Making a subscriber stay for the first three months

There is a field for exactly this, and it does not do anything on its own.

If you have gone looking, you have probably already found minCycles — a minimum number of billing cycles, sitting right there on a selling plan in Shopify's subscription API since 2021. It looks like the setting you wanted. The first merchant to ask about it got an answer the same evening from a Shopify developer, and that answer is still the whole story:

Yes, it is possible to specifiy a minimum billing commitment on a selling plan by using SellingPlanRecurringBillingPolicyInput.minCycles.

— jbourassa, 9 February 2021

Note that Shopify will not enforce this rule: the application that drives the resulting subscription contract can still cancel at anytime.

— jbourassa, 9 February 2021

Weigh that source honestly: the account shows the forum's retired Shopify flair and no current staff badge, so read it as a Shopify developer answering in 2021 rather than a policy statement issued today. What keeps it the best answer available is that the reference does not say otherwise — it does not mention enforcement at all.

So the number is recorded and nothing checks it. Shopify's reference for that exact field says only "Minimum number of billing iterations." and does not discuss enforcement in either direction — which means the honest version of this is the staff reply, not the reference page.

Your subscriber can cancel, and Shopify built the button

This is the part worth being clear-eyed about before you shop for an app. Cancelling is not a gap in Shopify's subscriptions — it is a feature, documented and promoted. From their account a customer can "pause or cancel their subscription", alongside editing payment details, skipping an upcoming order and changing the shipping address. And when they do:

If customers cancel their subscription, then billing and delivery ends immediately. Canceling a subscription cannot be undone.

And it is not a button they have to go looking for. Shopify emails it to them before every single charge:

Shopify Subscriptions emails your customer 3 days before each recurring order is charged. The reminder gives the customer time to skip the upcoming order, update their payment details, or pause or cancel the subscription before the charge is made.

Read that again with a three-month commitment in mind. On the native app, the term you are trying to hold is working against a reminder that arrives, by design, three days before each of the payments you were counting on — and the same email offers skipping, which moves the date you expected money on without ending anything.

Shopify's own free Subscriptions app sells that capability on its listing in those words — "cancel, skip, or pause subscriptions". What its listing does not contain, anywhere, is a minimum term, a lock-in or a cycle cap. I looked for all three.

So if you are on the native app today, a three-month commitment is not a setting you have missed. It is not there.

Need the first three months to actually hold? Describe how the commitment should work →

Where the lock actually lives

The minimum term is real, and it lives inside the third-party app's own portal — the app decides whether to show your customer a cancel button before cycle four. That has two consequences people find out the hard way.

It is the app's rule, not the platform's. Nothing at Shopify's level refuses the cancellation; an app that stops honouring the setting, or a path around the app's portal, is a subscription that ends early.

And nobody advertises it. This is the strangest thing about this question, and it is why merchants assume the feature does not exist. Five subscription listings were read for this page, three of them re-checked word by word, and not one sells a minimum term — not Shopify's own, and not the two biggest independents. Appstle's listing carries 9,049 reviews and does not mention a minimum, a lock-in or a cycle cap anywhere; Seal's carries 3,145 and does not either. Yet both of those vendors' own documentation describes the feature plainly. Seal's manual offers "a minimum number of required payments before the customer can cancel, a maximum number of payments before the subscription is cancelled automatically". Appstle's help centre is more explicit still:

The value you choose represents the minimum number of required orders before a customer can cancel their subscription.

with the default stated right beside it: "By default, customers can cancel their subscriptions at any time after their first order."

In other words, the answer to your question is documented, shipped and invisible to the way you are looking for it — because you are comparing App Store listings, and it is not on them. Two conditions those pages attach that no App Store listing will ever show you. Seal's minimum sits specifically on its auto-charging rules, and those "require you to have the Shopify Payments, Authorize.net, ShopPay or at least PayPal Express set up in your shop" — so how you take money can decide whether the feature is open to you at all. And neither vendor says which paid tier it sits on. Ask both questions before you migrate a subscriber base.

Four merchants, five years, same question

Is it possible to set up a subscription plan with recurring payment every 1 month and delivery every 1 month but with a rule that impose a minimum engagement of three months for example?

— LeavyBabies, 9 February 2021

That is the thread the staff answer above sits in. It is not marked solved, and somebody came back to it three years later asking where to put the setting.

We have a monthly subscription that has a lock in period of 6 months. Is that possible to do?

— TJ-DF, 11 September 2024

Two days later the same merchant narrowed it to the question that actually matters — "Is this possible with the Shopify Subscriptions app?" — and never got a yes or a no. The reply pointed at third-party apps instead. Unsolved.

And the most recent one is not asking for a minimum at all; it is asking for the other end of the same field, which is where this gets expensive:

1. Set maximum billing cycles — Allow merchants to define how many times a subscription should charge (e.g., 5 months), after which it automatically stops. — RetroGame_Galaxy, 19 April 2026

A second merchant arrived the same afternoon to say what it costs them:

The lack of fixed-term subscriptions makes Shopify Subscriptions hard to use for installment plans. We've had to either manually cancel subscriptions or use third-party apps.

— Natbrown94, 19 April 2026

Unsolved, no staff reply. A fixed term has two ends — the earliest a customer may leave, and the point at which you stop charging them — and the native app has neither. The second one is the more dangerous to be missing, because a subscription that should have stopped at five payments and did not is a refund and an argument, not an inconvenience.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

You say what the commitment is and what should happen at both ends of it. "Anyone on the monthly box stays for three payments — if they try to stop before that, they see why and the date they can, instead of a cancel button, and after the sixth payment it stops charging them by itself and tells me."

Two things said plainly. The term is enforced by whatever holds the cancel path, so the first question is always which app runs your subscriptions — and that is a question about your store rather than about Shopify, which is why no page can answer it for you in advance. And the end of the term matters as much as the start: the complaint in the 2026 thread is not people leaving too early, it is charges that should have stopped and did not, and that half is a counter nobody is watching.

Which plans, how many cycles, what the customer is told when they try, what happens on the last payment, and who hears about it — all of it is yours to describe, and a person here has it working in your store within 24 hours.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Selling a three-month box that people leave in month one? Describe the commitment you need held →