Kite Review (2026)

'Free to install' is doing a lot of work on this listing.

Visit Kite → Affiliate link — the rest of this page is the honest version, including who should skip it.

Pricing (2026)

✓ Pricing re-verified 6 Sep 2026

Four plans, billed in USD every 30 days. The Free plan is free to install and covers the first 50 discount orders each month; the listing states that $29 a month is billed only if you go over 50 orders. Starter is $29 a month, or $299 a year at a stated 14% saving, and adds unlimited discount orders, combined offers, progress bars and up to 10K bulk codes.

Growth is $49 a month, or $499 a year at 15%, and raises bulk codes to 100K with multiple rules per offer and campaign links. Pro is $99 a month, or $999 a year at 16%, and adds custom discount functions, checkout gifts (Plus only) and segment targeting. The three paid tiers carry a 7-day free trial. Free and Starter both say 'Not for Shopify Advanced and Plus'. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.

What the pricing page doesn’t say

The catch

The free plan covers the first 50 discount orders a month, and the same panel says $29 a month is billed once you pass them — so it is a threshold with an invoice behind it, not a free tier you can settle on. A store running one decent promotion will cross 50 discounted orders in days and be on Starter money without choosing to upgrade. The second catch is written on the plans themselves: Free and Starter are both labelled 'Not for Shopify Advanced and Plus', so if you are on either of those Shopify plans your real entry price is the $49 Growth tier, not the $29 the listing leads with.

And the feature most likely to sell the app to a large merchant — free gifts added at checkout — is marked Plus only and sits in the $99 Pro tier, which means the Plus stores it is built for pay $1,188 a year to reach it.

What Kite does

Shopify discount toolkit (by Skai Lama) built on native Shopify Functions: free gift with purchase, buy X get Y, tiered and volume discounts, progress bars and bulk codes. Free to install for the first 50 discount orders a month, then $29; Starter $29, Growth $49, Pro $99.

Where the four tiers actually diverge

The ladder is not four sizes of the same thing. Free and Starter are the same product with the meter removed — Starter's $29 buys unlimited discount orders, combined offers, progress bars and 10K bulk codes — and both are closed to Advanced and Plus stores. Growth at $49 mostly widens limits: 100K bulk codes, multiple rules per offer, campaign links, targeting logged-in customers. Pro at $99 is where a different kind of feature appears — custom discount functions, checkout gifts, targeting by customer tag and segment.

That shape decides the sum for you. If you are on Basic or Grow, start on Free and let the 50-order threshold tell you whether the app earns $29; you will know within a campaign. If you are on Advanced or Plus, ignore the first two tiers entirely — $49 is your floor, and the only question is whether checkout gifts are worth the further $50 a month to Pro.

Work that one out as revenue per gifted order, because at $1,188 a year it is competing with dedicated upsell apps rather than with the rest of this ladder.

How to actually use Kite

Installation runs from the App Store, so setup starts inside your Shopify admin rather than at a separate signup, and the listing says the app works with Checkout and Shopify Admin alongside a list of cart and page builders — All Slide Carts, Checkout Wizard, Easy Bundles, GemPages, iCart and UpCart — which is worth checking against whatever is already on your storefront before you install. Use the step most merchants skip: the listing carries a View demo store link, so you can watch a gift appear at a cart threshold and a progress bar fill on a live storefront before handing the app access to your store.

Then check your Shopify plan first, because it decides where you can start — Advanced and Plus stores are excluded from Free and Starter. On Basic or Grow, install on the free plan and build one offer, then watch the 50-order threshold: crossing it is what moves you to $29, and it is better to see that happen on a promotion you chose than on one that ran away.

Distilled from The Kite listing on the Shopify App Store (apps.shopify.com/kite-free-gift), read 6 September 2026 — the four plans with their annual rates and stated savings, the free plan's 50-order threshold and the $29 that follows it, the 'Not for Shopify Advanced and Plus' label on the two cheapest tiers, the Plus-only note on checkout gifts, the works-with list, the demo store, the developer (Skai Lama, Indore, MP, IN), the launch date of 28 June 2023 and the 4.9 rating over 1,161 reviews.

Kite vs Stackable, side by side

Both columns come from the same place: each vendor’s own published pricing, read on the date shown in the sources at the foot of this page. We do not average them into a score.

Kite →

What it costs

Starter is $29 a month, or $299 a year at a stated 14% saving, and adds unlimited discount orders, combined offers, progress bars and up to 10K bulk codes.

The catch

'Free to install' is doing a lot of work on this listing.

Best for

shopify stores that want the discount mechanics themselves — gift with purchase, buy X get Y, tiered and volume pricing, with progress bars pushing the cart toward the next reward — built on native Shopify Functions rather than theme edits

Stackable →

What it costs

Growth is $19.99 a month, or $199.99 a year with the annual saving the listing puts at 17%, and covers unlimited combined discounts; that plan carries the label 'For Non-Plus'.

The catch

The two halves of the pitch are priced five times apart.

Best for

shopify stores running several promotions at once — an order discount, free shipping and a collection deal — that want shoppers to redeem them with one code instead of choosing, or that want the progress type which raises the discount as the cart fills

Both names above are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. Neither changes what this table says: both columns come straight from the vendors’ own pricing pages.

The natural comparison is Stackable — Both sit on Shopify's native discount plumbing, and the split is between combining discounts and creating them. Stackable is about redemption: several discounts — order, collection, shipping — under a single code, plus a progress type, from $19.99 a month with no free plan. Kite is about the offers themselves: free gifts, BOGO, tiered and volume pricing, bulk codes and storefront widgets, opening at a metered free tier that turns into $29 past 50 discount orders. So if your promotions already exist and customers keep having to pick which code to use, that is Stackable's problem. If the promotion is the thing you cannot build — a gift that appears at a cart threshold, a tier that rewards the bigger basket — Kite is the one with those mechanics, and it has the far longer record: 1,161 reviews against Stackable's 54..

More on Kite

Everything we publish about Kite links back here — the review stays the honest hub:

The ex-banker filter — the same yardstick on every review (how we review): My ex-banker filter is simple: does Kite remove a real cost — time, errors, missed revenue — bigger than what it charges?

Visit Kite →

Frequently asked questions

What should I weigh before buying E-commerce software?

Check your platform and version specifically. Shopify support is close to universal in this category, while WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento and headless setups vary a lot, and 'supported' sometimes means a generic API rather than a maintained app. A listing in your own platform's app store, with recent reviews there, is a better signal than the vendor's logo wall.

Is this a hands-on review of Kite?

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 genuinely good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.

Others in this category

The e-commerce tools closest to Kite that we have also reviewed. They overlap rather than match:

StackableCode Bulk DiscountsEasy BundlesSmarty DiscountsKiwi Sizingall 36 reviews →

This is our researched assessment — not a paid placement. The “Visit” links on this page are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you, and it never changes our take. How we review →