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If you’ve chosen Shopify as your preferred payment method, some specific procedures differ from those using credit card billing. Here are a few examples:

Shopify’s Base Charge + Usage Charge

Effective February 12, 2025 all new Shopify-billed subscriptions will only see one charge from that reflects the price of your Privy plan. Existing customers, however, will continue to see a base charge and a usage charge that sum to your subscription charge.
Your Shopify bill, as managed by Privy, may appear as two separate charges—a base charge and a usage charge. This division sometimes confuses users, making them believe they’re being charged twice. Rest assured, this isn’t the case. Shopify separates the base charge of a plan from any additional pricing associated with specific usage tiers. For example, a merchant on the $90 Starter Plan will see a base charge of $15 and a usage charge of $75.

What is a usage fee?

Usage in Privy is not related to the features used or the use of the account; usage in Privy is related to the number of mailable contacts on the account and how they scale. In other words, a usage fee is determined by the tier of contacts you’re currently at. The base charge is the minimum price, and the usage fee is adjusted to your account size. This means that even if the service is not used, no emails/texts are sent, or no displays are created, the price will remain the same. If you are Shopify billed, it will be split into two charges (Base and Usage). If you plan to stop using the account for a period of time, we recommend that you cancel it to avoid additional charges. For more information, see this article.

Frozen accounts

When an account is Frozen, on Privy’s end, we cannot determine the specific reason why an account gets frozen since this status is related to the Shopify side of your store. However, this article from Shopify support about Frozen Shopify stores states that if you miss paying your Shopify subscription bill or if a payment fails three times, your store is frozen until you settle your bill with Shopify. Your store does not freeze until your bill’s due date. If your store is frozen, you can’t access your Shopify admin, and customers can’t view your store. When a Shopify account is frozen, apps (such as Privy) do not have the option to cancel or reinstate a paid plan. Since Shopify is showing us that your store is unfortunately frozen. We highly recommend chatting with their billing support team on how to resolve this.

Account Restriction Notification

Your account could face restrictions if you have not accepted a change in pricing in your Shopify dashboard. This could happen if your pricing exceeds the cap set on your account, which means you need to manually approve the charge beyond your billing cap. Even if your billing cap isn’t set at the maximum amount of $5,000, your account could still face restrictions. In such cases, a pop-up message will appear on your dashboard when attempting to edit or create any display or campaign: To stop this message from showing up, please click the ‘Take me to Shopify’ button, which should complete the update. Note: Please ensure that the price and contacts match the restriction message and our pricing page. If you see any discrepancies, don’t hesitate to contact the support team for further assistance.