Add up the subscriptions, the fees taken from your sales, and what apps cost in speed and maintenance hours. Your Shopify bill shows only the first item, and not always in full.
The benchmark
It all fits in one table, with one row per app. Copy it, then add your own columns if your store needs others:
| App | Fixed monthly cost | Variable share | Installed on | Owner | Last used | What it replaces | Third-party domains called |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer reviews | |||||||
| Pop-up |
Then calculate the annual total. Exporting your bills, under Settings then Billing, gives you a good base for subscriptions, but it doesn't catch everything: some apps bill outside Shopify, and those charges don't appear on the platform's bill. They show up on your card statements, so read those too.
The rule
Every app has a named owner and an annual review. If no one can say what an app is for, it goes.
The steps
- The inventory. List the apps installed in the admin, then the ones enabled in the app embeds tab of the theme editor, and match both lists against the bills.
- Duplicates. You often find two review tools or two pop-up tools. In the theme of one store the authors work with, the code of three old cookie banners was still there, and two of them were still loading on every page alongside the tool in use.
- Native features. Check what the theme or Shopify can now do without an app.
- The exit. Uninstall, have the code left in the theme cleaned up, then measure the home page again.
- The renegotiation. A fee based on a percentage of sales, painless at €1M, becomes a real cost line at €10M; the right time to renegotiate it is when you move up a tier.
A sentence to say to your leadership once the table is filled in, to adapt in your own words:
"Here is what our apps cost us per year, fees included, and here are the three I propose removing before their next renewal."
The trap
Many teams believe an uninstalled app has disappeared from the site. Shopify automatically removes two things on uninstall: the blocks the app added to the theme, and the scripts it injected itself. But anything pasted directly into the theme files, by the app or by a contractor, stays in place and keeps slowing down the site after the subscription ends.
On the home page of another store the authors work with, they counted fifteen active app embeds, more than fifty third-party domains, about 487 requests and 4.9 MB transferred.
They estimated the cleanup at thirteen hours of development, because the team first has to decide what stays, then the code has to be removed app by app. On simpler themes, their estimates range from one to six hours, and that time appears on no app invoice.
The authors aren't immune either. On a store whose theme they maintain, they had replaced the review tool with another one and removed its blocks, and its script was still loading on every product page: the app injected it itself, and a script like that only goes away when you uninstall the app.
A deadline will do part of the sorting for you. Since October 1, 2026, apps can no longer create or modify these injected scripts, and starting March 1, 2027, Shopify will stop loading them on stores.
An app that still relies on this method and hasn't migrated to theme blocks will therefore stop displaying that day, and as far as the authors can tell, nothing ends its subscription at the same time.
Ask each app's developer now how it displays on your store, and add the answer to your table.
