TnC Review (2026)The Free Plan Is Dev Stores Only
By Daan Haket · Researched and written with an AI assistant · who does what
Start with the badge at the top of the listing, because it is the one thing on this page that misleads.
Shopify merchants on a standard plan who need a recorded “I agree” gate before payment — for GDPR, an age gate, digital-goods withdrawal rules or chargeback defence — and who go to Advanced at $10.99 for the consent timestamp rather than stopping at the $6.99 headline.
you are on Shopify Plus and want the checkbox inside the real checkout page, where the plan you need is the $19.99 Plus tier the App Store listing does not show; you expected a free tier from the listing's badge, which covers development and partner stores only; or a checkbox on the cart and the express buttons is not the enforcement your legal requirement actually asks for.
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Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 14 Oct 2026
The monthly ladder is $6.99, $10.99 and $12.99, and the annual prices are $67.10, $92.32 and $109.12. The listing puts the annual saving at 20% on Basic and 30% on Advanced and Pro. This ladder has moved three times in five weeks, each time with the same feature lists. On 24 August 2026 the monthly plans were $6.99, $9.99 and $12.99. On 25 August they were $7.99, $12.99 and $14.99, with annual rates of $67.12, $109.12 and $125.92.
By 9 September the annual rates had been cut to $47.94, $77.94 and $89.94 under a “save 50%” label while the monthly ones held. On 29 September both columns had changed again, with the monthly rates back down to $6.99, $10.99 and $12.99. Treat any figure here, ours included, as the price on the day it was read, and check the listing before you install.
Full pricing notes (6 more paragraphs)
Four plans on the listing, and the free one is not for you. Development Stores is free and carries every Pro feature, but the listing states it is for development and partner stores only and that payment will be activated on upgrade — so the “Free plan available” line at the top of the listing describes a partner sandbox rather than a free tier for a store that takes orders.
Basic is $6.99 a month or $67.10 a year and covers the AI terms-and-conditions checkbox with support for Buy It Now and express checkout buttons. Advanced is $10.99 a month or $92.32 a year and adds the consent date logged into the order's details plus the ability to show the checkbox for specific countries and products. Pro is $12.99 a month or $109.12 a year and adds newsletter and contact forms, translation of the checkbox into multiple languages, the checkbox in Shopify POS and an AI-powered policies generator.
Every paid tier carries a 7-day free trial, and the listing states charges are billed in USD and recur every 30 days. The vendor's own pricing article, re-read on 29 September 2026, now prints the same monthly and annual rates as the listing for all three plans; on 9 September the two pages disagreed on the annual price. The article still puts the annual saving at approximately 30%, which holds for Advanced and Pro and not for Basic, and still answers its own question “are there any hidden fees?” with “No. All pricing is transparent and listed above”.
It is also the only page where a fifth plan appears at all: a Plus Plan at $19.99 a month or $167.92 a year, for Shopify Plus merchants only, adding “the ability to show the checkbox in the actual Checkout page of your store”. The Plus Plan is the one rate that has not moved in any of our readings, so it now sits $7 above Pro.
The article also notes that uninstalling during an ongoing billing period still incurs that period's charge. Developer Effective Apps, trading as Effectify, at 13 Max Nordau, Ashdod, Israel; the app launched on 2 December 2019, carries Shopify's Built for Shopify badge, and stood at 565 listing reviews with a 4.9 average on 14 October 2026, up from 557 on 29 September and 550 on 9 September.
Re-read on 14 October 2026: the listing and the vendor's pricing article (updated 17 September 2026) show the same three monthly and annual rates as on 29 September, and the article still lists the Plus Plan at $19.99 a month or $167.92 a year.
Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
Category context: E-commerce. Across the 40 tools in this category that we researched with a public US-dollar price, the median entry price is $19 a month (lowest paid plan as listed, per seat where the vendor prices per seat). Compare pricing conditions in the Software Cost Atlas →
What the pricing page doesn’t say
“Free plan available” is displayed twice, and the free plan is Development Stores — for development and partner stores only, with payment activated on upgrade. A store that takes real orders has no free tier here. It is the same shape as this developer's Blocky and TiXel listings, where the advertised free plan is also development stores rather than a working free tier, so read it as a house pattern rather than an oversight.
Second, the App Store's pricing table is incomplete. The vendor's own help-centre article lists a Plus Plan at $19.99 a month, Shopify Plus only, and describes it as the plan that shows the checkbox in the actual checkout page. The App Store listing shows four plans and not that one. The same article answers its own hidden-fees question with “No. All pricing is transparent and listed above”, which is true of that article and not of the listing most buyers will read first.
If you are on Plus and you want consent captured in checkout rather than in the cart, the price is nearly three times the headline. Third, the feature that makes the app defensible costs extra, and what it costs is not stable. Basic at $6.99 shows the checkbox; it does not record when anyone ticked it. Consent-date logging starts on Advanced at $10.99. Across our three readings the step from checkbox to audit trail has been $3, then $5, and is now $4, with identical feature lists every time and no note on the listing about any of the changes.
For an app whose pitch is chargebacks and legal risk, an audit trail as a paid upgrade is worth knowing before you compare $6.99 against anything else. Fourth, be clear about what this can and cannot enforce. On a store that is not on Shopify Plus the checkbox lives in the cart and on express-checkout buttons, not inside Shopify's checkout, because Shopify does not open that page to apps below Plus.
The listing is honest about the surfaces it does cover — cart drawers, Buy It Now, express checkout buttons, floating carts, PayPal and Apple Pay — but a shopper who reaches payment by another route has not passed a gate. Whether that is sufficient consent is a question for your own counsel rather than for an app listing. Finally, the data access. The listing states the app views device and activity data including geolocation, IP address, browser and operating system and browsing behaviour, and can view and edit customers, products, orders for the last 60 days, store analytics, web pixels and the Online Store script tags and theme.
Geolocation is what the country targeting on Advanced and above runs on, so the scope is explicable, but an app installed for compliance reasons that itself processes IP addresses and browsing behaviour belongs in the same register as everything else you had to write down.
Watch the video review
The video version of this review, from our YouTube channel.
What TnC does
Shopify app that puts a mandatory “I agree to the terms” checkbox on the cart and on the Buy It Now, PayPal and Apple Pay express buttons, logs the consent timestamp against the order, and can show it only for chosen products or countries for GDPR and age gates.
What buyers report about TnC
Hands-on: not tested by usReported by buyers: Shopify App Store, read August 2026
Themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We have not run TnC ourselves, so this is other buyers' experience rather than ours. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • 498 of the 514 reviews are five stars, and unusually for this developer a good share of them carry long tenures rather than minutes. Stupidbubble® LifeStyle Platform (United States, 10 months, 27 June 2026) describes a support agent working through digital products that had never been linked to the app until the checkbox appeared on all of them. OrthoTape.com (United States, eight months, 19 June 2026) credits it with helping “with many chargeback issues”. SP BOUTIQUE (United States, over a year, 10 April 2026), GRINDBasketball (United States, nine months), Cowgirl Couture (United States, six months) and Three Moons Body Shop (United States, over a year) are all still on it.
- • The most useful review names a failure mode and its fix. MAG Signature Sound Ltd (United Kingdom, about 16 hours, 18 June 2026) found the checkbox text rendering white on white beside the Pay Now, Apple Pay and PayPal buttons, and had support recolour it — a defect only visible against a live theme, which is the argument for spending the trial on the theme you actually sell on.
- • House Of COHR (United Kingdom, 29 minutes, 15 April 2026) is the clearest statement of what a buyer gets: customers must agree before checkout, and “that data is recorded against the order”. Primrose Cottage (United States, 37 minutes, 16 June 2026) bought it for the EU withdrawal-right exemption on digital goods.
- • Filtering to one, two and three stars returns exactly five reviews out of 514 — three one-star, two three-star, nothing at two — and three of the five are about the price or the free plan rather than the product. Arab Hyphenated (United States, 13 minutes, 28 May 2025): “The app advertises a free plan, but no such option is clearly available. It forces you into selecting a paid plan.” shesbod (Canada, 1 minute, 1 January 2026): “no free plan”. Kis Kis Mjau (Latvia, 29 minutes, 21 July 2026): “a simple checkbox should no't cost an subscription”.
- • The developer answers those in public, and the answers confirm the reading rather than refuting it. Effective Apps replied to shesbod on 13 August 2026 that “The app indeed offers a free plan for stores that are currently being developed, as it states in the app's pricing plans section” — that is the Development Stores tier, not a free tier for a store taking orders. The reply to Kis Kis Mjau on 12 August 2026 defends the price on the grounds that the app also handles compliance work across cart, checkout, themes and order flows.
- • The remaining two are minor and old. Tante-Anne-Laden (Germany, 32 minutes, 18 December 2023) asked for the modal's “Close” button text to be translatable; the developer says the option existed but had been hidden for being too advanced, and re-enabled it. That reply has since been re-edited with an “UPDATE - 08/13/2026” header in which the app's creator says he is personally going over every review. Kasia Laskowska Art (Poland, 4 minutes, 27 February 2026) left a wordless three stars.
- • Nobody in the reviews read names a plan, mentions the consent timestamp that starts on Advanced, or mentions Shopify Plus and the checkout page — the three things that actually decide which tier you need.
Where the ratings disagree. The complaint set is one-note, and the note is not about the software. Across 514 reviews the app's own job — does the checkbox appear, does it hold up the checkout — produces almost no negative reviews at all; what recurs is the “Free plan available” badge and the price behind it. The tenures split the same way: every free-plan complaint comes from a merchant who was gone inside half an hour, while the praise runs to six months, nine months, a year. Read that as a listing problem rather than an app problem. One caveat on all of it: the prices rose between 24 and 25 August 2026 — Basic from $6.99 to $7.99, Advanced from $9.99 to $12.99, Pro from $12.99 to $14.99, with no change to any feature list — so every review above was written against cheaper rates than the ones you will be quoted.
Pages read (August 2026): Shopify App Store
When the paid plan is worth it
One question decides the plan, and it is not about price: where can a shopper reach payment? On a standard Shopify store that is the cart and the express buttons, exactly what Basic at $6.99 covers. The step to Advanced is $4 a month and it buys the thing that turns this app into evidence: the consent date and time written into the order's details. A checkbox nobody can show was ticked is decoration; a timestamp on the order is what a payment processor sees during a chargeback.
Buying this for disputes makes Advanced the floor, not Basic. One gap: the developer's help article says the timestamp cannot be recorded for orders placed through the Buy It Now button, so a dispute-proof setup also means hiding that button. Advanced to Pro is another $2 and genuinely optional — newsletter and contact forms, translation, Shopify POS, an AI policies generator. Worth it if you sell in person or in more than one language.
Then the plan the listing omits. On Shopify Plus, the checkbox inside Shopify's own checkout sits only on the $19.99 Plus Plan, and the App Store will not say so. It has held its price through every change to the listed three, so it now sits $7 above Pro. Plus merchants most want the gate there, and theirs is the tier missing from the table.
How to actually use TnC
Decide first which surfaces you must gate; that picks the plan. Walk your own store the way a shopper does — cart drawer, Buy It Now, Apple Pay, PayPal, and on Plus the checkout page itself — and write down every route to payment. On a standard plan the app covers the cart and the express buttons, not Shopify's checkout; on Plus, that page needs the $19.99 tier which only appears in the vendor's help centre.
Then assume you need Advanced rather than Basic and make the trial prove otherwise. Place a test order during the seven days and open it in your admin: no consent timestamp on the order means the wrong plan. Place it through the cart, not Buy It Now — the developer says Buy It Now orders never carry the timestamp. Use the trial on the theme you actually sell on. The most specific complaint in the listing's own reviews is a merchant finding the checkbox text rendering white on white beside the Pay Now, Apple Pay and PayPal buttons — only visible against live theme colours. Support customised it for them quickly, so raise it rather than designing around it.
Distilled from apps.shopify.com/terms-and-conditions-checkbox and the TnC pricing article on effectify.help, both read 25 August 2026 and re-read 29 September 2026. Re-read on 14 October 2026, with the pricing article at https://www.effectify.help/en/article/tnc-app-pricing-plans-omduyz/. For the buyer questions, the developer's help articles on the consent timestamp (https://www.effectify.help/en/article/where-can-i-see-the-consent-date-and-time-of-when-customers-have-agreed-to-the-terms-and-conditions-6nct5e/), the mandatory setting (https://www.effectify.help/en/article/my-customers-are-still-able-to-checkout-without-checking-the-checkbox-60jk88/), the checkout page (https://www.effectify.help/en/article/can-i-show-the-terms-and-conditions-checkbox-on-the-checkout-page-1de4bim/) and the one-checkbox limit (https://www.effectify.help/en/article/can-i-add-more-than-one-checkbox-1mjlu4a/ and https://www.effectify.help/en/article/how-to-add-multiple-links-and-checkbox-limitations-owr5by/) were read the same day.
Frequently asked questions
Will every order carry the consent timestamp on Advanced?
No: orders placed with Buy It Now will not. The developer's help article “Where can I see the consent date and time of when customers have agreed to the terms and conditions?” (effectify.help, read 14 October 2026) says the timestamp appears under Additional Details on the order, but cannot be recorded for orders placed via the Buy It Now button, and offers to hide that button for you. The listing advertises Buy It Now support for the checkbox itself from Basic, so the box can show there while no record is written. If you need the timestamp for chargebacks, plan on Advanced at $10.99 a month and a store without Buy It Now.
Is the checkbox actually required, or can shoppers skip it?
Check the setting. The help article “My Customers Are Still Able to Checkout Without Checking the Checkbox” (read 14 October 2026) says the checkbox is only mandatory once you uncheck “Make the checkbox optional by default” under Checkbox Settings, Appearance Settings. Test it in the trial by trying to reach payment without ticking the box, from the cart and from each express button.
Can I ask for separate consent to terms, privacy and refunds?
Not with separate boxes. Two help articles read 14 October 2026 say the app shows one checkbox per form, and give Shopify's limits and conversion as the reasons. What it offers instead is several policy links inside one label, set up in the Rich Text Editor. If your counsel wants each consent ticked separately, this app does not do that.
Is this a hands-on review of TnC?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Buyer reviews on Shopify App Store (listing slug terms-and-conditions-checkbox, published as “TnC: Terms and Conditions Box”; 514 reviews at a 4.9 average, two pages of the unfiltered list plus the one-, two- and three-star filter read separately), read August 2026.
- Read 2026-08-25, re-verified 2026-09-09 and again on 2026-09-29 on apps.shopify.com/terms-and-conditions-checkbox, listed as “TnC: Terms and Conditions Box”, and in the vendor's own pricing article at www.effectify.help.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
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