Using dynamic pricing to discount subscription orders over time

Recharge’s Product Subscription Plans let you offer dynamic pricing, enabling customers to subscribe and receive discounts.

This guide explains how to offer customers different discounts based on their order history.

Before you start

• If you started using dynamic pricing before August 2025, you may be using the legacy version, which requires both Workflows by Recharge and Product Subscription Plans to offer dynamic pricing to customers. When you create a dynamic pricing plan, Recharge displays in-app messaging or a banner to confirm which dynamic pricing version is available to you.
  • If you use the legacy dynamic pricing, contact the Recharge support team to upgrade to the new version outlined in this article.
• Dynamic pricing is available for purchases made through your storefront using the Storefront widget, and through the customer portal for stores using the Affinity customer portal. In the subscription plan's Sales channels settings, the Storefront widget and Customer portal channels are compatible. The Merchant portal and API channels are not supported for dynamically priced plans.
• The customer portal's delivery schedule or upcoming orders section does not update to reflect future price changes from the dynamic pricing feature.
• Dynamic pricing and prepaid are mutually exclusive plan types. A plan can be either prepaid or dynamically priced, not both.

How it works

Use dynamic pricing to offer customers an alternative product price when they subscribe, one that differs from what they pay for their recurring orders. You can offer customers an initial discount that applies to as many orders as you'd like, with the price automatically updating for all future recurring orders.

Customers can subscribe to a dynamically priced plan at checkout, or through the customer portal if your store uses the Affinity customer portal and you've enabled the Customer portal channel on the plan. In Affinity, customers see a pricing callout when they select the plan, for example: "$12.00 for your first order, then $18.00 for all future orders."

The pricing progression is the same for every subscriber, regardless of how they signed up. Whether a customer subscribes at checkout, adds the plan through the customer portal, or swaps an existing subscription onto the plan, they receive the same number of initial discount orders before the recurring price applies.

To use dynamic pricing, you must create a Product Subscription Plan for the product in your Recharge merchant portal, using the Subscription with dynamic pricing plan type option. Configure the plan details, including the:

• Initial discount: The discount customers receive when they check out with the product.
• Initial discount length: The number of orders to which the initial discount will apply.
  • ie. If your initial discount percentage is set to 20% and the initial discount length is set to 5, then your customers will receive a 20% discount on their first five orders. Set this to 0 if the initial discount only applies to checkout orders.
• Recurring discount: The discount amount applied to orders after the initial discount period has ended.

Configuring dynamic pricing for your subscription products

Use dynamic pricing to offer a discount at checkout for a specific product, and apply it to a specific number of orders. For example, you could use dynamic pricing to offer a 50% discount on the product for the first 5 months.

You could then set a discount on subsequent charges, for example, offering customers a 10% discount after their first 5 months.

Discounted product pricing is based on the original product pricing configured in Shopify. After creating the product in Shopify, you can set specific discounts to adjust the prices of your subscription products in Recharge. For example, you could offer customers:

• The product for $100 as a one-time purchase using the one-time product in Shopify
• The product for $90 at the checkout, and $80 for recurring orders by setting a 10% initial discount and 20% recurring discount when configuring the product subscription plan in Recharge

Follow the instructions below to set dynamic pricing for your subscription products:

1. Create the product in Shopify.
2. Click Products in the Recharge merchant portal and select Products from the dropdown to create the subscription plan.
3. Select the product you want to create a plan for, and then click Add subscription plan.
4. Select Subscription with dynamic pricing as the plan type, then update the frequency and plan name. The plan name appears in the subscription widget on your storefront.
5. Set the initial discount percentage to reflect the discount amount customers should receive at checkout.
6. Set the initial discount length to the number of orders for which the initial discount should apply.
7. Set the recurring discount percentage to the discount customers should receive after their initial discount expires.
8. Optional: Open the Charge and cut-off schedule menu to add a cut-off schedule.
9. Optional: Open the Channels menu to configure channel settings. To let customers add or swap to this plan from the customer portal, enable the Customer portal channel. This option requires the Affinity customer portal.
10. Select Save when finished.

Considerations

Consider the following when using dynamic pricing:

Frequently asked questions