In my opinion, Stagnate Subscription Software that Underperforms
January 10, 2025

In my opinion, Stagnate Subscription Software that Underperforms

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Recharge

We are a standard subscription driven DTC eCommerce company offering a consumption based product, prime for an auto replenish business model. A significant portion of our monthly revenue comes from recurring subscriptions. We use Recharge to capture, managed, and retain our subscribers. Suffice to say, subscriptions are a critical component of our business model and strategy.

Pros

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

Cons

  • Customer retention and churn reduction
  • Better subscription offerings and discounts
  • Customer subscription management dashboard
  • Subscription analytics dashboard is clunky
  • Website load time
  • Recharge has allowed us to build a subscription business
  • Recharge is very time consuming for us to manage and debug
  • We regularly deal with customer frustrations due to poor dashboard and subscription management features
  • We have found and debugged multiple bugs with new Recharge features
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.
Recharge has been in use for a long time at this brand, before a lot of the emerging competition has sprung up. Whenever I research or use a different piece of subscription software, Recharge feels old and stagnate to me. It doesn't feel like they're keeping up with changes in the industry and instead of polishing their subscription functionality, they're adding on subscription adjacent functionality. I wish they would get their subscription functionality working better before they diversified.

Do you think Recharge delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Recharge's feature set?

No

Did Recharge live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Recharge go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Recharge again?

No

Recharge's entry level subscription plans are cheap, allowing small brands to spin up a subscription program and get started. But at scale, Recharge gets expensive compared to much of the competition and runs into many limitations around subscription acquisition, management, and retention. We run into regular bugs and issues that are time consuming to fix. In my opinion, much of Recharge's functionality updates are adding on new features that they charge you for even though much of the subscription related functionality is clunky, sluggish, and doesn't perform incredibly well.

Recharge Support

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.
ProsCons
Kept well informed
Slow Resolution
Poor followup
Less knowledgeable
Escalation required
Difficult to get immediate help
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
Slow Initial Response
I do not have premium support at my current business because we are not at sufficient scale. However, I have worked at brands before that did have higher support tiers. In my experience, the hither support tiers were still quite poor.
Yes - I have reported multiple bugs to Recharge. Recharge at first claimed it wasn't an issue and we had to spend quite a bit of time thoroughly testing the issue and conveying the issue before it was accepted as a bug.
Unfortunately I do not have any good experiences with Recharge support.

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