Should You Add Subscriptions? (Recharge vs Bold vs Ordergroove)

Last year a coffee brand I was helping flipped on subscriptions, watched 600 people sign up in a month, and threw a little party. Ninety days later, more than a third of those people were gone. Nobody threw a party for that. That's the part nobody puts on the landing page. Subscriptions look like free recurring revenue until you actually run the numbers and realize you've signed up for a churn-management job you didn't apply for. So before you install anything, let's talk about whether you should, and then which tool actually fits. I'm not a subscriptions evangelist. I've helped a handful of DTC brands turn recurring revenue on, and I've watched two of them turn it back off because the math didn't work for what they sell. I'll be honest about that here, because the apps sure won't be.

The part where the math bites

Here's the uncomfortable thing about recurring revenue: it leaks. Recurly's 2025 study of more than 2,200 merchants and 67 million subscribers put the average monthly churn for subscription ecommerce at about 3.4% once you count both people who cancel and people whose cards just fail. For consumer goods and retail it's 4.1% a month. That second number matters, because failed-payment churn (they call it involuntary) is roughly 0.8 to 0.9% of it, and that's churn you can claw back with good dunning instead of better marketing.[1] Now split by what you're selling, because the spread is enormous. Replenishment stuff that people genuinely run out of (supplements, coffee, pet food, razor blades) tends to land somewhere in the 4 to 7% monthly range. Discovery boxes, the surprise-me-every-month kind, can bleed 10 to 15% a month. Those are estimates pulled from category benchmarks, not a single audited source, so treat them as directional. But the shape is real: if people don't run out of your product on a predictable cadence, a subscription is a discount you're handing out to people who'd have rebought anyway.

Source: Recurly, Customer Churn Benchmarks (2025) for the first two bars; replenishment and discovery-box figures are category benchmark ranges, labeled estimates. https://recurly.com/research/churn-rate-benchmarks/ So rule of thumb before you pick a tool: a 4% monthly churn means your average subscriber sticks around about 25 months. At 8% it's roughly 12 months. At 12% it's barely 8. Multiply that lifespan by your per-order margin and you'll know in five minutes whether subscriptions are a growth engine or a leaky bucket for your catalog. Do that before you read another word about apps.

Photo: Unsplash (Tyler Nix). Replenishment categories like coffee are where subscription math works best. https://unsplash.com/

The three tools, honestly

Assuming the math works, here's the actual decision. I'll compare the three names people keep asking me about: Recharge, Bold Subscriptions, and Ordergroove. They sit at genuinely different stages, so this is less a fight and more a sorting exercise.

Sources for that table: Recharge pricing, Recharge billing docs, Bold Subscriptions pricing, and Ordergroove pricing FAQ. Pricing shifts, so confirm at signup.

How I'd actually choose

If you're brand new and genuinely don't know whether subscriptions fit your products, start on Bold. The free-until-you-have-revenue tier means you can run a real test for the price of nothing, and the ~2% transaction fee on small volume is noise. The catch: that percentage fee starts to sting as you scale, which is exactly when you'd want to leave. Once you're past validation and serious on Shopify, Recharge is the default for a reason. It's the most mature subscription stack in the ecosystem, the retention and dunning tooling is genuinely good (remember, that's where you recover the 0.8% involuntary churn), and the app integrations save you from rebuilding things. The honest downside is the $99/mo floor plus 1.49% plus per-transaction fees, which is real money, and Plus and Custom lock you into 12-month annual contracts. Read the billing terms before you sign. Ordergroove is a different animal. No per-transaction fee is a legitimately big deal at scale, and the multi-platform support matters if you're not a pure Shopify shop. But it's custom-quoted, enterprise-priced, and needs developer time to do well. If you're asking "should I add subscriptions," you're almost certainly not ready for Ordergroove yet, and that's fine. Whatever you pick, the tool is the easy 20%. The hard 80% is the retention work: smart card-failure dunning, easy skip-and-swap instead of hard cancels, and a cadence that matches how fast people actually use the thing. If you want one stack that ties subscriptions to the rest of the store, that's the bet Sellarix is making, though plenty of brands run Recharge or Bold standalone and do just fine.

The takeaway

Subscriptions aren't free money. They're a margin bet on whether your product gets used on a predictable cadence and whether you'll do the unglamorous retention work. Run the churn-to-lifespan math first, match the tool to your stage second (Bold to test, Recharge to scale on Shopify, Ordergroove for enterprise), and treat dunning as a feature, not an afterthought. So here's my question back to you: if a third of your new subscribers vanished in 90 days, would your unit economics still smile? Answer that before you install anything.

Sources

• Recurly, Customer Churn Benchmarks (2025 analysis, 2,200+ merchants / 67M subscribers): https://recurly.com/research/churn-rate-benchmarks/
• Recharge, Pricing: https://getrecharge.com/pricing/
• Recharge, Billing and pricing (support docs): https://support.getrecharge.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008682914-Recharge-billing-and-pricing
• Bold Commerce, Subscriptions pricing: https://boldcommerce.com/shopify/subscriptions-pricing
• Bold Commerce, How am I billed for Bold Subscriptions: https://support.boldcommerce.com/hc/en-us/articles/35531808114580-How-am-I-billed-for-Bold-Subscriptions
• Ordergroove, Pricing and Incentive FAQ: https://help.ordergroove.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041870653-Pricing-and-Incentive-FAQ