Executive summary
- What: Shopify App Pricing removed the ceilings on private plans. You can create any number of private plans per app and assign any number of target stores to each one, up from 15 plans and 20 stores.
- Why: The old caps forced app partners with many bespoke agreements to reuse plans across mismatched clients or to fall back to legacy manual pricing.
- Who: App partners running negotiated pricing, and the enterprise merchants on the other side of those agreements. No action is required for plans that already exist.
What changed
A private plan is a pricing plan visible only to stores you nominate. Those nominated stores are the plan targets. Private plans appear on your app plan selection page but only to users signed in to an authorized store account, and because they serve a small audience they do not support translation.
Previously you could create up to 15 private plans per app, each with a maximum of 20 authorized stores. Both limits are gone. The same unlimited behaviour is available in the app migration CLI, the tool for moving legacy app subscriptions onto Shopify App Pricing plans, which remains in Early Access by sign up.
Why it matters
For a partner with a handful of custom deals the old caps were invisible. For a partner serving enterprise Shopify Plus accounts they were a structural constraint. Fifteen private plans is not many when every large client negotiates its own feature set and rate, and the workaround was either to group unrelated clients onto one plan, which makes entitlement logic ambiguous, or to stay on legacy manual pricing and give up the newer billing model.
The twenty store ceiling bit hardest on multi store organizations. A Plus merchant running separate stores per region or per brand could exhaust the target list with a single agreement, which meant splitting one commercial relationship across duplicate plans and reconciling it manually at renewal. If you operate a multi store estate and license custom apps across it, this is worth raising with your vendors at the next review: unified pricing across every store in the org is now a reasonable ask. Teams weighing a bespoke build against a licensed app can read our take on custom Shopify apps.
Role specific impact
- Marketers: negotiated app pricing can now follow your brand and regional store structure rather than being reshaped around a store count limit. Factor that into vendor renewal conversations.
- Developers: entitlement checks can move to one plan per client instead of shared plans with conditional logic, which removes a recurring source of billing bugs. If a discount or a longer trial is all a client needs, that remains simpler than a private plan.
- Store admins: when a vendor issues a private plan, confirm every store in your organization is listed as a target before you approve the charge, since a missed store means an unexpected public rate.
Use-case example
Real-world scenario
A partner supplies a product configurator to a manufacturer operating 34 Shopify Plus stores across North America and Europe. Under the old ceiling the agreement needed two private plans, 20 stores on one and 14 on the other, with a quarterly reconciliation to keep rates aligned as stores were added or retired. Consolidating onto a single private plan covering all 34 targets removed roughly two hours of finance work per quarter and eliminated the drift that had twice billed a newly launched store at the public rate.
Implementation checklist
- List every private plan on your app and identify plans that were split purely to stay under the old caps.
- Consolidate split agreements onto one private plan per commercial relationship where the rate and feature set match.
- Add any target stores that were previously left off because a plan was full.
- Confirm that entitlement checks in your app read from the plan rather than from a hardcoded store list.
- If you are still on legacy manual pricing, request Early Access to the app migration CLI and review the migration guide before planning the move.
- Document the plan to client mapping so renewals and store launches do not recreate the drift.
FAQ
Q: Do existing private plans need to be recreated?
A: No. Existing plans continue to work unchanged. The new limits simply mean you can add more plans and more targets when you need them.
Q: Should every negotiated deal become a private plan now that the cap is gone?
A: Not automatically. If the client only needs a price incentive, a discount or an extended trial is simpler to administer. Reserve private plans for genuinely bespoke feature sets and rates.
Resources
Private plans in Shopify App Pricing
Need guidance? Talk to Makro.