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Public apps need a way to monetize, and Shopify offers several approaches depending on your strategy. The Plan Builder is Meridian’s: define your pricing once, and let the SDK handle everything a merchant sees and everything Shopify needs.

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Recurring charges

Define plans, include features in each, and let the merchant choose. Bill monthly or yearly, regardless of how much they use the app.

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Usage-based charges

Bill on events instead of, or alongside, a recurring charge. Define events, track them, and invoice the merchant continuously based on usage.

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How does Shopify handle it?

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What the Plan Builder is

One place to define your monetization, and one integration to expose it:
  • Plans: the tiers you sell, with a monthly price, an optional annual price, and an optional free trial.
  • Features: what each plan includes, boolean or a numeric limit, gated at runtime by key.
  • Events: what you meter. The catalog is app-level (under Usage) and shared; a plan adds the terms: included quantity, overage rate, cap.
  • Discounts: percentage or fixed-amount, code-based or automatic.
Your app renders the pricing page and account page from that definition through the SDK, and Meridian does the Shopify Billing handshake, so you write almost no billing code, and none of the recurring-charge or usage-charge API calls.

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The path through it

  1. Define your features, and your events under Usage if you want to bill on usage.
  2. Create a plan that includes them, as a draft.
  3. Publish it to Shopify by activating it. This is the step with prerequisites.
  4. Gate your app on the feature keys, and report usage on the event keys, through the SDK.
A plan is a draft until you activate it, and only active plans reach merchants. See Visibility.
Last modified on August 21, 2026