Details
Company
Shopify
Year
2024
Role
Design and Strategy
Background
App developers play a critical role in the Shopify ecosystem by extending core platform functionality through apps that help merchants sell, manage, and grow their businesses. The Billing API lets developers securely charge merchants, powering app monetization within Shopify.
Details
What prompted us to reimagine app pricing?
Challenge
Shopify’s legacy Billing API required developers to build and maintain complex billing logic—leading to inconsistent experiences, higher support overhead, and longer development cycles.
Solution
Managed Pricing, allowing developers to define pricing plans directly in the Shopify Partner Dashboard. Shopify now hosts the app’s plan selection page and automates key billing flows including recurring charges, free trials, proration, test charges, and price updates.
Decisions
App pricing isn't one-size-fits-all. It's influenced by supply and demand, and understanding the target market is key.
Research
To understand user needs I moderated interviews with new and experienced app developers to uncover billing pain points, financial impacts, and pricing needs. Alongside a competitive analysis, these insights shaped a scalable pricing system that solves current gaps and supports future models across the Shopify ecosystem.
Direction
Following competitor research and initial developer interviews, I defined a direction and created prototypes. In subsequent rounds of interviews, I used these prototypes to validate the approach, surface concerns, and ensure the design resolved key developer pain points. At the same time, I focused on maintaining a high-quality merchant experience with billing flows that were clear, consistent, and trustworthy.
Outcomes
By centralizing pricing logic, Managed Pricing accelerated time-to-market and simplified pricing strategies for developers.
Launch
New apps overwhelmingly adopt Managed Pricing, and a majority of existing apps have plans to transition.
