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.

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.

Stack	WooCommerce.com	Milo
Core subscriptions plugin	$299 / year	Free
Failed payment recovery	+ AutomateWoo $159 / year	Add-on or In Bundle
Memberships gating	+ WC Memberships $199 / year	Add-on or In Bundle
Recurring coupons	Included in core license	Add-on or In Bundle
MRR / churn / LTV analytics	Not included, requires WC Analytics	Add-on or In Bundle
Gifting subscriptions	No official option	Add-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 Blocks editor as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought. Full WooCommerce Blocks checkout compatibility on day one.
• DataViews-powered admin, the same sortable, filterable, searchable interface WordPress is shipping in core. No more 2014-era admin tables.
• A complete REST API covering every subscription operation, public and admin-facing. Build whatever integration you want. We’re not gatekeeping the data.
• Full HPOS compatibility. High-performance order storage works out of the box.

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:

• Memberships – gate content, products, downloads, and pages behind active subscriptions
• Gifting – let customers buy subscriptions for someone else, with custom delivery dates
• Subscription Coupons – recurring discounts, prepayment incentives, retention offers
• Failed Payment Retry – smart retry schedules that recover real revenue without manual intervention
• Advanced Analytics – MRR, churn, LTV, retention cohorts, all built directly into the admin
• Stock Management – reserve inventory for active subscribers so renewals never sell out
• Scheduled Start Dates – let customers pick when their first billing cycle begins
• Split Shipping – ship a single subscription order across multiple addresses
• Download Limits – cap downloadable file access by subscription status
• All Products for Subscriptions – add subscription pricing to any existing simple product
• Gravity Forms – sell subscriptions through Gravity Forms checkout

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:

• Milo Subscriptions (core)
• Milo Payments (gateway)
• Migration tool from WooCommerce Subscriptions (in core)

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

• Memberships, Gifting, Subscription Coupons, Failed Payment Retry, Advanced Analytics, Stock Management, Scheduled Start Dates, Split Shipping, Download Limits, Gravity Forms

Optional, transaction-based:

• By default, Milo Subscriptions routes subscription checkouts through Milo Payments. That’s how we pay for the work, and the 1% commission is the model that keeps the core plugin free. But default is not mandatory. We ship the Any Gateway add-on. Install it and Milo Subscriptions accepts any WooCommerce-compatible recurring gateway: the official Stripe gateway plugin, Authorize.Net, Braintree, GoCardless, or any other plugin that supports recurring tokens. Zero commission to us. No questions asked. We’d rather earn your business by being useful than by trapping you behind a paywall. If Milo Payments is not the right fit for your store, the escape is one free install away. This is also a transparency commitment. Most plugins that lock you into a specific payment processor do so silently We’re telling you exactly where the gate is and giving you the key for free.

What’s next

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

• More add-ons at the same Bundle-included price. We have three more in active development.
• Deeper integrations with a growing list of partners.

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 support@milosubscriptions.com.

Try Milo today

Three ways in:

• Install free: Download Milo Subscriptions from WordPress.org
• Get the Bundle: milosubscriptions.com/product/all-add-ons-bundle
• See the comparison: milosubscriptions.com/milo-vs-woocommerce-subscriptions

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 support@milosubscriptions.com 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.