If you build Shopify apps, you probably got The Email.
The one that said your annual $1M revenue exemption is now a lifetime $1M exemption. As in: once you’ve made a million total, you pay 15% on everything, forever.
The developer community lost its mind. I read the threads, the hot takes, the LinkedIn outrage. And I kept thinking the same thing: this is a small ask.
The old deal was absurd (in a good way)
Let’s be clear about what we had. Every year, Shopify app developers kept the first $1M in revenue completely free. No rev share. Zero. Then it reset in January and you got another million, free again.
If you were making $2M a year, you were paying 15% on only half your revenue. Every single year. That’s an incredibly generous deal. I don’t think people fully appreciated how unusual it was.
Apple takes 30%. Google takes 30%. Even their small business programs cap at $1M annually and still charge 15% on everything under it. Shopify was handing developers the first million and walking away. Every January, like clockwork.
According to Glen Coates, Shopify’s VP of Product, only “a few hundred” developers out of tens of thousands were actually benefiting from the annual reset. A few hundred. Out of 16,000+ apps. That’s who this change affects.
The developers making $50K a year from their app? Nothing changed. The first $1M is still free — they’ll never hit it. The developers making $200K? Same story. The lifetime cap is so far above them that this policy is invisible.
The people this hurts are the ones who were already doing very well.
I remember the old Shopify
Here’s where it gets personal for me.
I worked at Shopify. I remember when it felt like a startup that genuinely loved its developers. The API was open, the documentation was solid (mostly), the partner program was a real invitation. Build something useful, put it in the app store, and Shopify would stay out of your way.
That era shaped how I think about platforms. It’s why Victoria Garland builds on Shopify. It’s why I still tell clients that the Shopify ecosystem is one of the best places to build an ecommerce business. I believe that.
But I also remember that Shopify went public in 2015. And public companies have shareholders. And shareholders want growth. And growth, eventually, means extracting more value from the ecosystem you built.
This isn’t betrayal. It’s arithmetic.
Every platform follows the same arc. You attract developers with generous terms. You build an ecosystem. You go public. And then, slowly, the terms get less generous. Not because anyone in the building is evil, but because the incentives shifted the day the stock started trading.
I’ve watched this happen at Apple. I’ve watched it happen at Google. Shopify held out longer than most, honestly. The $1M annual exemption lasted years. That’s more patience than most public companies show their developer ecosystems.
The outrage is real but misplaced
I’m not dismissing the frustration. If you’re an app developer who was counting on that annual reset, and now you’re looking at $450K more in rev share over five years, that’s a real number. It changes your margins. It changes your roadmap. Maybe it changes whether you hire that next developer.
But the framing online — that Shopify is killing the developer ecosystem, that this is the end of independent app development on the platform — is wildly out of proportion.
The first million is still free. The rate is 15%, not 30%. Shopify paid out over $1B to app developers. The ecosystem is massive and growing.
What actually happened is that a very good deal became a pretty good deal. And a few hundred developers who had the best deal in the industry now have a deal that’s merely better than most.
That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud.
So is it still worth building on Shopify?
Yes. But with eyes open.
I’m saying this as someone who builds Shopify apps right now at Victoria Garland. We’re in it. JourneyGlow, PriceGlow, CrowdShop, StockGlow, SpeedGlow. We’re not on the sidelines commenting. We’re writing Liquid and deploying to Gadget and dealing with the same API versioning headaches as everyone else.
It’s still worth it because the merchant base is real. The problems are real. The money is real. And 15% after your first million is still a better deal than most platforms offer from dollar one.
What you can’t do is build on any platform like it owes you something. Shopify doesn’t owe developers a $1M annual gift. Apple doesn’t owe developers a 15% rate. No platform owes its ecosystem permanent generosity.
The deal is: you get access to merchants, distribution, and infrastructure. In exchange, the platform takes a cut. If the cut changes, you adapt. If the platform builds something that competes with your app, you find a new angle. That’s the game.
I remember the small business, entrepreneurship-loving Shopify. I do. And there’s a version of me that misses it.
But the Shopify that exists today, the one with shareholders and quarterly earnings and 16,000 apps, was always where this was heading. The generous era wasn’t the real Shopify. It was the startup phase of a company that was always going to grow up.
The rest of us just have to grow up with it.
Shameless plug: At Victoria Garland, we build Shopify apps and custom integrations for merchants who need things done right. We’ve been in this ecosystem long enough to know where the lines are, and how to build something worth keeping.