You can now let Shopify employees use your apps for free or at a discount
Shopify App Store
Effective February 09, 2018
We’re introducing a new plan type to help you identify Shopify employees installing your apps, giving you the option to allow them to use the app for free or at a discounted fee. This helps them better understand the value your app can bring to merchants.
At Shopify, we encourage our employees to know our product, platform, and community inside and out. This helps us to better serve the over 500,000 merchants who depend on Shopify to run their businesses, and the partners and developers who help make their success possible. For this reason, in previous years we’ve allowed our employees to use third party apps for free. Many Shopify employees - including gurus who are at the frontline of merchant support - have shared that they’ve benefited from payment-free use of apps:
“As a guru, I recommend apps in nearly every interaction, and using them on my own store lets me test them in real time, with real site visitors”
“As a Merchant Success Manager, I now recommend that app [I’ve been using in my personal store] to Plus merchants with a personal conviction that I can only have from experiencing it first hand”
“When I write content for the Shopify Blog, or speak at events, the apps that are top of mind for me are the ones I use in my own store”
“Having access to these tools has largely strengthened my understanding, relationship, and empathy within our partner ecosystem”
While we see the ability to use apps as having clear benefits, we believe that you, the app creator, should ultimately be making the call on who can use your app for free or at a discounted charge. As of March 1st, all Shopify employees using your app will be transitioned to the staff_business plan name, which no longer defaults to skipping app charges, but instead lets you choose what app pricing you’d like to offer Shopify employees.
Visit our docs to learn how to setup free or discounted billing for Shopify employees.
Please note however, that this does not affect the app submission or feature process. The Apps Quality Assurance team will continue to have the ability to bypass the app billing process for testing purposes.
If you choose to setup a free or discounted plan, please submit your app using this form as soon as you have implemented the code above, and we’ll have your free/discounted rate appear when Shopify employees browse the App Store.