By Roy · Marketing manager at Subi. Writes about subscription and loyalty growth for Shopify merchants. · Published · Last updated
Short answer: it depends on how often you bill and how you count. Across Shopify stores using Subi, the median store keeps 26.1% of monthly subscribers a year after sign-up and 40.0% of quarterly ones. Counted per renewal, the order flips: monthly plans keep 41.2% of subscribers at the sixth renewal, quarterly plans 25.0%.
Retention drives every subscriber's lifetime value, so merchants want a benchmark for it. Two honest ways of counting give opposite rankings of billing intervals. Below are both cuts from Subi's own data, read on 22 October 2026, with the number of stores behind each table.
What is a good subscription retention rate on Shopify?
Subscription retention rate is the share of subscribers still subscribed at a fixed point after they signed up, such as 90 days after sign-up or the date of their third renewal.
By calendar time, the median Shopify store on Subi keeps 60.6% of its monthly subscribers at 90 days and 26.1% at a year. Longer billing intervals keep more subscribers at every mark:
| Billing interval | 90 days | 180 days | 365 days | Stores (90 / 180 / 365 days) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every 1-3 weeks | 44.0% (29.9-64.3) | 30.0% (18.2-46.2) | 15.4% (6.7-25.0) | 113 / 100 / 71 |
| Monthly or every 4 weeks | 60.6% (47.7-72.8) | 41.9% (28.9-56.3) | 26.1% (15.4-40.0) | 753 / 688 / 521 |
| Every 5-10 weeks | 69.2% (59.4-80.0) | 50.7% (41.2-65.0) | 31.1% (21.4-44.9) | 244 / 224 / 166 |
| Every 3 months | 83.5% (72.7-92.0) | 62.0% (47.2-75.8) | 40.0% (25.0-54.5) | 188 / 174 / 133 |
| Every 4 months or longer | 92.9% (82.5-99.1) | 82.1% (64.3-96.1) | 56.6% (40.0-82.8) | 137 / 127 / 90 |
The last row mixes 4-month, 6-month and yearly plans, so read it as a group, never as "yearly".
Does subscription retention depend on how often you bill?
Yes, and the direction depends on the clock you use. Count per renewal instead of per calendar day and the ranking reverses: the shorter the interval, the more subscribers survive each renewal.
| Billing interval | 1st renewal | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 6th | Stores (1st to 6th) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every 1-3 weeks | 90.9% (83.1-95.0) | 73.9% (65.3-86.5) | 65.0% (52.8-79.4) | 58.8% (43.7-72.2) | 47.5% (36.4-64.2) | 123 to 114 |
| Monthly or every 4 weeks | 87.2% (79.2-93.3) | 71.1% (60.0-82.4) | 59.9% (47.0-72.3) | 51.5% (38.5-65.6) | 41.2% (27.8-56.5) | 779 to 683 |
| Every 5-10 weeks | 83.8% (75.0-90.7) | 64.3% (51.7-76.1) | 53.5% (40.8-63.6) | 46.0% (33.2-57.1) | 33.3% (21.4-46.7) | 246 to 170 |
| Every 3 months | 81.0% (71.8-90.7) | 59.1% (45.5-75.1) | 46.9% (33.8-66.1) | 39.1% (25.0-54.5) | 25.0% (15.8-42.0) | 185 to 67 |
The "every 4 months or longer" group is left out of this table: it mixes yearly plans with shorter ones, and few stores have enough subscribers past its first renewal. At the first renewal its median is 75.0% across 117 stores.
The sixth quarterly renewal comes 18 months after sign-up, so only 67 stores had enough subscriptions that old, and those subscriptions started in the earliest months of the window.
Why does a quarterly plan look better on a calendar?
A quarterly plan asks the renewal question four times a year; a monthly plan asks about twelve times. Each renewal is a moment a subscriber decides whether to keep going, so a year of quarterly billing holds fewer of those moments, and more subscribers are still there at day 365. At each single renewal, quarterly subscribers leave more often.
The two cuts agree where they measure the same age. Monthly subscribers at their third renewal, about 90 days in, sit at 59.9%, close to the 60.6% calendar figure at 90 days. Quarterly subscribers at their fourth renewal, about a year in, sit at 39.1% against 40.0% at 365 days.
Neither cut is the "true" retention. The calendar cut tells you how much of your book is left after a year. The renewal cut tells you how well each renewal holds. Time-driven exits, such as a card that expires, land inside a quarterly plan's renewals and mostly outside a weekly plan's, which is part of why the renewal cut favors short intervals.
How should you read your own retention number?
Compare like with like. Before you set your number against any benchmark, check two things on both sides: the billing interval and the cut.
- Compare per renewal within the same interval. A monthly store that keeps about 60% of subscribers to the third renewal is at the median; the middle half of stores sits between 47.0% and 72.3%.
- Read a mixed book interval by interval. A store with half its subscribers on quarterly plans will look better on a calendar than a monthly-only store with identical renewal-by-renewal retention.
- Put your effort on the first renewals. In every interval up to quarterly, the median falls furthest between the first and second renewal, and by the second renewal the median has lost 26 to 41 points. Our guide to customer retention for subscription stores covers what to do in that window.
- Check what your report counts as gone. Here a pause counts as a loss from the day it starts, and so does a subscription lost to involuntary churn from failed payments.
These figures describe which subscribers stay. They do not predict what would happen if you changed a plan. Subscribers choose their interval, and interval travels with the product, so the data does not show that moving monthly subscribers to quarterly billing would change how long they stay.
How does this compare with other published churn by billing interval?
Published research points the same way on the calendar cut. Across 65.1 million subscriptions started at 13,158 Shopify brands between March 2025 and February 2026, cumulative lifetime churn was 84.2% for monthly plans and 67.7% for quarterly, with annual lower still at 30.1% (Recharge, August 2026). That research counts cancellations and failed payments over each subscriber's life so far and describes its figures as directional rather than a periodic rate.
It is a different measure from ours. It pools every subscription, and its cohorts were young, so many quarterly and annual subscribers had faced only one or two renewals, or none. Our figures are per-store medians at fixed marks. Compare the direction, never the levels: both data sets rank longer intervals ahead by calendar time, and neither of those published figures counts per renewal.
How we measured this
- Data read on 22 October 2026 from Subi's own warehouse, covering subscriptions that started on or after 22 October 2024 in stores using the Subi Subscriptions App.
- Only stores paying for Subi on the read date. Test, development, staff, sandbox and closed stores are dropped. Stores that left before the read date are not in the data, which may flatter every level.
- Pay-per-delivery subscriptions only, where the billing interval equals the delivery interval. Prepaid, fixed-term and minimum-commitment plans are dropped, as are subscriptions that ended within their first day.
- A paused subscription counts as gone from the day it paused.
- Each store's figure is the share of its subscriptions still subscribed at the mark. A store counts only if it has at least 10 subscriptions old enough for that mark.
- Every figure is a median across stores, shown with the 25th to 75th percentile. Every figure on this page rests on at least 67 stores. No store is named or identifiable.
- A renewal mark is the date the Nth renewal was scheduled (sign-up date plus N billing intervals), counted only once that date is at least a week past. It checks that the subscription was still live on that date; it does not check that the charge succeeded.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good monthly subscription retention rate on Shopify? For monthly plans, the median Shopify store on Subi keeps 87.2% of subscribers to the first renewal and 41.2% to the sixth. The middle half of stores keeps between 79.2% and 93.3% to the first renewal.
Do quarterly subscriptions retain better than monthly ones? By calendar time they keep more: 40.0% at a year against 26.1% for monthly at the median store. Per renewal they keep fewer: 25.0% at the sixth renewal against 41.2%. A quarterly plan asks the renewal question less often.
Should I move subscribers to a longer billing interval to cut churn? This data cannot tell you that. Subscribers chose their intervals, so the gap between intervals is not the effect of switching. A longer interval changes how often subscribers decide; whether it suits them depends on how fast they use the product.
Do pauses and failed payments count as churn in these figures? Yes. A paused subscription counts as gone from the day it paused, and a subscription ended by failed payments counts as gone too. If your own report leaves pauses out, it will read higher than the same subscribers counted this way.