The setup
An $8M ARR skincare subscription brand on Shopify + Recharge. ~14,000 active subscribers, ~85% of revenue from monthly subscriptions, ~15% one-time.
The original subscriber-discount logic: a Shopify Script that applied 15% off for any customer with the recharge-monthly tag. The Script ran at checkout and Recharge stored the resolved price on the subscription record.
The slow leak
Six months earlier, the brand had raised retail prices by 8% across the line. The intent: pass a portion through to subscribers (who shouldn't be locked at last year's COGS forever). The implementation: someone updated the product prices in Shopify Admin and assumed Recharge would re-quote at renewal.
What actually happened depended on how each subscription was created. Some renewed at the new product price minus 15% (correct). Some renewed at the locked-at-signup price (legacy). Some renewed at the new product price with no discount (Script didn't fire on renewal). The result was a three-way pricing split across the active subscriber book that nobody had a complete picture of.
Symptoms:
- Customer service receiving 10–15 refund requests per week from "you charged me the wrong amount."
- Finance reporting unexplained margin compression.
- A few subscribers paused and never returned.
The diagnosis
The brand pulled a Recharge subscriptions export and joined it against the current Shopify product prices. ~3,400 of the 14,000 active subscriptions were renewing at a price that didn't match the current intended subscriber-tier price. The miss-rate was 24%.
The migration
The founder picked TagTier specifically because of the price-locks-at-rule-time model: the price isn't stored on the subscription, it's computed from the rule each renewal. Change the rule, every active subscriber's next renewal is at the new price — uniformly.
- Day 1: Install TagTier on dev store. Configure rule:
#recharge-monthly → 15% off retail tier. Test on 10 sandbox subscriptions across all three legacy pricing states. - Day 2: Bulk-update all 14,000 active Recharge subscriptions via the Recharge API to the unified target price. (This was the labor-intensive step; required ~6 hours of careful CSV work.) Communicate to subscribers via email: "Your next renewal will be $X. Reply STOP to pause."
- Day 3: Switch the active subscriber-discount logic from the Script to the TagTier rule. Disable the Script.
- Day 4–14: Watch renewals. ~470 subscriptions renewed in the first week; all at the new unified price.
Outcomes (60 days post-migration)
- Mismatched-price refund tickets: 10–15/week before → 0/week after the second renewal cycle.
- Pause rate ticked up briefly during the bulk-update communication (expected) and returned to baseline within 3 weeks.
- Margin recovery: The 24% subscriptions that had been renewing at incorrect prices are now correct. Estimated impact: ~$11K/month in margin not previously captured.
- Time to change a subscriber discount: "It used to be a project. Now I change one number in TagTier and the next renewal cycle uses it."
What this migration didn't fix
Customers who were previously renewing at a lower price (because their subscription was locked at signup) saw a price increase at the unified rate. ~120 subscribers paused, ~40 canceled. The brand had budgeted for this in the communication step. Net subscriber-count impact: -0.3% over 60 days; net revenue impact: +5.7%.
Quote
"The reason we got into trouble in the first place was that nobody owned 'subscriber price' as a single source of truth. It was implicit in five places. Now there's one rule, and it's that rule. Our finance team finally trusts the report."
Related on TagTier
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