The Best Free Store Apps to Start With (and Their Real Limits)

"Free plan" is the most abused phrase in the app stores. Sometimes it means a genuine tier you can operate on indefinitely; sometimes it means fourteen days of everything followed by a paywall. Before you provision a new store, it pays to know which is which.

We went through the twelve apps in our kit and sorted them honestly. Seven have real free tiers. Five have free trials — useful for evaluation, but not a way to run. This roundup covers the seven, their actual limits as published, and the specific trigger that should make you reach for a card.

One ground rule: we are an aggregator. Limits and prices below come from published pricing and the app listings we track, cross-checked against what users report in reviews — not from our own store. Caps change; when a number is load-bearing for your budget, confirm it on the app's current pricing page.

The genuine free tiers

Judge.me — the workhorse

The strongest free tier in the set. Unlimited review requests on the free plan means a new store can run review collection at full volume without touching a paywall — the thing most competitors gate first. Aggregated user reviews consistently credit the free plan as the reason small stores start here, and the 130+ integrations mean it rarely blocks a stack decision. Upgrade trigger: you want the fuller widget customization and features of the paid tier — which is a flat $15/month, not a contact-count ladder. Full breakdown in our Judge.me review.

Klaviyo — free until your list is real

Free to 250 contacts, with the segmentation and automation machinery available from the start. The cap is the point: 250 contacts is enough to prove your welcome and abandoned-cart flows convert, and not one contact more. Upgrade trigger: contact 251. Paid starts at $20/month and scales by list size, so audit your list before you grow into it — dead contacts cost real money here.

Omnisend — all features, capped volume

Omnisend's free tier is structured the opposite way: every feature is included — the prebuilt ecommerce automations, email plus SMS and web push — with the caps on contacts and send volume rather than capability. That makes it the best free tier for learning what a full email platform does. Upgrade trigger: a campaign that converts is hitting the send cap. Paid entry is $11.20/month, the lowest of the three email platforms we track.

Kit — the creator outlier

Formerly ConvertKit. Free up to 10,000 subscribers, which is not a typo and is by far the most generous ceiling in the set. The trade: Kit is built audience-first — landing pages, forms, a visual automation builder — rather than commerce-first, so deep store automations are lighter than Klaviyo's or Omnisend's. Upgrade trigger: honestly, for most stores it is not the subscriber cap — it is needing paid-tier features or outgrowing the creator shape. Paid starts at $33/month. Best fit: stores where the audience came before the catalog.

PageFly — a free page slot

A free plan to start, with slot-based pricing after — you pay for the page slots you publish, from $24/month. The free plan is enough to build and ship your first custom landing page and find out whether a builder earns its keep. Upgrade trigger: you have more than a couple of pages carrying paid traffic. Until then, the stock theme plus one free slot covers a surprising amount of ground.

Zendrop — free to browse, paid to automate

A free plan to start, with the catalog (1M+ products) open for sourcing research. The core value — automated fulfillment — sits on paid tiers from $49/month. Treat the free tier as a scouting pass: validate that the products and suppliers exist for your niche before the subscription starts. Upgrade trigger: real order volume, where automated routing saves actual hours. See our dropshipping roundup for how it stacks against Spocket.

Triple Whale — the free dashboard

The Founders Dash tier is free and gives a small store its one-screen view of performance. Paid tiers price by store volume and add the pixel-based attribution machinery. Upgrade trigger: you are spending on ads and need attribution beyond what platform dashboards claim. Before that, the free tier is the whole job.

The five that are trials, not tiers

For completeness — these are worth evaluating, but budget for them from day one if you adopt them:

• Loox (reviews) — from $14.99/month; free trial only. The photo-first alternative to Judge.me.
• Gorgias (helpdesk) — from $10/month, priced by tickets; trial only.
• Spocket (dropshipping) — from $39.99/month; 7-day trial.
• SE Ranking (SEO) — from $129/month; 14-day full-featured trial.
• Recharge (subscriptions) — from $99/month plus 1.49% + 19¢ per transaction; the 60-day free trial is unusually long, but the meter runs eventually.

The pattern worth copying

Stack the free tiers that cover jobs (Judge.me + one email platform + Triple Whale), use trials strictly to evaluate against a decision you have already framed, and upgrade only when a named limit blocks revenue. A free tier you have outgrown is the best signal in ecommerce — it means the store is pulling.