Recharge vs. Subscription Genius (discontinued)

If you are using Shopify and have plenty of ecommerce orders a month, Recharge is a no brainer when it comes to setting up and using a subscription service. We can't say enough about how well their team works and implements everything along the way. They also teach us common practice things to set up in the admin for customers to use, and help us with reporting and analysis to get better and grow.

Incentivized

I would avoid [it] for any subscription management. Personally, we had a torrid experience with the product and company. The platform is dated and feels like an afterthought or a sideline project for Pape Ventures. They certainly don’t invest any time in developing the product and it feels like there is a real ‘Can’t do’ attitude from the management.

• Auto trigger subscription orders
• Buy box widgets on the website

• Initial sales was strong.
• Their website looks the part.
• You feel like they are genuine.

• We would like to see a bit more design concepts with their product page widget
• It would also be nice if they had a "Points Program" rather than just a Loyalty Program that worked off of money back
• Very rarely their admin UI will hang, causing us to log out and try again.

Incentivized

• Failed to deliver on promises.
• Auto renew function never worked from the start.
• Facebook Pixel Tracking never worked.
• Support failed to return calls.
• Support failed to return emails.
• Generally ignored.
• It ended up costing us double. I had to waste time chasing them to deliver on a product that never worked.
• Feels like a side project or afterthought.
• No new development time.
• Feels like it has been mothballed.

In my experience, Recharge is very slow loading, both for our customer facing dashboards and our internal dashboards. We regularly deal with customer complaints, having difficulty using their subscription management dashboard. Working in the Recharge admin dashboard is also slow and clunky. It can be a little bit of a battle to get stuff done and it's not uncommon for analytics dashboards to simply fail to load. All in all, working with Recharge is not an enjoyable experience for me.

In my experience, Recharge support is... quite poor. They are slow to respond and unhelpful. Even at a different brand I worked at with an Enterprise contract and guaranteed few hour response times, they would regularly take one to three days to get back to me, which is quite a bit longer than the Enterprise support response times. I've had to get into arguments with them multiple times about bugs before they would admit them to be bugs and fix them and their go to support is to usually blame Shopify. There was one time I accidentally sent an email to a different vendor asking about Recharge support, and the other vendor provided a more helpful response than Recharge support.

We actually surveyed over a dozen potential Shopify subscription apps before we finally decided to settle on Recharge. Recharge is definitely not the cheapest, but they also weren't the most expensive, either. For the all of the features and technology they offer versus what they are charging, we found it to be extremely fair (and now well worth the price).

Incentivized

• Our subscriptions are 33% up already from our previous system
• Email automation is working super smoothly
• Their tools (like Cancelation Prevention) really do help with order churn

Incentivized

• We actually lost money and further time
• We ended up reverting back to manual subscription management