WooCommerce Subscriptions 9.0 is here: what it means for merchants (and why we think subscriptions should be free)

What used to be a separate extension is now part of the core plugin, existing installations migrate automatically, and the standalone plugin can be safely deactivated.

As people who spent years inside WooCommerce, we think this is a good moment to step back and look at where subscriptions on WordPress are heading, and what it means for the merchants who actually run these stores.

What actually changed in 9.0

Credit where it is due: this is a merchant-friendly release. Working straight from the changelog, the notable pieces:

• Sell any product as a subscription, out of the box. You can now sell a product as a one-time purchase, a subscription, or both, with no separate plugin.
• Storewide subscription plans got better. Plans now support free trials, sign-up fees, and fixed-amount discounts. You can choose which storewide plans are assigned to a product, and disable one-time purchases on products that use those plans.
• Gifting now works with plan-based products, and bulk edit can update purchase options, so you can apply storewide plans to specific products in bulk (replacing the old “Limit to categories” option).
• Clearer scheduling. Expiration is now set as a number of payments (“Total payments”) rather than a length of time, and the billing-date-alignment settings (formerly Synchronization) were improved with clearer first-billing options.
• Better reporting. The Subscriptions by Product report now includes products sold via subscription plans.
• A batch of bug fixes, several of them HPOS-related (related orders no longer swept by the privacy eraser, renewal and switch query args now supported), plus fixes to role switching, gifted-renewal line items, and assorted PHP 8.1 warnings.

If you run a store on WooCommerce Subscriptions, 9.0 is worth installing.

The bigger signal

The interesting part is not any single feature. It is the direction.

For years, selling a normal product on subscription required a second paid extension. With 9.0, Automattic folded that capability into the core subscriptions plugin and made it free. That is a clear statement: flexible subscription products are table stakes, not a premium upsell.

We could not agree more. In fact, that conviction is exactly why Milo Subscriptions exists.

We have believed this from day one

Milo Subscriptions is a free subscriptions plugin for WooCommerce, built from the ground up on the WordPress of 2026. Selling subscription products, mixed carts (a subscription and a one-off item in the same cart), free trials, sign-up fees, and plan switching with proration have always been in the free core. Not behind an add-on, not behind a bundle, not behind a renewal fee.

So when WooCommerce Subscriptions moves toward “this should be built in and free,” it is moving toward where Milo already is. The difference is in how we got here. Milo was designed for today’s WordPress from the start, instead of a decade of features layered onto an older foundation. That shows up as a lighter plugin and a modern admin.

Where Milo goes further

If 9.0 has you reconsidering your subscriptions stack, here is what a free, modern alternative looks like.

Free core, fair economics. Milo’s core is free on WordPress.org. For payments, the companion Milo Payments plugin connects Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, and Square in one admin, with a simple 1% model and no monthly fee, instead of stitching together a gateway and extensions.

With or without WooCommerce. Milo has a standalone mode that sells recurring plans on any WordPress site, with no store, no products, and no cart required, just a subscribe button via a block or shortcode. That is a use case the WooCommerce-bound approach simply does not cover.

Operational tools built in. A nightly Subscription Health Check scans for expired cards, stale gateway tokens, and drifted renewal dates, and surfaces them before they turn into support tickets.

Your data stays yours. Subscriptions are stored as standard shop_subscription orders, exportable to CSV or JSON at any time, and the migration is reversible.

Being fair about it

None of this means you should rip out WooCommerce Subscriptions. If you are on WCS, happy with it, and 9.0 gives you what you need, that is a perfectly good outcome, and this release genuinely improves the product.

But “more features folded into a bigger plugin” is not what every store wants. Some merchants want something lean, free, and modern, with payments and standalone selling handled out of the box. For them, the consolidation in 9.0 is a nudge worth acting on.

If you want to try the lean path

Milo ships with a built-in migrator that imports your existing subscriptions, customers, billing schedules, and saved payment methods from WooCommerce Subscriptions, with renewals continuing through your existing gateway. Most stores migrate in an afternoon, and because nothing is stored in a proprietary format, you can leave just as easily as you arrived.

WooCommerce Subscriptions 9.0 confirms a direction we have backed all along: the fundamentals of selling subscriptions should be free and built in. Milo takes that idea a step further, and it is free to try today.