Last updated Sep 30, 2026

Does Shrine include updates?

For one year, yes. After that, only if you buy them separately. That is what Shrine's own product pages say, and it is worth reading in their words rather than ours:

"With your purchase, you'll receive one year of free updates. For ongoing support, lifetime updates are also available for purchase here."

The add-on sits in their cart as a $20 line called "LIFETIME Support", described in one sentence:

"This means you will be eligible to get updates/support FOREVER."

So the whole answer, as of 30 September 2026: Shrine is $149 and Shrine Pro $349, one-time, each with a year of updates and support; lifetime updates are $20 more. That is not an expensive add-on, and nothing here suggests it is a trick — it is simply a second purchase, and one worth knowing about before the first.

How often there is something to update to

Shrine publishes a changelog, which is more than most themes in this bracket do, and it keeps one per product. The three most recent entries of each, read the same day:

Their product pages say they "frequently update Shrine to keep it compatible with the latest Shopify features", and the Pro changelog bears that out: a release every two to three months. Which means the year of updates in the price is a real year of real releases — and that the second year is the one you pay for.

The question behind the question: what does an update cost you?

Whether updates are included is half of it. The other half is what taking one does to the store you have already built, and Shrine's pages do not describe how an update is installed — so this page does not guess.

What can be said is how Shopify itself treats a theme uploaded as a new version. In Shopify's words:

"If you update your theme manually, then the updated version of your theme displays as a separate version in draft themes."

and

"the content and settings that are managed using the theme editor, theme code editor, and language editor are unique to each theme and theme version that you upload."

That is the real cost of any update delivered as a zip: the sections you arranged, the colours you tuned and the code a developer changed belong to the old version, and moving them across is your job. It is the complaint in the public reviews of every big theme sold outside the Theme Store, and /features/theme-updates collects them.

How Hullara answers the same question

• Included, for as long as the licence is live. A lifetime licence gets every future release of the theme you bought, with no second purchase and no renewal. A monthly licence gets them while it is active.
• Merged into your theme, not handed over as a zip. We take the theme running on your store, merge the new release into it, and upload the result as a separate, unpublished theme. Your theme settings and templates are kept wholesale, Liquid you or a developer edited is kept and named in a report, and translations are merged. The per-file rules are on /features/theme-updates.
• Not one click. A Shopify Theme Store theme updates from a button in your admin; a Hullara update is a message to us, because the tool that performs the merge is ours. /compare/dawn gives that axis to Dawn and this page agrees with it.

And if the theme turns out not to suit you

Shrine's refund policy is explicit: "SHRINE operates with a strict no refund policy." Hullara refunds any purchase within thirty days with no questions asked — /legal/refunds. How the other themes in this bracket handle it is on /why/refund-policy.

For the rest of the comparison — track record, where Shrine is genuinely ahead, and price — read Hullara vs Shrine.