Migrate from WooCommerce Subscriptions to Milo (Free Guide)

If you run a subscription store on WooCommerce, you’ve probably paid the WooCommerce Subscriptions tax: $279 a year, every year, just to keep recurring billing running. Here’s the good news: you don’t have to keep paying it.

Here’s the good news: you can move off it. Milo Subscriptions is a free, modern alternative, it’s on WordPress.org, and it ships with a built-in migrator that brings your existing subscriptions across, usually in an afternoon, without your customers re-entering their cards.

This guide walks through why store owners are switching, and exactly how the migration works.

Why store owners are leaving WooCommerce Subscriptions

It’s rarely one thing. It’s the stack of them:

$279/year, forever. For a lot of stores, that’s pure overhead on a feature that should be table stakes.
Gateway lock-in. The “official” path increasingly pushes you toward a single payments stack. If you use Stripe, PayPal, Mollie or Square directly, you want a tool that works with your gateway, not around it.
A dated admin. Managing subscriptions still feels like 2015, slow list tables, clunky screens.

Meet Milo: free core, modern, and multi-gateways

Milo Subscriptions is a complete subscriptions plugin for WooCommerce, rebuilt on modern WordPress:

Free core, on WordPress.org. Subscription products, free trials, sign-up fees, plan switching with proration, a self-service customer portal, Blocks checkout, HPOS, 17 languages.
Your gateways, your way. Payments run through the free Milo Payments plugin (Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, Square in one place), or keep your existing recurring-capable gateway with the Any Gateway add-on.
A modern admin that’s actually fast to work in.
Standalone mode, sell subscriptions even without a full WooCommerce store.

Instead of a $279 license, the model is simple: the core is free, Milo Payments takes a small 1% commission on what it processes (or use your own gateway), and a few optional paid add-ons exist for stores that need extras. You only pay in proportion to what you actually sell.

“”But migrating sounds risky.”

It isn’t.

This is the objection that keeps people stuck, so let’s kill it.

Milo ships with a built-in migrator designed specifically for stores coming from WooCommerce Subscriptions (and WP Swings). It brings across:

your subscriptions, customers, and billing schedules,
the saved payment methods, so renewals keep charging automatically, customers never re-enter their cards,
with a preflight check that verifies the matching Milo Payments gateway is connected to the right account before you start.

Connect the same Stripe/PayPal/Mollie/Square account you already use, and your existing tokens keep working. Most stores migrate in an afternoon.

The migration, step by step

Install Milo Subscriptions (free, from your Plugins screen) and Milo Payments.
Connect your gateway in Milo Payments, the same account your current subscriptions already charge.
Open Milo → Import and run the migrator. It reads your existing WooCommerce Subscriptions data and runs a preflight check.
Review the dry run, then migrate. Your subscriptions, schedules, and saved payment methods come across.
Verify in the new admin: statuses, next-payment dates, and payment methods. Run the built-in Health Check to confirm nothing drifted.

That’s it. Renewals keep firing on schedule, on the same cards.

Is Milo right for you?

We’re not going to pretend Milo does everything WooCommerce Subscriptions does on day one, no serious tool would. The fundamentals are here today, and the long tail is closing quickly, just follow the changelog and you’ll see it move.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but with the right craftsmen, nothing stays out of reach.

If you rely on one very specific WCS-only behavior, check the feature comparison first. Otherwise, the gap that actually matters, free vs $279/year, is already closed.

Get started

Stop renting your subscriptions. Own them.