Billing based on shop plan. Technical implementation

[Cabus]

I see many apps on the Shopify App Store offering billing based on the plan or tier of the shop.

E.g. 3$ for SHOPIFY BASIC shops, 8$ for SHOPIFY & ADVANCED shops and 15$ for SHOPIFY PLUS.

I would like our application to have a similar pricing model.

I understand the concepts behind the Billing API and how to work with it, what I haven't figured out is how to definitely identify which pricing tier to apply for a given shop, based on information available about the shop.

The ShopPlan GraphQL data endpoint (https://shopify.dev/docs/admin-api/graphql/reference/store-properties/shopplan) lets us know if a shop is on Shopify Plus, so that can easily be validated.

My struggle is with distinguishing between Basic and Advanced shop plans.

https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-APIs-SDKs/Enumeration-of-plan-name-from-GET-admin-shop-json/...

Apparently, using the plan's name is no good, because we don't know all possible values and there is no reasonable way of handling all unknown names. What should I charge the merchant if shop plan is custom, singtel_basic, singtel_unlimited, dormant or any unknown value?

Another approach I explored is distinguishing shop tiers by checking for available features.

https://www.shopify.com/pricing

One unambiguously distinctive feature seems to be Locations (the max number of locations allowed for the shop) - Basic: 4, Shopify: 5, Advanced: 8.

The data is accessible in GraphQL via Shop.resourceLimits.locationLimit (https://shopify.dev/docs/admin-api/graphql/reference/store-properties/shopresourcelimits).

Basing the billing of merchants on 'secondary' data like available features seems to be a very inelegant and error prone solution to me.

Is there really no standard way of building tier based pricing? (I couldn't find any Shopify-provided resources on the topic so far)

Do you think the Locations approach is sensible or can you think of scenarios in which that solution will break?

[Cabus]

Push. I'd really like someone from Shopify to weigh in here.