Appstle℠ Subscriptions App

This app is like a constantly ticking time bomb. All their app changes are done in real time, so your customers will have a front-row seat to some real messy changes until the developers finally get it right. Which they rarely do, because aside from a very reckless, sluggish team of developers, they have no marketer or designer to explain to them what a good customer journey is. So it falls upon us to try to explain to them things such as why not having quantity selectors in a build-a-box and forcing the customers to go in and out of every individual item just to add them to a pseudo-cart only to then proceed to a real one is a terrible customer journey. The app’s architecture and design are a total mess. You have the regular subscription plan, normally you can choose a build-a-box option, but here, you have to stack that option on top of an existing plan, and for some reason you can enter a discount in both places. And here where it gets even messier: if you enter the discount in the subscription plan, it's built into the price, but you can't have a compare price, and if you enter it in the build-a-box extension, it's entered at the checkout as a discount code. And to make matters even worse, any product added into the build-a-box will forcefully have its own subscription widget, and the only way around it is to disable ALL widgets everywhere. As for their recklessness, here are a few examples: - overriding basic Shopify css elements (your visa, mastercard and other payment logos suddenly line up vertically)
- when I tell them about that, they go ahead and ADD more messy code to override the code that’s overriding Shopify’s default
- whenever they add a new element, there’s no translation field for it, so if your shop runs in another language, expect English words to always pop up randomly.
- subscription widgets aren’t automatically enabled for collections, and there’s no install repository where you can get the code and do it yourself immediately, you have to wait for their team to send you that snippet. (and the response time and/or useful feedback drops dramatically once your trial period ends.)
- and when I did get the code it was in broken HTML, so I am thankful I told them to send that to me and not have them run that on our store somewhere. - as mentioned above, all the live changes done without informing us and us having a ‘code red’ every single time. - irresponsible, misinformed feedback: even questions such as “do your subscription + loyalty discounts stack up or are they multiplied by one another?” don’t get a correct answer and you literally have to run the math for them to show their answer didn’t make sense. I could go on and on… In short: unintuitive, unreliable and extremely time-consuming.

This app has really stressed me out. I want to offer our customers a pre-pay subscription option, where we win with cash-flow, and they win with a product discount. However the shipping profiles / settings do not make any sense, as I don't want them to get free deliveries that I don't deem them to be entitled to.
I am told it's not possible to create a pre-pay option where our current website delivery charges are applied (free delivery when you spend £40). With the pre-pay option, if a customer spends £40 total spread across 3x deliveries (i.e. we spend 3x the amount on deliveries - about £8 x 3) they get free delivery, which is exactly NOT what I want as we just loose money (if we spend £8 on each delivery, it means we spend £24 delivery for a total pre-pay order of £40). I need them to spend at least £40 for each DELIVERY (so that's £120 total for 3x separate delivery slots) to get free delivery. But apparently this is not possible, which I find really unhelpful.
Some of the chat people are helpful, but it takes longer than expected for them to reply and one just left the chat today and was marked as 'away' without warning. I wish there was a phone number I could call so someone could just talk it through with me.
Also, when you've created a new delivery profile, these can't be edited. So if you get one little thing wrong that you want to change, you have to do it all again.

Looks great but pointless as it does not work with sage pay UK payments. This should be flagged wasted a lot of time and disappointed customers

My company has been using this app since September 2022. In that time, our experience has been awful. Do not be fooled by the many 5 star reviews. We went with this app because of the "excellent reviews".

Here are the reasons why you shouldn't go with this app:
The support team is completely uneducated on the app and could not help me with any issues I brought up from the start. We switched from WooCommerece to Shopify and Appstle promised that we could transfer our previous subscriptions over. The process was on-going even after launching our Shopify site. The support team kept telling us different things and promising a quick turn around, none of which happened.

Additionally, the company behind the app is incredibly dishonest about what the app can do and how much it costs. And to make matters worse, the company frequently makes changes to the app without any warning. These changes often break the app, leaving users like myself frustrated and unable to operate our businesses effectively. It's incredibly frustrating to have to constantly worry about whether or not the app will work the way it's supposed to.

They recently changed what customization you have control of based on what tier you pay for without telling us. So our widget broke and lost all of our branding. When I contacted support, they asked if we had made any changes to the widget and they didn't understand what "branding" is. I had to dig around the app to discover that they had made this change. Now they want us to pay 3 times what we are currently paying them on a monthly basis.

Lastly, the app has a horrid UI/UX design. The layout is confusing and difficult to navigate, and the overall user experience is not enjoyable. It feels like the developers put little thought into making the app user-friendly, which is unacceptable given the high cost of the subscription.

Overall, I would not recommend this app to anyone. It's not worth the headache and hassle that comes with it. These are just a few issues we have had over the last 6 months, the list is a lot longer. Save your money and look for a better option elsewhere.

Do not migrate to Appstle from another system! The migration has been a disaster and we have lost tens of customers and a lot of revenue.

Appstle's customer service are helpful, and Muhammad in particular is very good, but the software is appalling. Even though it was more expensive, I should DEFINITELY have stayed with Bold.

Appstle is not user friendly at all and has very little direction to set up a recurring subscription. I followed the tutorial that was sent to me by support and it still charged my customers everyday for three days after they subscribed to my monthly subscription. I highly do not recommend

I really am so confused as to how this app has so many reviews. I switched over from recharge to Appstle thinking I could save a few bucks but this app has lost me thousands of dollars. Their platform is outdated and very limited. They also failed to transfer over 100 of my recharge customers and their customer support doesn't seem to care. The customer portal for my customers also doesn't connect and is very limited. You are also unable to set up influencers on a free box without a card on file or jumping through major hoops and it can not be reoccurring. If you sell a monthly subscription box, do NOT GET THIS APP!!! STAY AWAY!! If you sell single products on a subscription then this app should work fine.

But it's been a massive headache, they failed to take my recharge transfer seriously and I have been losing money every month with constant errors to my customers that were transferred and not transferred correctly and even simple things and users not being able to login to their portal to update their shipping address.

STAY AWAY! Not worth saving money. These reviews have to be fake. Their customer support is all outsourced from India.

- Installation took a entire week of me staying up to midnight asking them whether the installation had completed
- They only work PCT time zone which meant i wouldnt get a response until after 6.30pm
- Today after 5 days of correct orders they charged 116 wrong subscriptions to customers, taking hundreds of pounds from them without their consent. My customers are furious, I have to refund all of them manually one by one, some have cancelled their custom with me.
They have ruined my website, caused me to lose 90% of my customers. I do not recommend this app and I strongly recommend you avoid them if you value your business and your customers.

Reading through the reviews of Appstle overall you get the impression of a very slick app and support. This unfortunately has not been my experience at all. The support at Appstle have not been able to help me to migrate from Bold Subscriptions which is one of the top shopify apps for subscriptions. Every day I try (this has been a multi-day exercise) a new person appears in support. So the conversation starts from zero again. I had hoped this would lead to someone new who understand the migration process and how to do it from Bold, but no one seems to know. I'm guessing that all the reviews for this app are from people who haven't used subscriptions before. So perhaps the overly positive rating is due to a lack of experience in subscriptions. It looked a bit suspicious with the 5 rating, and some reviews stating that they changed their review after the install. If you are aiming to migrate from any other subscription app I'd think about it twice. The app may work in itself, but if you can't get it set up with your existing subscribers smoothly - then I (you'll) never know. More detail on the support given for migration:
1. They ask you for two files but don't explain how to populate or get them from your existing systems
2. The two files contain subscription and customer data in a specific format they want (problem 1 - you'd think a company trying to acquire new customers like me would put some time into understanding how to get the migration data they need - but they haven't - no one in the company knows where to get the data)
3. I've returned countless files and been told sometimes they are partially correct, and other times (amusingly) the same files are now all incorrect
4. You can ask as many questions as you like but it seems they've been told to be friendly but give no actual support. So you get friendly messages that waste your time and apologise for not being helpful. Extremely disappointing. Recommendation to Appstle - take a note from any tech startup - work on your onboarding process and make it as easy as possible. Not impossible. It seems you're investing your time in the wrong places if you want to grow and take market share from other subscription apps.

Updated review Sep 28 2021
After working with the app for 2 months and with the support team, I've decided to update my review. One thing I will mention straight off the bat is that the level of support and attention went down considerably when the Appstle team got their 5 star rating. I am (still) experiencing bugs in their app and was promised a fix 3 weeks ago, but none to be found. This is after multiple emails, chats and follow-ups. I had to repeat explanations of the same issues to the support team multiple times, and there were one or two moments where something was "fixed" that wasn't a problem in the first place. Although I wanted to work together to find a solution and make this app viable for my store, the Appstle team is not meeting me halfway, so I am currently searching for a replacement app. -------------
Original Review
August 3 2021
What makes Appstle Subs so good is the support that goes along with it. There were a couple of tweaks I wanted to execute and Dharmik was a great help with that (super patient too). I will say that we are not yet live with this functionality, so we have yet to see how it works in practice, including the customer management piece of it. Will keep everyone posted on how that goes, but in the meantime, I'm satisfied.