Stay AI pricing 2026: $499/mo flat, plus fees — is it worth it?

Stay AI sells one thing the subscription category mostly hand-waves about: AI-driven retention with a number attached. Its pricing reflects a platform built for brands that already have subscription revenue worth protecting — a single $499/mo plan plus 1% and $0.19 per subscription order, with no cheaper tier to start on. Whether that floor is justified depends on whether the AI retention layer actually moves your churn.

This page does the real math on the stacked fees and puts the OLIPOP churn numbers in context. Verified 2026-06-04 from stay.ai/pricing.

Bottom line up front

• Best for: Shopify and Shopify Plus DTC brands with meaningful subscription revenue that want AI-driven retention.
• Avoid if: you’re pre-revenue, seeking the lowest-cost option, or not on Shopify.
• Standout strength: AI retention with a verifiable result (the OLIPOP 26% churn / 35% revenue case), plus independence from any parent company.
• Biggest weakness: the $499/mo floor with no cheaper tier — small brands have nowhere to start.

The pricing in numbers (verified 2026-06-04)

There’s a 30-day trial, no free plan, and — importantly — no lower tier. The $499/mo applies whether you do 200 subscription orders or 20,000. That single-tier structure is the clearest signal of who Stay AI is for: established subscription brands, not first-timers.

What Stay AI actually costs at scale

Stack the three layers. At 5,000 subscription orders a month, $0.19/order is $950 — nearly double the base — before you add 1% of subscription GMV. As order volume climbs, the per-order and percentage layers dominate, and the $499 base becomes the small part of the bill. Model your order count and GMV, not the headline price: the real cost is volume-driven even though the entry number is flat.

This is the same fee structure shape as Skio ($499–$599 + 1% + $0.20/order); the difference is what the AI layer does with the spend.

The AI retention claim — with a number

Most subscription apps claim “reduce churn.” Stay AI’s differentiator is that it ships a named, verifiable result. Per the company’s own published case study, OLIPOP reduced active churn by 26% and grew subscription revenue 35% after migrating off Recharge. In a category usually full of platitudes, that’s a specific data point you can pressure-test against your own churn baseline.

The AI layer behind it:

• RetentionEngine — AI-personalized cancel flows that rank save offers (pauses, discounts, surprise gifts) per subscriber.
• WinbackEngine — automated reactivation triggered by churn-risk signals.
• Predictive churn alerts — flags high-risk subscribers before they cancel.
• Self-optimizing A/B testing — tests that auto-optimize as winners emerge, built on proprietary reinforcement-learning models.

The retention math is the whole value case: if Stay AI cuts your churn by even a fraction of the OLIPOP figure, the $499/mo plus fees returns multiples at sufficient subscription revenue.

The independence advantage

A 2026-specific point: Stay AI is independent. Its closest comparable, Skio, was acquired by Recharge in April 2026, which puts a roadmap-convergence question on new Skio deployments. Stay AI carries no such overhang — its AI-retention roadmap answers to itself. For a brand choosing a subscription platform to build on for years, vendor independence is a real input, and it’s one Stay AI has and Skio currently doesn’t.

Operators who migrated are positive:

We moved from ReCharge to Stay over a year ago and it was absolutely the right move.

— Stay AI customer review

The forecasting tools are incredibly helpful for planning inventory and understanding upcoming demand.

— Shopify App Store review, 2026

Stay AI sits at 5.0 from roughly 140 Shopify App Store reviews. There’s no consolidated G2 footprint, so the App Store rating is the load-bearing third-party signal.

When the math works — and when it doesn’t

It pays back when:

• You have established subscription revenue where a churn reduction returns multiples of the cost.
• AI-driven retention experiments and predictive churn are the capabilities you actually need.
• Vendor independence matters for a multi-year platform decision.

It doesn’t pay back when:

• You’re pre-revenue or very small — there’s no tier below $499/mo to grow into.
• You’re chasing the lowest-cost subscription option — the floor plus fees is high.
• You’re not on Shopify — Stay AI is out of scope.

Alternatives worth considering

• Recharge — the category incumbent with the largest ecosystem; the platform Stay AI’s case study migrates brands away from.
• Skio — strong native-checkout UX at a similar price, now a Recharge company (weigh the acquisition).
• Loop Subscriptions — independent, with no per-order flat fee — a different unit-economics posture.

The full set is on the Stay AI alternatives page, and the full Stay AI review covers the AI retention depth.

Final verdict

• Rating: 9.1/10 (matches the full review) — a focused AI-retention platform, priced for established subscription brands.
• Best for: Shopify subscription brands with meaningful revenue that want AI-driven retention.
• The real cost: $499/mo plus 1% plus $0.19/order — at scale the fees exceed the base, so model your volume.
• The differentiators: a verifiable churn result (OLIPOP) and vendor independence — the latter increasingly relevant against Skio’s post-Recharge roadmap question.