from. With so many options out there, which app is the right one for you? In this blog post, we will be comparing the two most popular subscription apps, Seal Subscriptions and Recharge Subscriptions.

A Subscription function has always been needed for many stores. Whether you are selling coffee-related products, dog treats, or skincare products, subscriptions can always help your store grow and increase revenue. It is without a doubt we can say that the subscription-selling model is growing rapidly.

What is the main difference between Seal Subscriptions and Recharge Subscriptions?

First, let's look at the whole image and see the main difference between both apps.

Seal Subscriptions

Seal Subscriptions is a popular app that has recently seen rapid growth. Its biggest advantage is that it offers a completely free plan with 0% transaction fees. The most popular option is auto-charging subscriptions, but merchants can also decide to make recurring invoices. It also offers integration with other Shopify apps (such as Bundler), dashboard analytics, and a great support team, all of which come with a free plan.in-depth

Recharge Subscriptions

Recharge is another high-demanding app that has seen success over time. It offers a high variety of customization options and has a high level of flexibility. Just like Seal Subscriptions, it offers a wide variety of integrations with many different apps, such as Klaviyo, Gorgias and more. Merchants using Recharge can easily sync customer data across multiple stores. Besides subscriptions, Recharge also offers bundles and flows.

So the biggest main difference between Seal Subscriptions and Recharge Subscriptions are by far the fees that come with each transaction. Here is also the visual representation, to see how much does Recharge charge per transaction. The in-depth cost comparison can be seen on this page below.

Seal Subscriptions

Pricing model

The biggest advantage of Seal is most definitely its pricing model. It offers a completely free plan with no transaction fees. The free plan offers up to 150 total subscriptions, subscription editing, regular and prepaid plans, customer portal settings, app integrations, automated product swaps, and more.

The paid plans are affordable but offer much more than what they are worth. The $4.95 model gives you access to APIs and webhooks; the  7.95$ model provides you with cancellation flow and delivery profile options; and higher paid plans offer you more options such as fixed schedules, the option to skip subscriptions with out-of-stock items, a custom email domain, and more. 

Of course, each subscription plan also gives you a higher number of maximum subscriptions.

Features

Auto-charging subscriptions

Seal offers a wide variety of features that you might be looking for in a subscription app. The most popular feature is making auto-charging subscriptions, which allows your customers to purchase an auto-charging subscription that'll automatically renew after a certain period you've set up. Furthermore, the app also allows you to make recurring invoices for your customers, which won't automatically renew, but we'll send the customer an email. It also offers a payment calendar, which gives you a full overview of upcoming payments, skipped payments, failed payments, and more.

Customization

Popular features also include the availability of customization for subscription widgets. Not only can you change the colors of the widget with some simple clicks, but the app also comes with a custom CSS window, so with some knowledge of CSS, you can easily customize the widget and design it completely to your liking.

Customer Portal

Another demanding feature is also a very clear and easy-to-use customer portal. In the customer portal, your customers get a clear overview of all their subscriptions and can edit, cancel, pause, or reactivate their subscriptions. You can enable all sorts of features, such as allowing customers to skip an upcoming payment, stacking discount codes, and showing or hiding specific buttons in the customer portal.

Product Swaps

One of the interesting features that Seal Subscription has that you might find very useful are product swaps. 

A product swap gives you benefits such as: 

• Option to automatically swap specific products in subscriptions, 
• add a gift item to subscriptions or remove a gift item after a specific payment,
• keep the customers connected with the store and products by offering them options for different products within the same subscription.

Integrations

You can easily integrate Seal Subscriptions with other third-party apps, such as Bundler, which allows you to combine certain products into bundles. The integration allows you to sell your bundles with subscriptions and even apply bundle discounts with active subscriptions. Of course, Seal Subscriptions also works with popular page builders such as PageFly and GemPages.

Recharge Subscriptions

Pricing model

While Recharge also has affordable pricing plans, they don't offer a free plan, unlike Seal. A 30-day free trial is available, though, which should be enough time to give you an overall idea and look of the app. Recharge's pricing model is a bit different from the one Seal uses. It has two basic plans: ‘Standard’ and ‘Pro’. The standard plan costs $100 and offers everything you need for subscriptions, such as essential subscription management tools, analytics dashboards, and many integrations. It also does have volume-based transaction fees, and they will charge you 1.25% + 19 cents per transaction.

Features

Recharge also has quite a lot of features that you might find handy in any subscription app. The popular features include direct checkout links, a discount code dashboard (which can provide you with insights into how your discount codes are performing), the availability of using and managing discount codes that can be used in a variety of scenarios, from one-time purchases to subscription products.

Another quite new feature is the option of gifts. You can allow your customers to gift their skipped shipment as a one-time order to others. This could potentially mean that you can turn gift recipients into potential subscribers and reduce the revenue loss. Speaking of gifts, there is also a feature for gifting subscriptions, where customers can gift subscriptions to their loved ones.

A very demanding and popular feature of Recharge is the option to combine subscriptions with bundles. While Seal also does offer that, they have a separate app for that, but in the Recharge example, they offer you full-functionality bundles of bundles if you just buy their pro plan. This way, you can boost your subscription metrics with flexible bundle options.

A very spoken feature that Recharge keeps recommending is their option to decrease subscriber churn. You can provide customers with a list of customized cancellation options. This way you can learn more about your customers and why your customers want to cancel. You also have an option to see and compare retention and sales across customer cohorts and within individual cohort. This way you can identify and further investigate the reasons to prevent any future churn that might occur.

Of course, a lot of Recharge's features are the same as Seal Subscriptions such as access to customer portal and it's options, subscription management, swapping products and customer support.

Keep in mind, that some features listed above are locked in to Recharge's pro plan.

Integrations

Recharge comes with a big directory of apps that can be integrated with it. On their website you can see all sorts of categories for apps that can integrate with Recharge. Most popular include Gorgias, Stripe, Klaviyo and Avalara.

Cost comparison

In this section we will compare Seal Subscription's selling plan LEGEND that costs $20 with Recharge's subscription plan STANDARD that costs $99.

Let's say you are a merchant with a traffic of exactly $20,000 ($10 per order) per month:

Recharge transaction fee is 1.25% + 19 cents

Recharge transaction fees calculation:

• Percentage fee of 1.25% on each transaction
  • 1.25% of $20000 = $250
• Fixed fee of 19 cents on each transaction
  • 2000 transactions x $0.19 = $380
• Total transaction fees: $250 + $380 = $630
• Recharge plan cost: $99
• Total monthly cost with recharge: Transaction Fees + Plan Cost = $630 + $99 = $729

For Seal Subscriptions, you are just paying for the plan, in this example $20 per month.

This means that you are saving around 3600% more money with Seal Subscriptions.

Making the right choice

Both Seal Subscriptions and Recharge are great options for someone who wants to start the subscription business in their store. Which one you will pick completely depends on your needs and the flexibility of your store. If you change your mind, both apps also have an easy option to import all of your subscriptions from one app to another.

If you are looking for affordable app with basically all features that you need for subscriptions, I recommend Seal Subscriptions. The no transaction fee on subscriptions is a big plus and some people can't even imagine the amount of money this saves them.

However, if you like the Recharge's pricing model, then they might be the one for you. While they are more expensive, they offer a bunch of features you might find useful in a subscription app. If you like spending money, definitely check them out.

This way your store will have the option to offer your products via subscriptions and you will see the results of better customer experience and higher revenue.

Happy subscription management! 🛒