Cupcakes, razors, dog food, streaming: There’s a subscription service for all of these, and the subscription business is booming, expected to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025. If you run a subscription box company with a loyal customer base, a big part of running your business is managing customer relationships and recurring payments. To keep up with the demand, you can use subscription management software to track orders and keep the monthly recurring revenue flowing.
What is subscription management?
Subscription management is the process in which a company handles consumer subscriptions for services or products it provides on a recurring basis. It involves managing customer billing, renewals, payment schedules, product updates, customer service, user profiles, marketing, and more.
Subscription management software and tools allow you to track and manage multiple components of a subscription program and optimize the user experience. These resources can help you maintain and grow a subscriber base while preventing customer churn, and in turn, revenue loss.
Benefits of a subscription management program
While subscription models can help ensure a steady stream of revenue, they also require overhead costs and support to keep them running smoothly. In order to stand out and make an impression amid the sea of subscription products, establishing a proper subscription management plan is essential. Subscription management tools are particularly helpful in streamlining technical management—including handling billing cycles, staying on top of subscription renewals, and assisting with customer support—across the customer lifecycle.
A subscription management platform can also help with areas like inventory management, an issue Vinyl Me, Please founder Matt Fielder encountered when getting his own vinyl subscription business up and running. On the Shopify Masters podcast, Matt talks about the early stages of starting his company, when the company was buying more inventory than it could move, leaving albums collecting dust and ultimately “lighting dollars on fire.”
With the right process in place, however, Vinyl Me, Please was later able to find its stride. Subscription management solutions can help track and determine the right amount of inventory to meet consumer demand and reduce loss in the process. Today, Vinyl Me, Please has more than 30,000 subscribers and over $11 million in revenue.
Top subscription management apps
There are subscription management solutions available to support your unique business needs. While some programs serve as essential resources for fledgling brands with small-but-growing subscriber bases, others are better suited for large, well-established companies operating across many touchpoints. Here are some of the most popular subscription management apps, along with information about their programs and pricing. Many offer free trials and multiple pricing tiers.
Shopify Subscriptions
Shopify Subscriptions is an app built-in to your store admin, allowing you to sell products on a recurring basis. Use the app to set delivery frequency tiers (weekly, monthly, or yearly) and discounts for repeat purchases. You can make subscription details visible on product pages, shopping carts, thank-you pages, and automated follow-up emails. Shopify Subscriptions also provides basic analytics, allowing you to view the number of active, paused, and canceled subscriptions. Customers can manage their subscriptions via their accounts, pausing, skipping, or canceling their deliveries as needed.
Pricing: Free for Shopify stores.
Subify
Subify is built to work for Shopify and is designed to help businesses prompt customers to order on a recurring basis. Subify allows you to create a Subscribe and Save button, set membership plans, and manage shipping schedules and recurring payments. Subify includes a customer portal to help users manage their subscriptions and a robust support team.
Pricing: Subify offers a free trial and limited free plan. Paid plans range from $9 to $79 per month.
Seal
Seal’s subscription management app offers a variety of features, including auto-charging to help boost recurring revenue, manual subscription building, payment calendars and scheduling tools, integration with additional apps like Google Analytics, and inventory management, among others tools.
Pricing: Seal is free up to 150 subscriptions. Paid plans range from $4.95 to $380 per month
Appstle
Appstle provides a slate of comprehensive subscription tools with an eye toward customization. Appstle includes bundling options, loyalty features like “subscribe and save,” a customizable “build a box” function for customers to design personalized subscriptions, and a dedicated customer portal.
Pricing: Apostle is free up to $500 in monthly subscription revenue. Paid plans range from $10 to $100 per month.
Recharge
Recharge is a subscription management platform designed to be scalable and customizable. It includes features like a custom checkout domain, discount code dashboard, payment processor support, and gifting offerings such as allowing customers to give a skipped shipment to others or share subscriptions with loved ones.
Pricing: Paid plans range from $99 to $499 a month. Custom plans are also available.
Ordergroove
Ordergroove’s subscription management platform provides a dashboard that gives you performance indicators including churn rate, growth, and product-specific performance. It also makes it easy to migrate over from other platforms. Other features include loyalty and incentive programs, designed to maximize enrollment and retention, as well as options like bundling and “subscribe and save” offerings.
Pricing: Ordergroove pricing is not currently available online, but you can learn more by visiting its website.
Propel
Propel aims to simplify subscription management through a user-friendly platform. Its tools allow you to optimize automatic payments, personalize consumer notifications, build loyalty platforms, and help reduce support tickets by letting customers manage their own subscriptions.
Pricing: Proper is free up to $500 in monthly subscription revenue. Paid plans range from $9 to $19 a month.
Recurpay
Recurpay’s offerings include flexible payment plans, mixed carts that allow for subscriptions and one-time purchases, live chat support, prepaid gift subscriptions, and data-driven analytics to improve performance.
Pricing: Recurpay is free up to $100 in monthly subscription revenue. Paid plans range from $9 to $79 a month.
Subscription management FAQ
What is the role of subscription management?
Subscription management helps companies track recurring revenue from subscriptions to their services or products. Subscription management software have dashboards and tools to view, execute, and analyze billing, renewals, updates, customer service, user profiles, marketing and more. A strong subscription management plan helps to reduce customer churn, while boosting revenue in the process.
What is an example of a subscription management tool?
If you’re a Shopify user, you can take advantage of its subscription management software, Subify. The app can help you manage customer billing schedules and create flexible discount models and delivery frequencies for your customers, thus boosting sales and customer lifetime value.
What is an example of a subscription model?
One example of the subscription business model is Birchbox, which sends subscribers boxes filled with a curated selection of cosmetics, skin care, perfumes, and all things personal care. Subscription management tools assist the company with keeping track of consumers, handling monthly payments, managing customer service requests, and staying on top of product updates or pricing changes.
