Trial MRR vs paying MRR for a Shopify app

A new install that accepts a subscription is not the same as a shop that has paid. During a trial the charge is accepted and the price is known, but no money has moved. If you add that price into the same MRR as billed shops, a launch looks like revenue and the week after the trial looks like a crash.

Trial MRR is a price, not cash

The merchant picked a plan. Shopify recorded an activation. Until an AppSubscriptionSale exists for that shop, you have not been paid for this period. The monthly price is still worth watching, because it is what you will earn if the trial converts. It is a pipeline number.

A subscription sale is the line between the two

AppDeck marks a paid subscription as a trial when three things are true. The price is above zero. No AppSubscriptionSale has been recorded for that shop since the charge was activated. And the activation is still inside a 7-day window. The first subscription sale after activation moves the shop into paying MRR.

That 7-day window is AppDeck’s reading of Partner data. It is not your app’s trial setting inside Shopify. If your listing uses a 14-day trial, shops can still be on trial in Shopify after AppDeck has stopped calling them trials. Use the sale, not the calendar, when the two disagree. No sale means they have not paid.

What goes wrong when you mix them

• A Product Hunt day or a changelog spike inflates MRR, then “churns” when trials end without paying.
• A pricing test looks successful because more people start trials, while the number of shops that pay stays flat.
• Annual plans on trial look enormous if you forget to divide by 12 and you also forget they have not been billed.

The pair of numbers to keep

Keep paying MRR and trial MRR on the same screen, plus the count of shops in each. Paying MRR is the business. Trial MRR is the next few weeks. The gap between installs, trials, and paying shops is the conversion story, which is separate from how the monthly amount is calculated.

AppDeck shows both, and lets you include or exclude trials in the headline MRR. The setup is on how it works.