Introducing Milo: Free Subscriptions for WooCommerce

Today we’re launching Milo Subscriptions and Milo Payments.

Both are free. Milo Subscriptions live on WordPress.org and ready to install. There’s also a paid add-on bundle for stores that need more, priced at $149 per year, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. That’s the entire pricing story. No upgrade ladders, no licensing chains, no surprises.

If you sell anything on a recurring basis through WooCommerce, this is for you.

Milo Subscriptions dashboard. The central place to handle your subscriptions.

The problem we built Milo to solve

If you’ve ever run a real subscription store on WooCommerce, you know how the bill builds.

The core subscriptions plugin from woocommerce.com is $299 a year. You add AutomateWoo for failed payment recovery, that’s another $159. You add WooCommerce Memberships to gate content, another $199. Before your store does anything beyond the basics, you’ve spent $657 a year on three extensions. And that’s before you’ve sold a single subscription.

That’s the moment a lot of small and mid-sized stores quietly walk away from the platform. Not because WooCommerce can’t do subscriptions, but because doing them well costs more than most stores can justify in year one.

We built Milo to fix that.

What launches today

Milo Subscriptions is the core plugin. It handles recurring billing, customer self-service, plan switching with proration, free trials, sign-up fees, mixed carts, variable subscription products, and full WooCommerce Blocks checkout support. Free, on WordPress.org. No license key. Cherry on the cake: Milo has a standalone mode in case you want to sell subscriptions without WooCommerce.

Milo Payments is our unified payment gateway plugin. One install gives you Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, and Square through a single admin interface, with one OAuth flow per provider, one place to disconnect, and a consistent settings UI across all four. Free. Optional 1% commission on transactions if you choose to use it. Second cherry on the cake: Milo Payments can be used as regular gateways for non subscription products.

The All Add-ons Bundle is $149 a year (limited period) and unlocks every premium Milo add-on, present and future. That includes Memberships, Gifting, Subscription Coupons, Failed Payment Retry, Advanced Analytics, Stock Management, Scheduled Start dates, Split Shipping, Download Limits, All products for subscriptions, and Gravity Forms checkout. Eleven add-ons today, more on the way, all included.

Individual add-ons are available a la carte starting at $19, for stores that only need one or two.

A migration tool ships free inside Milo Subscriptions. It imports existing WCS subscriptions, customers, billing schedules, and saved payment methods. We’ve tested it on stores with thousands of active subscriptions and it works without breaking anything.

The pricing in plain English

We get one question more than any other: “How do you make money if the core is free?”

Three ways.

The first is the All Add-ons Bundle at $149 per year. That’s the primary revenue line. Bundle customers get every premium add-on we ship, including future paid releases, for as long as their license is active. If you only need one or two add-ons, you’d pay less buying them individually. If you need three or more, the Bundle pays for itself the day you install it.

The second is Milo Payments, which charges a 1% commission on transactions (same as WooPayments) processed through it, on top of the standard Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, or Square fees. That’s it. No setup fees, no monthly minimum, no chargeback markup, no currency conversion surcharge beyond the underlying provider’s rate. That makes us cheaper than WooPayments for US customers.

The third is individual add-on sales for stores that don’t want the full Bundle.

You’ll notice none of those revenue lines gate the core plugin. You can install Milo Subscriptions today, run a subscription store on it forever, and pay us nothing. We’d prefer if you eventually wanted the Bundle or chose Milo Payments, but we’d rather earn that by being useful than by holding the core hostage.

The math, in real numbers

Here’s what a typical mid-sized subscription store actually pays.

StackWooCommerce.comMilo
Core subscriptions plugin$299 / yearFree
Failed payment recovery+ AutomateWoo $159 / yearAdd-on or In Bundle
Memberships gating+ WC Memberships $199 / yearAdd-on or In Bundle
Recurring couponsIncluded in core licenseAdd-on or In Bundle
MRR / churn / LTV analyticsNot included, requires WC AnalyticsAdd-on or In Bundle
Gifting subscriptionsNo official optionAdd-on or In Bundle
Year 1 total$657$149
Year 2 total$657 every year$149 every year

That’s $508 in savings every year, every year you run your store.

Side-by-side comparison page with the full detail: milosubscriptions.com/milo-vs-woocommerce-subscriptions.

Built on modern WordPress

The other reason to build Milo was technical. WCS shipped in 2013. The WordPress it was built for doesn’t exist anymore. Milo is fresh code, built on the WordPress of 2026.

That means:

The technical decisions are deliberate. We want Milo to be the plugin developers reach for when they want to customise, integrate, or extend. The REST API alone is going to make a lot of agency work easier.

A note from us

We spent more than a decade building WordPress plugins.

The pricing model is a choice. The thing we kept hearing from store owners was that the cost of doing subscriptions on WooCommerce was disproportionate to the size of their business. The plugin should not be the thing that gates you from running your store. That’s why the core is free and stays free.

If you’re starting a subscription business today, or you’ve been priced out of doing it well on WooCommerce, this is for you.

Subscription Health Check, free in the core

One thing we wanted from day one was a way to surface broken subscriptions before customers email you about them. Customer IDs that no longer resolve at the gateway. Payment methods that have expired. Renewal dates that drifted out of sync. Tokens that quietly invalidated months ago.

Milo Subscriptions ships with a built-in Health Check that scans every active subscription on a nightly schedule, and on demand from the admin. The findings appear in a dedicated tab with a sortable, filterable list of subscriptions that need attention. You see problems before customers send the support ticket.

This is usually the kind of thing you’d build custom for every serious subscription store, or pay a separate add-on for. In Milo, it’s part of the free core.

What’s already in the Bundle

For the $149 yearly Bundle, today on launch day, you get:

Eleven add-ons in the Bundle today. Every paid add-on we ship in the future, while your license is active, is also included automatically. No upgrade emails, no “that one’s a separate purchase,” no surprises.

What’s free, what’s paid

To make this crystal clear:

Free, forever:

Paid (Bundle for $149/year, or buy individually):

Optional, transaction-based:

What’s next

This is day one. The roadmap for the rest of 2026:

We’re not going to chase every feature request. We’d rather ship fewer things that work end-to-end than a long list of half-finished ones. If you have something specific you want, the fastest way to influence the roadmap is to email us at [email protected].

Try Milo today

Three ways in:

The Bundle comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. The core plugin is free with no credit card. If you’ve got questions about whether Milo is the right fit for your specific store, email us at [email protected] and we’ll talk through it.

Thanks

Building Milo would have taken twice as long without the support of a handful of people in the WordPress ecosystem who believed in the project before there was anything to see. Many of them are publishing their own posts about Milo this week. We’ve collected them on the Launch Partners page if you want to see what they have to say.

Welcome to Milo. Let’s build something good.