Coffee subscriptions without Shopify app fees

What Shopify and Recharge cost a coffee roastery at $20k a month

A roastery selling coffee subscriptions on Shopify with Recharge pays a Shopify plan fee plus Recharge's monthly fee and a cut of each subscription charge. The math below uses list prices as of October 2026 from Shopify's pricing page and Recharge's App Store listing.

Recharge Starter fee = $99 + (1.49% × monthly volume) + ($0.19 × number of charges)

Assumptions for this example: $20,000 a month of subscription charges processed by Recharge, a $40 average charge (500 charges), Shopify Basic on monthly billing, and Medusa Cloud's Launch plan. Card processing fees are left out because you pay them on both sides.

The Medusa column leaves out the cost of building and maintaining subscription logic. If that build costs D, it pays back after D ÷ $420 months at this volume. Recharge's percentage fee grows with revenue, while the Medusa Cloud plan stays flat.

Smaller roasteries should check the cheaper options first. Recharge's listing shows a $25 a month plan with no transaction fees for the first 50 subscribers, and Shopify's own Shopify Subscriptions app is free.

Coffee subscription features and how Medusa handles them

Medusa core has no Subscription Module. The Subscriptions recipe and its example guide give you the base, and the rest is code you add.

Grind and size map directly to product options: a "Grind" option with whole bean, filter, and espresso values, and a "Size" option, give each combination its own variant, price, and stock. Gift cards come from the Loyalty Plugin, which is store credit, not a gifted subscription.

Three ways to build coffee subscriptions on Medusa

1. Follow the official guide and extend it. You own all the code, and the guide renews with Stripe's saved payment methods. Another provider works if it supports saved payment methods, or you write the renewal payment logic yourself.
2. Install Reorder, an MIT-licensed community plugin for Medusa 2.3+. It adds pause, resume, skip, and cancel, dunning with retries, and per-frequency discounts. Medusa's blog reports that Roastloop launched coffee subscriptions in 7 days with it. Medusa doesn't maintain Reorder, and its current release doesn't allow mixed carts.
3. Use Stripe Billing as the engine through a custom payment provider. Stripe charges 0.7% of Billing volume on pay-as-you-go pricing, so you trade the Recharge fee for a smaller one.

Who runs subscriptions on Medusa

Good Chef sells plant-based meal boxes on subscription. Its agency built a Subscription data model and a nightly renewal job in Medusa, and skipped Stripe Billing so customers could pay with their preferred method (Good Chef case study). Healthletic, a supplements brand, sells one-time purchases and subscriptions on Medusa after moving off Shopify Plus (Healthletic case study).

When Medusa is not the right choice for a roastery

• You have under 50 subscribers and no developer. Recharge's $25 plan or the free Shopify Subscriptions app costs less than any build.
• You want skip, pause, and dunning on day one with no code. Recharge includes failed payment recovery on Starter.
• No one on your team can maintain a Node.js app.

The same template applies to other consumables such as pet food, supplements, and tea: swap grind and size for flavor or pack size and keep the fee formula.