Most app comparisons are written by people who have never migrated a store between the apps they're comparing. This one isn't. I build subscription infrastructure on Seal's API, and I've done Recharge to Seal migrations with the store's custom logic intact. So you know where I sit going in — and where Recharge is the right answer, I'll say so.
One more thing this article won't do: print today's prices and feature lists as if they'll still be true next quarter. Both apps change constantly. Structures change slowly; numbers change often. I'll give you the structures and tell you exactly what to verify yourself.
The pricing models differ in kind, not just in amount
Seal charges a flat monthly fee that steps up in tiers as your subscriber count grows. [TK-verify: confirm current Seal pricing and tier thresholds before publish.] Recharge charges a monthly platform fee plus a per-transaction take — a percentage and a fixed fee on each recurring charge it processes. [TK-verify: confirm current Recharge pricing and transaction rates before publish.]
That structural difference matters more than either number:
- Under flat tiers, app cost is a step function of subscriber count. Grow revenue per subscriber — a bigger box, add-ons, a price increase — and the app's share of your subscription revenue shrinks. The app is a fixed cost you amortize.
- Under a per-transaction take, app cost scales with subscription revenue itself. Every recurring charge pays a toll. The app is a percentage partner in the program.
Neither is wrong. A take rate can be the cheaper deal at low volume; flat tiers tend to look better as volume grows. Run the arithmetic on your own subscriber count, order values, and charge frequency — this week's real numbers, from both pricing pages. It takes ten minutes, and it's the ten minutes most merchants skip.
Comparing capabilities without a stale feature table
A feature table would be out of date before you finished reading it. Here's how I'd actually run the comparison, in the order that decides real projects.
The customer portal. Subscriptions are kept or lost in the portal — the page where subscribers skip, swap, pause, and cancel. Both apps ship a hosted portal with theming and settings. The question that separates apps for me isn't what the default portal looks like; it's what happens when you outgrow it. Seal, for example, documents a JavaScript API for overriding the cancellation flow entirely — your own popups, your own survey, your own save offers. Whichever app you evaluate, ask that same question: when the built-in flow stops being enough, is there a documented way past it?
Program mechanics. Build-a-box, prepaid plans, gifting, custom cadences, swap rules. Both apps cover the standard shapes of subscription programs; the edges differ, and the edges move with every release. [TK-verify: current build-a-box, prepaid, and gifting support in each app before publish.] My test: write your program's five most important rules as plain sentences — "a subscriber can swap any item until 48 hours before the charge" — and demo both apps against that list. The feature page will say yes to everything. The demo won't.
APIs and webhooks. If you'll never write code against your subscription app, skip this one. If you might — custom analytics, an ops dashboard, retention logic, an integration your stack needs — then API depth is the whole game, because it's the difference between extending your app later and replatforming later. Read each app's developer docs for the specific objects you need to touch: subscriptions, orders, customers, discounts. An hour with the docs before you commit beats a month of workarounds after.
Analytics. Both apps ship dashboards. No app dashboard survives contact with a real finance question, so judge the export and API paths, not the charts.
Who each app fits
The honest version, following from the structures above:
- If your program fits the standard shapes and predictable app cost matters to you, Seal's flat tiers are hard to argue against.
- If you're paying a take rate and it doesn't bother you — because the app's ecosystem does real work for your stack, with integrations you actually use and a team that already knows it — that can be a fair trade. Re-check it yearly; tolls compound quietly.
- If your program has outgrown settings pages entirely, the question stops being "which app has the feature" and becomes "which app do I build the feature on." That's the position I work from: I build on Seal's APIs, and that work has its own page.
- And some programs shouldn't be on either app. Fully custom billing still exists, and I've built it — but most brands shouldn't. If you're hitting limits and wondering whether custom is the answer, read When Seal Subscriptions can't do what you need — the options ladder in it applies to Recharge merchants too.
What a migration actually involves
This is the part I get asked about most, and the part with the most fear around it. Reasonable fear: a migration handles live billing relationships. Here's the anatomy of one, from stores I've moved.
Find out where your payment methods live. First question, always, because it sets the difficulty class of everything else. Subscriptions on today's Shopify run on subscription contracts, with the customer's card vaulted by Shopify. But setups that predate that, or that ran through an app's own checkout, can have payment methods living somewhere else. Where the tokens live determines whether billing continuity is straightforward or a project of its own. Answer this before you plan anything.
Inventory the logic, not just the subscriptions. Every store I've migrated had rules nobody had written down. A legacy discount certain early subscribers keep forever. A cadence exception support grants by hand. A free item that rides along with one specific plan. None of that lives in an export file — it lives in settings, in code, and in the support team's habits. Writing it down is the actual migration spec, and it's the step no importer can do for you.
Recreate the contracts; preserve the subscriber's world. The mechanical core: each active subscription is recreated on the new app — products, price, discount, schedule, next charge date. The bar is simple to state and strict to hit: the subscriber's next charge lands on the day they expected, at the price they expected, and their portal login still works. Hit it and nobody notices the migration happened. Miss it and you'll hear about it one support ticket at a time.
Dry-run, then move in waves. I don't cut a subscriber base over in one night. A small cohort goes first and gets watched — through a full billing cycle when the timeline allows. Then waves. Boring by design; migrations should be boring.
Keep the old app's data reachable. History, refunds, disputes, tax questions — you'll be looking things up for months. Plan for read access before you cancel anything.
None of this is exotic. It's careful work against a checklist, and the checklist is longer than any app's migration guide implies. Both apps offer import tooling and help with standard cases [TK-verify: current state of each app's official migration tooling and assistance] — the reason a developer gets involved is the logic inventory, because that's the part only your store can reveal.
The ten-minute version
Pricing: flat tiers versus a take on every charge — run your own numbers. Capabilities: demo your five hardest rules, and ask what's documented past the settings page. Migration: find your payment tokens, write down your undocumented logic, move in waves.
If you want a second pair of eyes before you commit either way, I do a free teardown: a short recorded review of your live subscription flow, naming 2–3 revenue leaks — including whether a migration would actually fix them or just relocate them. No pitch attached. Get a free teardown →