Curobi, answered
Straight answers about the 0% transaction-fee Shopify subscription app — pricing, what you can sell, migrating from another tool, how billing works, and how we handle your data. Can’t find it? Emailsupport@curobi.com.
Pricing & transaction fees
Is there a Shopify subscription app with 0% transaction fees?
Yes — Curobi. Recharge charges 1.25% + $0.19 per transaction on top of a monthly plan that starts at $99/month for new merchants, and Loop starts around $99/month + 1%. Curobi charges 0% transaction fees on every plan, always, because recurring charges run on Shopify's own Subscription Contract billing rails — Curobi is never in the payment flow, so there is no fee to recover. You start free for up to 50 active subscriptions, and paid plans are a flat $9.99 to $69.99 every 30 days, regardless of how much subscription revenue you process.
How much does Curobi cost?
Curobi has five plans, each billed every 30 days through Shopify and each including everything below it. Free ($0) covers up to 50 active subscriptions with Subscribe & Save plans, the product-page widget, a self-service portal, a dashboard, and branded emails. Starter ($9.99, up to 250) adds portal editing, automatic failed-payment retries, and cancellation save offers. Growth ($19.99, unlimited) adds the recovery dashboard, churn and cohort analytics, and revenue forecasts. Business ($29.99) adds Mix & Match bundles, gift subscriptions, win-back emails, the Subscription Risk Center, and CSV migration. Pro ($69.99) adds curated boxes, Build-a-Box, one-time box sales, fixed-calendar billing schedules, and the API. Every plan charges 0% Curobi transaction fees, so your bill never rises with your subscription revenue.
Recharge raised its prices and acquired Skio — what's a cheaper alternative in 2026?
Recharge's net-new Starter plan is now $99/month plus 1.25% + $0.19 on every transaction, its Pro plan is $499/month, and in April 2026 Recharge acquired Skio — the kind of consolidation and price increase that has merchants re-evaluating their subscription tool. Curobi is a flat-rate alternative: free for up to 50 active subscriptions, then $9.99 to $69.99 every 30 days with 0% transaction fees, so a percentage of each recurring charge never leaves your account no matter how much you grow. Migration from Recharge is built into the Business and Pro plans via CSV import, at no extra cost, and does not interrupt active subscriptions.
Appstle has a free plan — why choose Curobi?
You may not have to — Curobi has a free plan too, for up to 50 active subscriptions, with 0% transaction fees. Appstle's free tier is a real option and it's popular for good reason. Where Curobi stands apart is what you get as you grow: failed-payment retries and portal editing from $9.99, unlimited subscriptions with recovery and churn analytics from $19.99, and curated and Build-a-Box programs on Pro at $69.99 — each a flat price every 30 days with 0% transaction fees at any volume, on Shopify's own native billing rails.
Which Curobi plan do I need for subscription boxes?
Pro, at $69.99 every 30 days. Curated monthly boxes, Build-a-Box, and one-time box sales are all on Pro. You can try Curated Boxes during the one-time 14-day trial on the Free plan; when the trial ends, box programs pause — subscribers keep renewing with their current items, but new months aren't added — until you move to Pro. Business includes Mix & Match bundles, gifting, and win-back, but not boxes.
Which Curobi plan do I need to charge every subscriber on the same date?
Pro, at $69.99 every 30 days. Fixed-calendar and seasonal schedules — every subscriber charged on, say, the 1st of the month, or the 15th of February, May, August, and November for a quarterly box — are a Pro feature, and they aren't part of the one-time 14-day trial on Free. Every plan, including Free, can bill each customer from their own signup date, which Curobi calls a Rolling schedule. If you move below Pro, a plan already on a fixed calendar keeps charging on its dates, but you can't change the calendar until you're back on Pro.
Is there a free trial?
Yes, on the Free plan. You can start a one-time 14-day trial from Plan & billing in Curobi. It unlocks Starter's portal editing, payment retries, and save offers, plus cohort analytics, Churn Insights, and Curated Boxes — not every paid feature, and not fixed-calendar schedules. You're never charged when it ends; you stay on Free unless you choose a paid plan. Paid plans don't have a separate trial.
What happens if I reach my plan's subscription limit?
Nothing changes for your existing subscribers. Free covers 50 active subscriptions and Starter 250; only active subscriptions created through Curobi count, and orders and revenue are never limited. At the limit, existing subscriptions keep renewing and one-time purchases carry on — only new subscription checkouts pause until you upgrade or your active count drops. Growth and above have no limit.
What you can sell
What can I sell with Curobi?
Recurring product subscriptions, prepaid subscription terms, build-your-own boxes, merchant-curated subscription boxes, product bundles, and memberships. Plans apply to individual products, specific variants, or entire collections.
Is there a Shopify subscription app built for coffee roasters?
Yes — coffee is Curobi's core use case. Coffee-of-the-month plans, pick-your-roast and Build-a-Box bags, and merchant-curated sampler boxes that rotate monthly are native features on the Pro plan, not workarounds, with a cutoff that locks each box before billing runs. Paired with 0% Curobi transaction fees on every plan and CSV migration from Recharge, Appstle, Loop, Bold, or Seal (included on Business and Pro), it is built for roasters switching off tools that take a cut of every recurring charge.
What is a build-your-own subscription box?
A build-your-own box lets a customer assemble their own recurring box from a set of eligible products — for example, choosing which coffee bags go in this month's shipment. Curobi enforces per-item limits and a billing cutoff, so the box is locked in before the recurring charge is created. Merchants can also ship a curated box they assemble themselves that rotates on a schedule.
Can I plan subscription boxes months ahead in Curobi?
Yes. The box editor covers this month and the next three, so you can build up to four months of curated boxes in one sitting. Each month is its own box with its own products and quantities, and Curobi applies the right month's contents to every subscriber's renewal before it bills, so the box ships itself when its month arrives. If you skip curating a month, subscribers keep receiving your latest published box rather than an empty order, and a future month is never filled with an old box. Build-a-Box works the same way when you choose a rotating monthly menu, or you can keep one stable menu that never expires; subscribers still pick their own items for their next box before the cutoff. Mix & Match bundles draw from a live catalog of categories you define, so there is nothing to plan month by month.
Can I sell one-time products and subscriptions from the same product page?
Yes. Curobi adds native purchase options to the Shopify product page, so a shopper can buy a product once or subscribe to it from the same page. Bundles can also be sold one-time or on subscription.
Setup & migration
Do I need a subscription app if Shopify already has free native subscriptions?
Shopify's free native Subscriptions app is a fine place to start if you sell one or two products on a simple recurring schedule. Most stores outgrow it: there are no build-your-own or merchant-curated boxes, Shopify documents that bundles aren't compatible with it, its customer portal stops at skip, pause, resume, cancel and payment or address edits, and while it does run configurable failed-payment retries there is no recovery workflow around them and no cancellation save flows. Curobi runs on the same native Shopify Subscription Contracts — so you keep Shopify's checkout and billing — but adds the boxes, bundles, self-service portal, and churn recovery that growing stores need, without adding a per-transaction fee on top.
Can I migrate from Recharge, Appstle, Loop, Bold, or Seal?
Yes. Curobi provides CSV-based migration tooling to bring existing subscribers in from Recharge, Appstle, Loop, Bold, or Seal without interrupting active subscriptions. Migration tools are included on the Business and Pro plans at no extra cost.
How long does it take to set up Curobi?
Most stores can install Curobi, create their first subscription plan, and add the subscription widget to a product page in well under an hour. Curobi has a free plan for up to 50 active subscriptions, so you can build and launch your plans before choosing a paid tier.
Do I need to change my theme or checkout?
No. Curobi runs on Shopify's native checkout and Subscription Contracts, and its purchase-option widget renders inside your existing theme. There is no separate checkout, redirect, or third-party billing page for customers to pass through.
Does Curobi work with my theme and my other apps?
Yes. Curobi's purchase-option widget renders inside your existing Shopify theme via app blocks and app embeds — no theme swap and no separate checkout. Because subscriptions run on Shopify's native Subscription Contracts, the tools already in your stack — reviews, loyalty, email and SMS, analytics, and upsell or bundling apps — see subscription orders exactly the way they see any other Shopify order, with no proprietary billing layer to integrate around. Headless and heavily customized themes are supported through the same Shopify app-block placement.
Billing, checkout & how it works
Does Curobi use Shopify's native checkout?
Yes. Curobi runs on Shopify Subscription Contracts and Shopify's native checkout. Subscriptions are created at Shopify's checkout and mirrored into Curobi for management — there is no third-party billing processor or redirect, and Curobi never touches or stores card data.
Who processes the recurring payments?
Shopify does. Recurring charges are created and settled by Shopify's own Subscription Contract billing, using the payment method the customer vaulted at checkout. Because Curobi is never in the payment flow, it cannot double-charge, and there is no transaction fee for it to add.
What makes Curobi different from Recharge, Appstle, or Loop?
Curobi is not another subscribe button. It was built around problems Shopify merchants have lived with for years: rebuilding next month's box on the 28th (in Curobi you curate this month and the next three in one sitting, and the right month ships itself), subscribers who cancel because they could not skip or pause (a self-service portal on every plan, with save offers from Starter), failed cards that quietly cancel customers (automatic retries, update-card emails and auto-pause from Starter), and box formats gated behind $299–$499/month plans plus a percentage of every order (curated, Build-a-Box and one-time boxes on the $69.99 Pro plan, with 0% Curobi transaction fees on every plan). Underneath sits a billing core built around idempotent, no-double-charge processing on Shopify's native checkout. If you need SMS flows, A/B testing, or enterprise-scale tooling, Curobi is not there yet; if you want a real subscription program without a transaction-fee tax, it is.
Can Curobi bill every subscriber on the same day?
Yes, on the Pro plan, with a fixed-calendar schedule. By default every Curobi plan bills on a Rolling schedule: each customer's clock starts the day they sign up, so someone who subscribes on the 8th is charged on the 8th of every month. A fixed calendar charges every subscriber on the same day of the month (1st to 28th) no matter when they joined, optionally only in the months you tick for a quarterly or seasonal box, with an order cutoff so late orders roll into the next batch, an optional ship day, and a choice of whether a new subscriber's first box ships right away or waits for the next charge day. It exists for boxes that ship to everyone at once — buy stock once, pack once, ship in one batch — and it uses Shopify's own selling-plan anchor dates, so Shopify still runs the billing. Skip moves a subscriber to the next charge date on the calendar, a reschedule moves forward to the next charge date, and the product-page widget shows shoppers an 'Order by … · ships …' line. Fixed calendars work on monthly plans; weekly and yearly plans stay Rolling.
Will my subscription products work with AI shopping agents and agentic checkout?
Curobi keeps your products, prices, and purchase options on Shopify's native product and checkout layer rather than behind a third-party subscription widget or redirect — the same surface Shopify exposes to its own agentic-commerce and AI shopping features. So as Shopify's agentic checkout and AI shopping agents roll out through 2026, a store on Curobi keeps its subscriptions on native rails those agents can read, instead of a proprietary billing flow they may not see. It is the same reason Curobi never touches card data: staying out of the payment and checkout path keeps you compatible with whatever Shopify ships next.
What subscription analytics and reporting does Curobi provide?
Curobi surfaces the core metrics a recurring business runs on — active subscribers, recurring revenue, upcoming and processed charges, failed-payment recovery, and cancellations — so you can see churn and revenue at a glance. And because every charge settles through Shopify, your subscription orders also flow into Shopify's own analytics and any reporting or analytics app you already use, instead of being locked inside a separate billing dashboard.
Customer experience & churn
How do I reduce coffee subscription churn?
Across subscription commerce the biggest churn drivers are price, product piling up between deliveries, wanting more variety, and failed payments that silently cancel customers who never meant to leave. Curobi is built to counter each one: a self-service portal on every plan to skip or pause a delivery so product never piles up (with rescheduling from Starter), cancellation save flows that offer a pause instead of a cancel and automatic dunning that retries failed charges and prompts customers to update their card (both from Starter), and Build-a-Box and rotating curated boxes on Pro to keep variety fresh. Letting a customer skip or reschedule instead of cancel is the single most effective lever a subscription program has.
Can subscribers skip a delivery or change their frequency?
Yes. Every Curobi plan includes a 24/7 self-service portal where subscribers can skip an upcoming delivery, pause, or cancel; from the Starter plan they can also change quantities, swap products, and reschedule their next order. Offering a skip or reschedule is the most effective single feature for reducing subscription churn, because most people who cancel are simply over-supplied for the moment, not gone for good.
How does Curobi reduce churn?
A self-service customer portal lets subscribers pause, skip, and cancel on every plan, with quantity changes, product swaps, and rescheduling from Starter. From the Starter plan, cancellation save flows offer a pause or skip at the moment of cancellation, and failed-payment retries plus update-your-card emails reclaim charges that would otherwise lapse; Growth adds a recovery dashboard and churn insights to show what's working.
Can customers manage their own subscriptions?
Yes. Every plan includes a 24/7 self-service customer portal where subscribers can pause, skip a delivery, cancel, change their address, and update their card. From the Starter plan they can also change quantities, swap products, and reschedule without contacting support.
What happens when a subscription payment fails?
From the Starter plan, Curobi runs automatic dunning: it retries the failed charge three times over 7 days (on days 2, 4, and 7) and emails the customer to update their payment method, and if every retry fails it pauses the subscription instead of cancelling it. This recovers revenue from declines that would otherwise silently churn the subscriber. Growth adds a payment recovery dashboard showing revenue at risk and recovered.
Does using Shop Pay reduce subscription churn?
It helps. Failed payments are one of the quietest causes of churn — customers who never chose to leave are cancelled by an expired or declined card — and across the industry, merchants who promote Shop Pay as the payment option tend to see roughly 14–19% fewer payment-failure cancellations than those who do not, because Shop Pay keeps card details current across its network. Curobi backs that up on its own side with automatic dunning from the Starter plan: it retries declined charges on days 2, 4, and 7 and emails customers to update their card, so a recoverable payment failure does not silently end the subscription.
Security & data
Does Curobi store customer payment or card data?
No. Because recurring charges run on Shopify's native billing rails, Curobi never handles, sees, or stores customer payment-card data. It persists only Shopify identifiers (GIDs) and subscription status — no raw customer personally identifiable information is stored at rest.
Is Curobi GDPR and CCPA compliant?
Yes. Curobi acts as a data processor on the merchant's behalf, honors Shopify's mandatory data-request, customer-redaction, and shop-redaction webhooks, and encrypts data in transit and at rest. Full detail is in the Curobi privacy policy at curobi.com/privacy.
Company
Who makes Curobi?
Curobi is a Shopify subscription app built and operated by Vibhora, founded in 2025. Curobi is an independent product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Shopify Inc.
How do I get support?
You can reach the Curobi team at support@curobi.com for support, or hello@curobi.com for general and sales questions. Product documentation lives at docs.curobi.com.