Shopify drops free Shopify Academy courses perk from all four plans

WHY IT MATTERS

The free-courses line is a small perk, and Shopify Academy itself isn't priced here, so plan prices and limits are unchanged. Because Pulse ties this change to a live test, watch whether the line comes back in later captures before treating it as a permanent cut.

BY THE NUMBERS

• 7 Shopify pricing changes in the last 90 days, well above its ~45-day average cadence
• Second change in 5 days — Oct 23 added comparison rows, Oct 28 cut this perk
• Shopify's third tracked feature removal; the last was the Plus 1% cashback cap on Oct 2
• 86 feature removals across 81 companies in the Pulse Index over the past 180 days

THEIR RATIONALE

Shopify hasn't framed this one — there's no accompanying messaging, just a line dropped from the table — but the timing points to an actively maintained page. This is Shopify's second change in five days, following the Oct 23 update that added plan comparison rows, and it already has 7 changes in the last 90 days, well above its typical ~45-day gap between changes. That pace suggests ongoing page maintenance and cleanup rather than a planned retirement of the courses benefit itself.

THE SIGNAL

Pulse links this removal to a comparison-table A/B test on Shopify's page that it has tracked since Oct 2, so it may not be permanent. Across the Pulse Index, feature removals accounted for 86 changes across 81 companies in the last 180 days, out of 2,208 pricing changes tracked in that window. Shopify's page has been unusually active, with 7 changes in the last 90 days against a typical ~45-day gap.

IN CONTEXT

Pulse has been tracking a comparison-table test on Shopify's page since Oct 2, when the Plus plan's 1% cashback cap came off the table, and links this removal to that same test. It lands five days after Shopify added plan comparison rows on Oct 23, and in the same stretch as a yearly pricing test showing Grow at $89 and Advanced at $359 against $79 and $299. Shopify has trimmed line items before, such as removing 10x checkout capacity from Advanced in Q2 2025. Across the index, removals like this are a steady pattern: 86 changes across 81 companies in the last 180 days.