I've heard shopify has been shaking down SaaS apps for past revenue % which they charge outside of the shopify ecosystem. Does anyone know if this is true or have more details?
Their terms seem a little unclear to me, but it seems that they claim they are due a percentage of anything you charge a customer who uses your Shopify app, even if you don't bill extra for use of that app.
However in practice I have found Shopify not too strict about fees charged outside of Shopify. I suppose if you were actually charging your customers specifically for the app but doing it outside Shopify to avoid the cut they would come after you.
I find BigCommerce a worse offender here. They copied Shopify's terms and constantly hound you asking for a cut of money even if you offer a free plugin with your standard service. Their method of collecting this info is also arcane, manual, and threatening. I would drop BigCommerce support in a second if they challenged us on this. So far they have backed down when we tell them we don't charge extra specifically for BigCommerce. But they still hound us monthly to submit a $0 report.
Yes, this is true. There's a lot of pressure, I suspect, since they've come out as a publicly traded company.
I've built on Shopify before. While they're great, you'll find that it's hard to grow your company in it (save for a few notable exceptions). And then there's the platform dependent nature of it all.
I would not build a business on top of another company's platform.
They did that for a couple developer companies that were intentionally not paying their rev-share agreement. There was an article on HN about it recently.
It made sense that they would take down bad actors in the community.
However in practice I have found Shopify not too strict about fees charged outside of Shopify. I suppose if you were actually charging your customers specifically for the app but doing it outside Shopify to avoid the cut they would come after you.
I find BigCommerce a worse offender here. They copied Shopify's terms and constantly hound you asking for a cut of money even if you offer a free plugin with your standard service. Their method of collecting this info is also arcane, manual, and threatening. I would drop BigCommerce support in a second if they challenged us on this. So far they have backed down when we tell them we don't charge extra specifically for BigCommerce. But they still hound us monthly to submit a $0 report.