Shopify Flow is free on Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus. Shopify names exactly those four plans in its Flow documentation, which leaves out Starter and the legacy Retail plan.
That is the whole answer. The reason people keep searching for it is that Flow spent its early years as a Shopify Plus feature, and a lot of blog posts and agency pages never got updated.
What each plan gets
| Plan | Shopify Flow | Send HTTP Request | Tasks from custom partner apps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | No | No | No |
| Retail (legacy) | No | No | No |
| Basic | Yes | No | No |
| Grow | Yes | Yes | No |
| Advanced | Yes | Yes | No |
| Plus | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Two things are gated above Basic. The Send HTTP Request action, which posts data to an outside endpoint, needs Grow or higher. Tasks created by custom partner apps are Plus-only.
Everything else is the same app. Same triggers, same conditions, same workflow editor, no per-plan feature tiers hiding inside it.
One limit is easy to miss: Shopify gives each store a Flow usage allowance based on the API limits of its plan. A Basic store running a heavy workflow on every order will hit that ceiling sooner than a Plus store running the same thing.
Why the Plus-only story stuck around
Flow launched as a Plus feature and opened up in stages:
- It came to the Advanced plan first.
- It reached the Shopify plan, since renamed Grow, in June 2022.
- It reached Basic on July 26, 2023.
Three years on, plenty of comparison pages and forum answers still describe Flow as enterprise-only. If you are on Basic and someone told you to upgrade to get automation, check the app store first. Flow is sitting there for free.
Installing it
Install Shopify Flow from the App Store. It appears in your admin sidebar, and you build workflows as trigger, condition, action.
Out of the box the triggers cover orders, customers, products, inventory, drafts, and risk. Other apps can add their own triggers and actions once installed, which is how Flow reaches past Shopify's own objects.
Bookings are one of those gaps
Shopify has no native appointment object, so Flow ships with no booking triggers. If you sell services, the events you most want to automate on are the ones Flow cannot see: someone booked, someone cancelled, someone showed up.
Easy Appointment Booking adds those triggers to Flow on our Ultimate plan. Once connected, a booking is a Flow trigger like any order:
- A confirmed booking adds the customer to a Klaviyo segment for that service.
- A private lesson booking tags the customer as VIP.
- A cancellation starts a win-back email instead of leaving the slot to rot.
- A POS check-in tags the customer or updates your CRM while your team serves the next guest.
You still need Flow itself, which means Basic or higher on Shopify's side, plus the Ultimate plan on ours.
If you are picking a plan mainly to get Flow, you do not need to. Pick the plan that fits your order volume and card rates, then install Flow for free on top of it.
