Why We're Building Gro (And Why Shopify Stores Deserve Better Tools)

I'll keep this simple. I started building Gro because I got tired of watching Shopify stores overpay for tools that should cost a fraction of what they do.

It started with email. Klaviyo is a good product, but the pricing has become genuinely hard to justify, especially since the February 2025 switch to active profile billing. You now pay for every active profile in your account, whether you email them or not. Unengaged subscribers count. Contacts you never email count. The better you are at collecting emails, the faster your bill climbs.

A store with 10,000 profiles is paying around $150/month on Klaviyo's email plan. That's before SMS and before any add-ons. And if your profile count creeps over your plan limit, Klaviyo moves you up a tier automatically on your next billing cycle. Full tier-by-tier breakdown in Klaviyo pricing explained.

For a lot of Shopify stores, especially ones in the early growth stage, that maths just doesn't work.

Then I looked at subscriptions

Recharge is the default subscription app for Shopify. Its Starter plan is $99/month plus 1.49% of every order plus $0.19 per order. If you're doing $50,000/month in subscription revenue at a $50 average order, that's about $1,034/month. For managing subscriptions. Full breakdown in Recharge pricing explained.

But the cost isn't even the main problem. The main problem is that tools like Recharge are built around billing, not around the customer.

Think about what most subscription apps actually do: they track when a customer is going to be charged next. They manage billing cycles. They handle payment retries. That's all important stuff. But from the customer's perspective, they don't care when they're being billed. They care about when their box is showing up.

If you run a build-a-box subscription (pet food, coffee, snack boxes, meal kits, whatever) your customers think in terms of deliveries, not payments. "When is my next box being delivered?" "What's in it?" "Can I swap something out before it ships?"

Most subscription tools don't think this way. They're oriented around the payment event, not the delivery experience. Features like letting customers easily see what's coming, swap products before a cutoff date, or understand their subscription in terms of what they're getting rather than what they're paying. These are either missing entirely or bolted on as afterthoughts.

That gap is where Gro started.

What Gro actually is

Gro is a Shopify app that does two things: email and SMS marketing, and subscription management.

On the email side, it's straightforward. You get a visual email editor, flows, segmentation, campaigns. The stuff you'd expect. The difference is you pay per send, not per profile. Free up to 1,000 sends/month. $39/month for up to 150,000 sends. Your bill reflects what you actually use, not how big your contact list is.

On the subscription side, we built it around the customer experience first. Subscriptions in Gro are tied to what the subscription is actually for, not just a billing address with a renewal date. If someone subscribes to a monthly dog food box for two dogs, those are two subscriptions with context. The customer portal shows them what's coming, not just when they'll be charged and which box is for which dog. They can skip, pause, swap products or adjust quantities without feeling like they're navigating a billing system.

We also don't gate any features behind pricing tiers. No "upgrade to Pro to unlock advanced cancellation flows." No "contact sales for build-a-box bundles support." Everything is available from day one.

Pricing:

• Email: Free up to 1,000 sends/month. $39/month for up to 150,000 sends. No per-profile charging.
• Subscriptions: Free for stores with fewer than 10 active subscribers. After that, 0.9% of subscription revenue with a $250/month minimum. No per-transaction fees. No feature gating.

What we're not

I want to be honest about where Gro fits and where it doesn't.

Klaviyo has years of integrations, a massive ecosystem and enterprise-grade infrastructure. If you're a brand doing $10M+ in revenue with a dedicated email marketing team then Klaviyo probably still makes sense for you.

Recharge has deep integrations with the wider Shopify ecosystem and a track record with large-scale subscription programmes. If you need a tool that connects to 50 other apps in your stack, they've had more time to build those bridges.

Gro is for the stores in between. The ones doing real revenue, often up to $1-2M a year, but watching tool costs eat into margins and create operational headaches. The ones running subscription boxes who want their customers to have a better experience than a billing portal. The ones who'd rather talk to the person who built the product than wait 48 hours for a support ticket reply. Gro uses Shopify's native subscriptions and orders, so it still connects to the rest of your Shopify apps, and Gro Subscriptions integrates with Klaviyo, so there's no need to remove Klaviyo if you only use Gro Subscriptions.

Where to from here?

We are a small team. We built Gro because the pricing in this space frustrated me and because we kept seeing subscription stores struggle with tools that didn't understand their actual business needs.

Building a competitor to Klaviyo and Recharge at the same time is either ambitious or naive. Probably a bit of both. But the advantage of being small is that we can ship fast, we can listen to what merchants actually need and there's no six month roadmap committee between a feature request and a deploy.

Gro is currently in private beta. If any of this resonated, check us out at usegro.co.