How to audit the Shopify app subscriptions you forgot you were paying for

App charges hide in the monthly Shopify bill. Export the invoice, list every recurring app charge, and kill the ones nobody on your team can name. Here is the quarterly routine.

Start with the bill, not the app list

Open Settings then Billing in your Shopify admin and look at the last three invoices. Every app with a recurring charge shows up as a line item, whether or not anyone remembers installing it. Export or screenshot the list, then sort by amount. The expensive ones get attention first, but the five-dollar-a-month apps are the ones that hide for years. A store doing modest volume can easily carry eight to twelve app subscriptions, and the owner can usually name only half of them.

Match each charge to an owner and a job

For every charge on the list, answer three questions. Who on the team uses this app? What does it do on the storefront or in the admin? What breaks if we remove it? If nobody can answer, that is your shortlist for removal. Common forgotten charges: review apps replaced by the theme's built-in reviews, popup apps from a long-dead campaign, currency converters from before Shopify Markets, and loyalty apps whose program was abandoned months ago.

Remove, do not just disable

Deleting an app from the Apps page stops future recurring charges in most cases, but some apps bill through their own external subscriptions. Check the app's listing for external billing notes, and cancel inside the app's own dashboard if it takes payment outside Shopify. After removal, verify the next invoice shows the charge gone. Then check the theme code: uninstalled apps often leave script tags, pixels, and CSS behind. Remove the leftover code the same week, while you still remember what was there.

Make it a quarterly habit

Put a recurring calendar event every three months: export the invoice, name every charge, remove the orphans. Assign it to one person. The stores that bleed money to forgotten apps are not careless; they just never scheduled the review. A thirty-minute audit four times a year typically recovers more than the annual cost of the audit's own time, and it keeps the stack honest about what it actually needs.