IN A HURRY?
Jump to the full list of locked features, sorted by the plan you need to unlock each one.
Smile.io is the loyalty app most Shopify merchants try first, and the free plan is a big reason why. It's a genuinely useful starting point. The catch is what happens a few months later, when you want points to expire, a VIP tier for your best customers, or rewards paid out as native Shopify store credit. That's when most stores discover the price of the plan they actually need.
Smile's pricing page lists plans and headline features, but it doesn't show everything that's locked. So we installed Smile on a test Shopify store on the free plan and clicked through every section of the admin. (We didn't click any upgrade buttons, in case you're wondering.) This guide is what we found.
Smile.io pricing plans at a glance
Smile prices by monthly orders and by features. Each plan includes an order allowance. Free, Essential and Standard stop at their limit, so a busier month means moving up a plan. Growth and Plus let you go over and charge per extra 100 orders instead.
| Plan | Price | Orders included | Over the limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 200 a month | Move up a plan |
| Essential | $15/month | 500 a month | Move up a plan |
| Standard | $79/month | 1,000 a month | Move up a plan |
| Growth | $199/month | 2,500 a month | $20 per extra 100 orders |
| Smile Plus | $999/month, billed annually | 7,500 a month | $5 per extra 100 orders |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Not applicable |
Prices are in USD and come from Smile's pricing page. The paid plans on Smile's Shopify App Store listing come with a 14-day free trial.
What you get on Smile's free plan
To be fair to Smile, the free plan is not a demo. For a small store that only wants customers to earn points on orders and swap them for a discount, it does the job. Here's what showed no lock on the free plan:
- Points: points on orders, plus birthday, sign-up and social follow rules.
- Rewards: amount and percentage discounts, free shipping, and discounts in Shopify POS.
- Referrals: the referral program, referral rewards and social sharing.
- Customers: the customer list, CSV export and bulk import of points.
- Branding: the launcher and rewards panel, with your colours and wording.
- Reports: 10 basic data-export reports.
- Settings: customer emails, multiple languages and product exclusions.
The limit is 200 orders a month. Smile's help center says you can go over that in your first month after installing without being asked to upgrade.
33 features locked on the free plan
On the free plan, 33 features in the Smile admin are locked: 10 need Essential, 7 need Standard, 12 need Growth and 4 need Smile Plus. The plan names below are the ones Smile shows on each locked feature inside the app.
Essential: $15/month
The first paid step is cheap, and it unlocks the things most stores expect to be free: integrations, a loyalty page, and removing Smile's branding from your store.
- Every integration. All 37 in the admin, including Klaviyo, Mailchimp, HubSpot and Judge.me. Smile's pricing page also caps the number you can connect: 1 on Essential, 2 on Standard, unlimited from Growth.
- Free product rewards, online and in Shopify POS.
- Loyalty landing page.
- Removing "We reward with Smile" from your rewards panel.
- Premium nudges: account creation, points spending and reward usage reminders.
- Custom referral link preview for shared links.
- Points Activity and Referral Performance dashboards.
- 14 advanced reports, such as redemption rate, outstanding points and top referrers.
Standard: $79/month
This is where the jump starts to hurt. Store credit, the reward type a lot of merchants now prefer to discount codes, sits here, five times the price of Essential.
- Store credit rewards.
- Gift card rewards.
- Bonus points campaigns.
- Points on product pages and points after purchase on the thank-you page.
- Business Growth and Customer Segments dashboards.
Growth: $199/month
Growth holds most of what turns a points program into a real loyalty program. If you plan to run VIP tiers, or you don't want unspent points to sit on your books forever, this is the plan you'll end up on.
- VIP program. The whole VIP tab is one upgrade screen.
- Points expiry, reward expiry and referral reward expiry.
- Delay order points until the return window closes.
- Earning limits per customer and customer eligibility on earning rules.
- Points balance on the customer account page and the Loyalty Hub.
- Performance Benchmarks and VIP Segments dashboards.
- 10 more advanced reports, including VIP and expiring-points reports.
Smile Plus: $999/month, billed annually
Plus is for large brands, and it's a $11,988-a-year commitment. Four features in the admin need it:
- REST API keys and signing keys for the JavaScript SDK.
- Custom activities, which reward any action you define.
- 2 financial reports: the value of discounts issued and of outstanding points.
Worth knowing: two features show a different plan in the app than on Smile's pricing page. Customer Segments is labelled Standard in the app but listed under Growth on the pricing page. Earning limits only show a generic "Upgrade now" link; Smile's help center puts them on Growth. If either matters to you, ask Smile before you upgrade.
Order limits and overage fees
Smile counts your orders every month. What happens when you go over depends on your plan:
- Free, Essential and Standard have hard limits (200, 500 and 1,000 orders). Smile notifies you at the start of the next month and gives you the rest of that month to review your plan. The program keeps running during that time. After that, you're asked to upgrade.
- Growth and Plus let you go over and bill the extra orders: $20 per 100 orders above 2,500 on Growth, and $5 per 100 above 7,500 on Plus.
Overage adds up fast in a busy month. A store on Growth that usually does 2,000 orders and does 4,000 in November pays for 1,500 extra orders: 15 × $20 = $300. That month's bill is $499 instead of $199, in the month you're busiest.
What Smile actually costs a typical store
Here's what you'd pay for some common goals, based on the locks above:
| What you want | Smile cost |
|---|---|
| Points and referrals, under 200 orders a month | $0 |
| Points for product reviews (Essential + Judge.me Awesome) | $30/month |
| Store credit or gift card rewards | $79/month |
| VIP tiers or points expiry | $199/month |
| VIP tiers in a 4,000-order month | $499/month |
| API access | $11,988/year |
The points-for-reviews line deserves a word. Smile has no product reviews of its own, so rewarding reviews means connecting a separate reviews app. Smile's integrations need Essential, and Judge.me's integrations need its Awesome plan at $15 a month. That's two subscriptions and two support teams for one earning rule.
Is Smile.io worth the price?
For a small store that wants basic points and referrals, yes. The free plan is solid and Smile is a mature, well-known app.
The trouble is the gap between plans. The features that make a loyalty program feel like a program (tiers, expiry, store credit) sit on the $79 and $199 plans. And merchants notice. We read Smile's Shopify App Store reviews rated 1 to 4 stars: of 381 with written comments, 259 named a specific problem, and 103 of those were about pricing. It was the most common complaint at every rating, 4-star reviews included. Two merchants put it bluntly:
"Once you sign up you will be forced to pay $199/mo FOREVER or Cancel." Smile merchant review, May 2026, 1★
"This app is just such a 'pay-to-win' app type." Smile merchant review, June 2025, 1★
Our take: Smile is a good choice if you're happy on the free plan, or if you're a large brand that will use most of Growth. It's an expensive choice for the store in between, which only needs two or three of those features. If you're weighing your options, see how Smile's prices compare with other loyalty apps.
If the Growth plan is the sticking point
We make Froonze, so take this section with that in mind. We price the other way round: if a feature isn't listed against a paid plan on our pricing page, it's on the free plan.
- VIP tiers and points expiry from $10/month.
- Store credit rewards on the free plan.
- Loyalty and product reviews in one app, so points for reviews cost $5/month in total.
- No overage fees. Loyalty tops out at $60/month with no order cap.
- Free migration help from Smile, on every plan.
WHEN FROONZE MAKES SENSE:
If you want VIP tiers, points expiry or store credit without a $199 plan, and a bill that doesn't jump in your busiest month.
INTERESTED IN MORE?
Compare Smile with five other loyalty apps in our guide to the best Smile.io alternatives.
How we checked: we installed Smile on a test Shopify store on the Free plan and recorded the plan named on every locked feature in the admin on October 21, 2026. Prices and order limits come from Smile's pricing page on the same date. Review figures come from Smile's Shopify App Store reviews rated 1 to 4 stars, collected on October 13, 2026.
Smile can change its prices, plans or features at any time, so check smile.io/pricing for current numbers. Smile is a trademark of its owner, and this article isn't endorsed by Smile. Spotted something out of date? Let us know and we'll fix it.