WP Subscription Review: Ditch WooCommerce's $279/Year Fee?

What Is WP Subscription (And Why Does It Exist)?

WooCommerce is free. WooCommerce Subscriptions — the official plugin that lets you charge recurring payments — is $279 per site, per year. If you're running multiple stores or just getting started with subscription products, that annual fee adds up fast.

WP Subscription is an alternative that showed up on AppSumo as a lifetime deal, with plans starting at $59 for a single site, $149 for five sites, and $249 for unlimited. That's a one-time payment versus an ongoing yearly commitment, which immediately makes it worth a closer look for anyone building a WooCommerce-based subscription business.

Creating Subscription Products

Setting up a subscription product works a little differently than the official WooCommerce plugin. Instead of adding a new product type to the dropdown (where you'd normally see "Simple product" or "Variable product"), WP Subscription adds a checkbox to your existing product editor. Check the box, and a new subscription options panel appears in the left sidebar.

This means the plugin works with both simple and variable products. It's a subtle difference from WooCommerce Subscriptions, but worth noting — if you're migrating from the official plugin, your mental model of how subscription products are created will need a small adjustment. The rest of the product setup (descriptions, images, pricing) stays exactly the same as any standard WooCommerce product.

Payment Intervals, Free Trials, and Signup Fees

Once you've enabled the subscription checkbox, you get granular control over your billing cycle. Payments can recur on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, and you can set the exact interval — every 1 month, every 3 months, whatever makes sense for your product.

The paid version of WP Subscription also supports free trials and signup fees. If you're running a membership site and want to offer a 7-day free trial, you can configure that directly in the subscription options. Signup fees work the same way — just enter a one-time amount that gets charged on top of the first subscription payment. Both features are locked behind the paid tier, though a free version of the plugin is available on the WordPress repository if you want to test the basics first.

The Missing "Limit Subscription" Feature

There's a "Limit Subscription" setting that deserves special attention, because the plugin's own marketing is a bit misleading about what it does. The options are: don't limit (customers can buy multiple subscriptions of the same product), allow only one active subscription per product, or only one of a particular status.

Here's the issue: WP Subscription's official YouTube channel describes this feature as a "split pay" option — implying you could set a fixed number of charges (like 12 monthly payments for a yearly commitment). That feature doesn't actually exist in the plugin. You can't tell it to charge a customer exactly 6 or 12 times and then stop. If you're thinking of something like CrunchLabs, where customers sign up for a 12-month commitment that automatically ends, this plugin can't handle that scenario yet. It's a notable gap, especially since the team's own documentation suggests otherwise.

Physical Product Delivery and Scheduling

For subscription box businesses or any physical product that ships on a recurring basis, WP Subscription includes delivery scheduling options. These settings only appear when your product is set to a physical good — they disappear entirely for virtual products.

You can set a specific delivery schedule or synchronize all subscribers to receive their product on the same day. For example, you could have all shipments go out on Mondays. It's a nice concept, but it would be more practical if you could set specific days of the month — like the 1st and the 15th — rather than just a day of the week. For subscription box services that ship monthly, syncing to "the first of every month" would be the ideal option, and that level of granularity isn't quite there yet.

How the Frontend and Checkout Experience Works

On the customer-facing side, WP Subscription integrates with your existing WooCommerce theme. The product page, cart, and checkout all work as you'd expect with any WooCommerce product. It's fully compatible with WooCommerce themes and even funnel builders — FunnelKit was tested and worked without issues.

One thing the plugin does well is transparency around recurring billing. Both the cart page and checkout page clearly display the recurring totals, including when the customer will be billed again and that they can cancel at any time. You never want a customer to think they're making a one-time purchase when they're actually signing up for a subscription, so this is a smart default. The downside is that you can't easily customize this recurring totals text within the plugin — there's no setting to tweak the wording, remove the exclamation mark, or add a link to your cancellation terms.

Payment Methods: Stripe, PayPal, and Paddle Only

This is an important limitation to know upfront: WP Subscription only works with Stripe, PayPal, and Paddle out of the box. And they specifically want you to use their official integrations for these gateways — third-party Stripe plugins are not compatible.

If you're already using a third-party Stripe integration on your WooCommerce store (which is fairly common), you'll need to switch to the official one or wait for broader compatibility. The AppSumo listing mentions they're taking suggestions for additional payment providers, so if you need a different gateway, let them know. For most new stores, Stripe or PayPal will cover the vast majority of use cases, but it's worth checking before you buy.

Customer Cancellation Process

When WP Subscription is installed, it adds a "Subscriptions" tab to the default WooCommerce My Account page. Customers can view all their active subscriptions, see payment details, next billing dates, and the payment method being used — though it doesn't show the last four digits of the card, which would be a helpful addition.

Cancellation is straightforward: customers click a cancel button and their subscription moves to a "pending cancellation" status, meaning they won't be charged again but retain access until the current billing period ends. If they change their mind before the next payment date, a single click reactivates the subscription. You can also configure whether customers are allowed to self-cancel or whether they need to contact support, which is a toggle in the product subscription settings.

Bugs and Rough Edges

No review would be complete without talking about the bugs, and WP Subscription has a few that are hard to ignore. The most visible one: when you navigate to the Subscriptions tab on the My Account page, the entire site navigation menu breaks. Links point to the wrong pages and the menu structure gets hijacked. Navigate away from the subscriptions page and everything returns to normal. It's a bizarre bug that's hard to explain technically, but it's very noticeable.

There are also some smaller polish issues. The "Add to Cart" button text is supposed to change to "Subscribe" for subscription products, but it didn't update in testing. The word "cancel" is misspelled in one of the settings. And WP Subscription adds its own top-level menu item in the WordPress admin sidebar while also appearing nested under WooCommerce — both links go to the same place, and you can't remove the duplicate in settings. These are the kinds of things that suggest the plugin still needs some fit-and-finish work.

Admin Dashboard and Reporting

The admin interface gives you a clear overview of all subscriptions, their statuses, and the ability to take manual actions like canceling a subscription on behalf of a customer. Every subscription is linked to a real WooCommerce order, so you can click through to see full order details and notes from the checkout process.

The reporting dashboard is decent — you can see how many active subscribers you have, your revenue total for the current month, and a projection for next month. Renewal settings default to automatic (which is what most store owners will want), but there's a manual option if you prefer customers to actively resubscribe each billing cycle. It's not the most feature-rich reporting suite, but it covers the essentials.

Role Management and Membership Limitations

WP Subscription includes a basic role management feature tied to the WordPress user role system. When someone purchases a subscription, they can be assigned a specific role (like "Subscriber"), and when their subscription ends, they can be reassigned to another role (like "Customer"). This works with any role management plugin you already have installed on your WordPress site.

That said, if you're looking to use WP Subscription as a full membership plugin — locking down content and making it available only to active subscribers — you'll need additional plugins to handle the content restriction side. WP Subscription is designed to handle recurring payments, not content gating. Think of it as the billing engine, not the membership platform.

Plugin Ownership and Future Concerns

It's worth noting that WP Subscription appears to have recently changed hands. The plugin was originally developed by an individual developer, and it now appears to be owned by Converse Lab, the same company behind ThriveDesk (a customer support tool that was itself a popular lifetime deal). The WPSubscription.co website confirms this connection.

This isn't necessarily good or bad — it depends on how actively the new team invests in development. But a recently acquired product often means there's a transition period where the new team is getting up to speed, fixing existing issues, and deciding which features to prioritize. If you're buying in now, you're betting that this team will continue improving the plugin and addressing the rough edges.

Final Verdict: Is WP Subscription Worth It?

If you're tired of paying $279 per year for WooCommerce Subscriptions and your subscription needs are relatively straightforward — recurring billing, customer self-cancellation, basic reporting — WP Subscription is a solid alternative at a fraction of the cost. The core functionality works well, and the lifetime pricing makes the math easy.

The caveats are real, though. There's no way to set a fixed number of charges (split pays), the plugin has some visible bugs like the navigation menu issue, and it only supports Stripe, PayPal, and Paddle. If you're processing hundreds of thousands in monthly subscription revenue, the official WooCommerce plugin is still the safer bet. But if you're just getting started or running a smaller operation, WP Subscription is probably good enough — just keep in mind that switching subscription platforms later is never a trivial undertaking.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.