TL;DR: Klaviyo's pricing has gotten out of hand. Recharge charges a fortune and still doesn't get the basics right for subscription boxes. Gro is email marketing and subscription management for Shopify. Priced fairly, built for stores where the customer experience matters more than the billing cycle.
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 based on every contact in your account, whether you email them or not. Suppressed profiles count. Unengaged subscribers 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, before reviews ($25/month extra), before any add-ons. And if your profile count creeps over your plan limit? You're auto-upgraded to the next tier. No warning, just a bigger bill.
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. And they know it. Their Starter plan is $99/month plus 1.25% of every transaction plus $0.19 per transaction. If you're doing $50,000/month in subscription revenue, Recharge is costing you over $700/month. For managing subscriptions.
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, 1% 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 but watching their tool costs eat into margins and cause operation nightmares. 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. However, Gro uses the native Shopify ecosystem for subscriptions and orders so will still connect to all the other Shopify apps. Plus the subscription app is integrated with Klaviyo, no need to remove Klaviyo if you just 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.