Restock Ops pricing: Starter vs Pro and the location limit

Most purchase order apps price on volume: so many orders a month, so many SKUs, so many users. Restock Ops does not. Both plans give you unlimited purchase orders, suppliers, receipts and staff, and the thing you pay more for is the number of Shopify locations the app will write inventory to. Starter is $19 a month for one location. Pro is $39 a month for up to five, and adds transfers between them. Every plan starts with a 14 day free trial, billed through Shopify on your normal invoice.

That is the whole price list, and it fits in a paragraph on purpose. This post is about the part that generates questions: what counts as a location, which one Starter picks, what the app does with locations it is not allowed to touch, and what happens on the day you move up or down.

The two plans side by side

Read the table from the bottom up and the pattern is clear: nothing in the day to day of ordering and receiving is held back on Starter. If you buy stock for one shop or one warehouse, Starter is the complete product. Pro exists because the moment a second location is involved, three new jobs appear (receiving into the right place, moving stock between places, and counting each place separately) and each of them needs the app to know about more than one location.

What counts as a location

A location, for the plan limit, is an active location in your Shopify admin under Settings, then Locations. Deactivated locations are ignored entirely, so a store that closed a pop-up shop last year and left the location switched off is not paying for it. Fulfilment service locations created by apps count if Shopify lists them as active, because inventory can live there, so a store with one shop and a 3PL app is a two location store for this purpose.

The app reads the list fresh from Shopify rather than keeping its own, so adding or deactivating a location in the admin is reflected on the Plan page the next time it loads. There is nothing to sync and nothing to tell us.

Which location Starter uses

On Starter the app works at exactly one location, and it picks it in a fixed order. If you have set a default purchase order location in Settings, that is the one. If you have not, it is the first active location Shopify returns, which is normally the original shop address. The Plan page states the result plainly, as "Restock Ops writes inventory at: Main warehouse", so there is never a question about where a receipt will land.

This means a Starter store with two locations is not stuck with whichever one Shopify lists first. Change the default location in Settings, as described in the settings post, and the allowed location changes with it. What you cannot do on Starter is have both: a receipt is always written to the one allowed location, and purchase orders cannot pick a different destination.

What the app does with locations beyond the limit

Locations past the limit are not hidden, they are locked. The Plan page, the home page, the purchase orders list and the stocktakes list all show a short line naming them: "Not on your plan: Outlet, Pop-up. Upgrade to Pro to use up to five locations, or change the default location in Settings." They do not appear as a destination when you create a purchase order, as a location for a stocktake, or as a filter on the reorder report.

Nothing is deleted or modified. Inventory at a locked location stays exactly as it is in Shopify, and the app simply never writes there. Receipts that would have been split across locations go to the allowed one, which is why a multi location store on Starter will see numbers drift at the other sites; the post on purchase order destinations explains what receiving into the wrong location looks like and how to correct it.

On Pro the same ordering applies, with the default location first and then the rest of the active list, up to five. A store with six or more active locations sees the sixth and onward locked in the same way. We have deliberately not built a plan above Pro yet; if that is you, tell us which locations matter and we will talk.

How the trial and billing work

Until you pick a plan the app runs as Starter: one location, everything else unlocked. The Plan page says so with a "No subscription yet" notice and a Choose a plan button. That button opens Shopify's own plan picker in the admin, not a page of ours, and the subscription you approve there appears on your Shopify bill next to your Shopify plan. The 14 day trial starts when you approve, and the Plan page shows the exact end date until it passes.

The plan itself is something the app reads back from Shopify every time, not something it stores. That has a practical consequence: uninstalling and reinstalling the app does not reset a paid plan, and a store that moved to a new owner keeps the subscription the store has. If Shopify's billing service cannot be reached for a moment, the Plan page says it could not reach Shopify billing and asks you to reload rather than guessing.

Cancelling is done from the same Shopify picker, or from the Apps page in the admin. The Plan page then shows the date the current period ends, and the app keeps the plan's locations until that date.

Moving between plans

• Starter to Pro: locked locations unlock as soon as Shopify confirms the new subscription, usually within seconds of approving it. Open a purchase order and the destination picker now lists them. Transfers appear in the navigation. Nothing needs re-entering.
• Pro to Starter: the default location stays allowed and the others lock. Open purchase orders addressed to a now locked location can still be viewed, but receiving against them is not possible until the destination is one the plan allows, so finish receiving before you downgrade or change the default first.
• Changing the default location on either plan: the allowed list is recomputed from the new default, so on Starter this is how you move the app from one site to another without touching the subscription.

When Pro pays for itself

The honest arithmetic is this. Pro costs $20 a month more than Starter, which is about forty minutes of anyone's time. If a second location means you are currently fixing one wrongly placed receipt a week, or walking stock between a shop and a storeroom without a record of it, Pro is cheaper than the mistakes by the second week. If the second location is a 3PL that receives your purchase orders and you never count or move stock yourself, Starter pointed at that 3PL is probably all you need.

The transfers feature is the other half of the decision and deserves its own line. A transfer in Restock Ops moves units from one of your locations to another with a shipment record, so inventory leaves A and arrives at B with a date and a count at each end. Stores do this with a notebook or a spreadsheet for years before paying for a tool; the day they usually stop is the first stocktake that cannot explain where forty units went.

A short checklist before choosing

• Count the active locations under Settings, then Locations. One means Starter. Two to five means decide whether you receive, count or move stock at more than one of them.
• If you will stay on Starter with several locations, set the default purchase order location in Settings before your first receipt, and make sure your suppliers deliver there.
• Deactivate locations you no longer use. They are not counted, and they stop appearing in the locked list.
• Use the 14 days to run a real purchase order end to end, including a partial receipt, at every location you expect to use. The limit is the only thing the trial does not let you test around, so test on the plan you expect to keep.

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