Shopify app costs: how to audit your apps and cut the bill

Picture a store with fourteen apps installed. The owner uses three.

It's a common problem in stores that have been running for a few years. Each app made sense on the day it went in: a review widget, a popup, a size chart, a currency switcher, a countdown timer for one sale two years ago. Nobody ever took them out. Now there's a monthly bill nobody looks at closely, and a store that loads more scripts than it needs.

The good news is that cutting it is straightforward. Audit every app against one question, replace the ones your theme or Shopify already covers, and clean up properly when you uninstall. Here's how, step by step.

First, find out what you're actually paying

Before you judge any app, get the real numbers. App charges come through your Shopify bill, so they're easy to miss.

1. In the Shopify admin, go to Settings → Billing. Your bills are here, and each one has an apps section listing the app charges on it.
2. Click View current charges to see what's building up for your next bill.
3. Then go to Settings → Apps for the full list of what's installed.

Three things catch people out:

• Usage charges. Some apps charge by orders, emails or visitors rather than a flat fee. They're added to your next bill, so a busy month means a bigger app bill.
• Separate billing cycles. Shopify bills subscription apps on their own 30-day cycle, so an app's charge may not line up neatly with when you installed it.
• Charges outside Shopify. Some apps bill you directly on their own website. Those won't appear on your Shopify bill at all, so check your card statement too.

Write it all down in one list: app name, what it does, monthly cost, and when you last used it on purpose.

1. Audit every app: does it make money, save time, or neither?

Go down your list and put each app in one of three groups.

• Makes money. You can point to sales it brings in or protects: reviews that appear on product pages, an email tool that sends abandoned cart reminders, a subscription app your customers actually subscribe through.
• Saves time. It removes work you'd otherwise do by hand every week: printing packing slips, syncing stock, tagging orders.
• Neither. You installed it for one promotion, a free trial turned into a subscription, or you're honestly not sure what it does any more.

Be strict with the first group. "It might help conversion" isn't the same as "it makes money". If an app adds a widget to every page, ask whether you'd notice if it disappeared tomorrow.

Watch for overlaps as well. It's common to find two apps doing the same job, such as two review apps, or a popup app and an email app that both show a signup form.

Everything in the "neither" group can go. For the rest, move on to the next step before you renew anything.

2. Replace apps with features you already have

Many apps were installed to fill a gap in an older theme. Current themes have closed a lot of those gaps.

Take Shopify's own free theme, Horizon. Its listing on the Shopify Theme Store includes, among other features:

• Size chart
• Stock counter
• Back-in-stock alert
• Product badges
• Quick view and quick buy
• Colour swatches
• Recently viewed and recommended products
• Mega menu
• FAQ page and promo banners
• Product filtering and sorting

Horizon is built on theme blocks, which you add and arrange in the theme editor without code. If you're on a newer theme, check what it already offers before paying an app to do the same thing. If you're on an older one, the number of apps it would replace is a fair thing to weigh up when you consider a theme update.

Shopify also makes several free apps that cover jobs people often pay for:

• Search & Discovery for search, filters and product recommendations
• Forms for email signup forms
• Inbox for customer chat
• Bundles for fixed bundles and multipacks
• Translate & Adapt for translating your store for different markets
• Subscriptions for selling on subscription

They won't match every paid app feature for feature, and that's fine. The question is whether you need the extra features, or whether you're paying for them out of habit.

Before you switch

1. Duplicate your live theme (Online Store → Themes, then Duplicate from the theme's menu) and make the change on the copy.
2. Set up the built-in feature on the copy and preview it on your phone.
3. Check anything the app stored, such as reviews, subscribers or translations. Export it first if you'll need it elsewhere.
4. Publish the copy, then uninstall the old app.

Timing is your call. Doing it in a quiet week gives you room to spot problems; if a big sale is close, you can either wait until it's over or test on the copy now and publish afterwards.

3. Uninstalling isn't enough: clean up what's left

Uninstalling an app from Settings → Apps stops future billing cycles. It doesn't always remove everything the app added to your store.

Shopify's own help page on uninstalling apps says it plainly: some apps add code to your theme that isn't automatically removed when you uninstall. That leftover code can keep loading scripts and styles on every page, for a service you no longer use.

Two other things from Shopify's help pages worth knowing:

• You might still pay for the current cycle. Uninstalling cancels future recurring charges, but a charge already generated for your next bill stays. If it hasn't been paid yet, ask the developer for a credit; if it has, ask for a refund. Refunds for third-party app charges are up to the developer, not Shopify.
• Cancelling inside the app isn't uninstalling. Cancelling on the app's own dashboard or website doesn't stop Shopify billing. You also need to uninstall it from Settings → Apps.

How to check for leftover code

Newer apps add themselves to your store through app blocks and app embeds, which you switch on and off in the theme editor and which don't edit your theme's code. Older apps often edited theme files directly, and that's where leftovers hide.

1. Ask the developer first. Before uninstalling, check the app's help pages or contact support. Many have a removal option or will clean up for you.
2. Work on a copy. Duplicate your theme before touching any code.
3. Search the code. On the copy, open Edit code from the theme's menu and search for the app's name. Look in theme.liquid first, then in snippets and sections.
4. Remove only what you're sure of. If a snippet clearly belongs to the old app, remove where it's included and preview the copy. If you're not sure, leave it and ask a developer.
5. Check the theme editor. Remove any app blocks or app embeds from the uninstalled app that are still listed.

Then measure the difference. Go to Analytics → Reports and search for "web performance". The report uses real visitor data from the last 30 days, so give it a few weeks after the clean-up before you compare. If the store still feels slow after the clean-up, see why your store is still slow after optimising it.

What to do next

Set aside an hour:

1. List every app with its cost from Settings → Billing and Settings → Apps, and check your card statement for apps billed outside Shopify.
2. Sort them into makes money, saves time, or neither. Uninstall the neithers.
3. Check what your theme and Shopify's free apps already cover before renewing anything else.
4. After uninstalling, ask the developer about leftover code and check your theme files on a copy.
5. Publish any theme changes in a week when you have time to check the store afterwards.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your app list, send us your store link and we'll tell you the first thing we'd fix. And if you're weighing up a theme rebuild that replaces a stack of apps, our prices are public.