What your apps cost

Every theme in this category publishes a saving. Booster says $281 a month. Shoptimized says $2,011 a year. Debutify says $3,000 a year.

None of them shows you the basket.

That is the problem with all three numbers, and it is not a small one: a saving is a subtraction, and without the list of apps and what each one costs you cannot check either side of it. The number is chosen to be large and it is unfalsifiable by construction.

So this page does not have a number on it. You do.

Your bill, not ours

Tick the things you pay a Shopify app for today and put in what each actually costs you. Open your Shopify bill in another tab if you are not sure — most merchants underestimate this by a wide margin, because the charges arrive separately and none of them individually feels like much.

Four rows are ticked to start with, because they are the four a store running paid traffic most often has installed together. The prices are placeholders, not researched figures — see below for why there are no real app prices on this page. Change them to yours.

Apps you pay for today, and what each costs per month
What it does	Edition	$ / month
Product bundlesBundles / buy-the-set	Pro	What Product bundles costs you per month
Cart upsellUpsell and cross-sell	Pro	What Cart upsell costs you per month
Volume pricing on the product pageQuantity breaks / tiered pricing	Pro	What Volume pricing on the product page costs you per month
Countdown to a promotion endingCountdown timer	Pro	What Countdown to a promotion ending costs you per month
“Pairs well with” on the product pageRelated / complementary products	Pro	What “Pairs well with” on the product page costs you per month
Email capture popupPopups and newsletter capture	Pro	What Email capture popup costs you per month
Product comparison tableComparison tables	Pro	What Product comparison table costs you per month
Before and after sliderImage comparison	Pro	What Before and after slider costs you per month
Shoppable lookbookShoppable images / lookbooks	Pro	What Shoppable lookbook costs you per month
Tabs on the product descriptionProduct tabs and accordions	Pro	What Tabs on the product description costs you per month
Age verificationAge verification	Pro	What Age verification costs you per month
One-tap discount codeDiscount / promo code	Pro	What One-tap discount code costs you per month
Sticky add to cartSticky add-to-cart bar	Core	What Sticky add to cart costs you per month
Slide-out cart with a free-shipping barCart drawer / free shipping bar	Core	What Slide-out cart with a free-shipping bar costs you per month
Quick view from the collection gridQuick view	Core	What Quick view from the collection grid costs you per month
Colour swatchesVariant swatches	Core	What Colour swatches costs you per month
Size chartSize charts	Core	What Size chart costs you per month
Trust badges under the buy buttonTrust badges	Core	What Trust badges under the buy button costs you per month
Low-stock indicatorInventory / scarcity display	Core	What Low-stock indicator costs you per month
Cookie consent bannerGDPR / cookie consent	Core	What Cookie consent banner costs you per month

$60 a month, across 4 apps — $720 a year, every year.

Pro is $229 once. At that rate you are level after 4 months, and everything after that is margin you keep.

Why we do not fill the prices in for you

We could. We would rather not, and the reason outlives this page.

We do not track third-party app prices, and a table of them starts rotting the day it ships. App vendors change their tiers monthly, price by order volume, and put the real number behind a plan selector three clicks in. A page here quoting "$29 a month for a bundles app" would be a claim about somebody else's product that nobody on this side re-checks — and a stale price in our favour is indistinguishable from a dishonest one.

It is the same rule that keeps our comparison pages against the other paid themes unwritten. We will compare published terms, because those are quotable and dated. We will not publish a number we cannot stand behind six months from now.

There is also a better reason. Your own bill is more persuasive than our average, because you already believe it. An average is somebody else's store.

What the ticking actually buys you

Two things worth being precise about, because "replaces apps" is a claim that usually hides a lot.

These are theme code, not bundled apps. Every row above is a section or a block in the theme's own build — the same list /pricing generates from the build manifests, so it cannot offer you something the zip does not contain. Nothing here installs, nothing here has a separate dashboard, and nothing here adds a script from another company to your storefront. That last part is the half that does not show up in the monthly total: each app you remove is also a third-party request on the critical path, which is why core.css and core.js between them are 27 KB gzipped.

Some rows are Pro and some are Core, and the calculator works out which edition your ticked set actually needs rather than quoting you the higher one. If everything you pay for today is in Core, it says so.

What this does not replace

Being straight about the edges, because a merchant who finds them after paying is a refund and a bad review:

Email, SMS and reviews. A theme can render a review score — Hullara reads Shopify's own rating metafield, which every review app writes — but collecting reviews, sending campaigns and managing flows are jobs for an app, and should be. Keep paying for those.
Anything with a back end. Loyalty points, subscriptions billing, wishlists, back-in-stock alerts. A theme has nowhere to store them.
Analytics and A/B testing.
Fake urgency. Some of what a conversion app sells is a countdown that restarts for every visitor, a stock number nobody set, or a review score typed into a settings field. Hullara cannot produce any of those, at any price, and if that is what you are paying for then this replaces nothing.

The honest version of the arithmetic

A theme is a one-off cost and an app is a recurring one, so the comparison flatters us the longer you run the store — and it flatters us most in the first year, which is exactly when a new store is least sure it will still be trading.

The number worth looking at is not the annual total. It is the months-to-level figure the calculator gives you. If that is under a year, the decision is straightforward. If it is not, you probably do not have enough apps for this to be about money yet, and you should buy the theme because you want the storefront rather than because of a subtraction.