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Peel Analytics changed owners in 2024, and that one fact should shape how you read everything else about it, the pricing included. This review starts there: who owns Peel now, what it actually costs in 2026, and whether it is built for a store like yours.
I run a market research company, so I spend my days around merchant data and the tools that promise to make sense of it. Peel is genuinely good at the one thing it is built for. It is also priced for brands with real scale, it changed hands two years ago, and it is a specialist, not the all-in-one dashboard a lot of buyers assume they are getting. This review is the long version of that verdict, with current pricing, the ownership change and what it means for you, and the alternatives worth a look. All prices here are in US dollars.
What Peel Analytics actually is
Peel, now branded Peel: Retention Analytics on the Shopify App Store, is a retention and cohort analytics platform for Shopify and Amazon DTC brands. It was founded in 2020 and backed early by Lerer Hippeau, and its whole pitch has always been narrower and deeper than the all-in-one crowd. It does not want to be the single screen for your entire business. It wants to answer one question better than anyone: who comes back, when, and why.
Connect your store and Peel builds your dashboards within about 24 hours, then automates the retention maths most operators never find time to do by hand. You get more than 100 metrics and 30-plus cohort KPIs: lifetime value by acquisition cohort, repeat-purchase timing, churn by segment, repurchase rates, and time between orders. On top of that sit RFM and custom customer segments you can export straight to your email and ad platforms, product and order analytics, and subscription analytics that plug into Recharge, Smartrr, Skio, Bold and Stay.ai. It reads from Shopify, Amazon, GA4, the major ad networks, Klaviyo, Attentive and more, and it exposes your data in Snowflake if your team wants to run its own SQL.
Two things make Peel stand out in a crowded aisle. The first is that it covers Amazon as well as Shopify, which is rarer and harder than it sounds, and a real draw for brands selling across both. The second is depth: if your growth model runs on repeat purchases and subscriptions, Peel goes deeper on retention than the generalist dashboards do. That focus is the reason to buy it, and, as you will see, also the reason it is wrong for a lot of stores.
Who actually owns Peel now
In May 2024, Shopify acqui-hired Peel’s founding team, and the product went a separate way. The team, including CEO Nicolas Grasset, who moved to Shopify as a Director, was absorbed into Shopify. The Peel app itself was picked up by Relay Commerce, which now runs it inside a portfolio of retention and post-purchase tools. Peel’s own site confirms it in the footer: a Relay Commerce company.
This matters more than a line of trivia, so let me be plain about what it does and does not mean. It does not mean Peel is shutting down. The app is live, maintained, sold on published plans, and still onboarding brands. If a review told you Shopify swallowed Peel and you assumed the product was gone, that is the confusion worth clearing up: the founders went to Shopify, the software carried on under new ownership.
What it does mean is a change in character. Peel is no longer a founder-led startup with one obsession. It is one asset in a portfolio, and portfolio owners allocate roadmap attention across everything they own. That can cut either way, and in Peel’s case you can already see it cutting both. The clearest evidence sits on the App Store listing, where Peel now offers a free plan to brands using Smartrr, the subscription app that sits in the same Relay retention group. That is exactly the cross-sell a portfolio parent brings and a standalone startup could never justify, and for a subscription brand already on Smartrr it changes the buying decision completely. The other edge of the same blade is feature velocity: a portfolio asset can coast on what it already does well rather than pushing the category forward. Neither is a reason to avoid Peel. It is a reason to buy it for what it does today, not for a roadmap you are imagining.
What you actually get for the money
Strip away the category language and Peel does three jobs, and does them well.
The first is retention and cohort depth. This is the core, and it is genuinely strong. Peel turns a year of order history into cohort curves, LTV by acquisition month and channel, churn signals and repurchase timing without anyone building the report. For a brand whose economics live or die on the second and third order, that is the exact analysis a spreadsheet never quite gets around to.
The second is subscription analytics. If you run a subscription programme through Recharge, Smartrr, Skio or similar, Peel drills into what is working and what is leaking, which is a weak spot for the generalist dashboards. Combined with the Amazon coverage, this is where Peel earns its keep for the brands it suits.
The third is automated, delivered insight. Peel pushes daily digests to Slack or email and surfaces the trends and anomalies worth your attention, so the numbers come to you rather than waiting in a dashboard nobody opens. Useful, and the closest Peel gets to doing the thinking for you.
One caveat, and it is the important one. Peel is a specialist, not an all-in-one. It is not built to be your single blended profit-and-loss screen, and it is not a paid-attribution powerhouse. It does carry multi-touch attribution with UTM and basic cost intelligence like flat-percentage COGS, but if what you actually want is one dashboard that answers profit, ad efficiency and attribution across every channel, Peel is the wrong shape for the job. Buy it for retention. Do not buy it expecting Triple Whale.
Peel Analytics pricing in 2026, and the order-volume twist
Here is where Peel is genuinely different from the tools it gets compared to, and where most reviews are out of date. Peel’s published 2026 plans price on your monthly store order volume, not your revenue.
| Plan | Monthly orders | Billed annually | Billed monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free, for Smartrr customers | n/a | 0 | 0 |
| Essentials | from around 16,000 | 449 | 499 |
| Accelerate | from around 29,000 | 809 | 899 |
| Tailored | from around 62,000 | Custom | Custom |
Those order bands matter as much as the prices, and most write-ups quote the money without them. A slider on the pricing page maps your order count onto a plan, so the figure you are quoted moves with your volume. There is also a 7-day free trial that needs no card and no sales call, with one catch worth knowing: it only computes your most recent twelve months of data.
Now the twist, and it is a point in Peel’s favour worth spelling out. Pricing on order volume is not the same as pricing on GMV, and it changes who gets a good deal. The all-in-one tools like Triple Whale and Polar Analytics price on your revenue, so as your sales grow, your bill grows whether or not you use the tool any harder. Peel charges on how many orders you process. If you are a high-AOV brand shifting fewer, pricier orders, say premium furniture or high-ticket supplements, Peel can work out cheaper than a GMV-priced rival at the same revenue.
Do the division and the model gets clearer still. At the Essentials floor, Peel costs roughly 2.8 cents per order. At the Accelerate floor, roughly 2.8 cents per order. It is close to a flat rate per order across the published tiers, which is a genuinely different shape from both GMV pricing, where your unit cost tracks your prices, and from Lifetimely’s ladder, where the cost per order falls as you scale. Flat is predictable. It also means Peel never gets cheaper per order for growing with it.
The honest reading of those bands is that Peel is built for larger stores than its reputation suggests. Sixteen thousand orders a month is a substantial business at any average order value, and a brand doing two or three million a year is very unlikely to be there. If you are below that volume, you are either quoted something bespoke or you are not the customer these plans were drawn for. The exception is the free Smartrr tier, which is the one route into Peel that ignores volume entirely.
What the reviews really say
Peel holds a 5.0 rating across 35 reviews on the Shopify App Store, which sounds unbeatable until you read the number next to it. A perfect score across a small, self-selected sample tells you that the brands who chose Peel and stuck with it are happy. It does not tell you how a random store will fare. Treat it as a strong signal from a narrow group, not a verdict from the whole market.
The praise itself is consistent and specific, which is the part that counts. On G2 and TrustRadius, and in Peel’s own testimonials, operators single out the same things: the depth and customisability of the reporting, responsive and hands-on support, and the rare Amazon coverage. Brands describe it as the most advanced analytics tool they have used for Shopify and Amazon, and the retention and cohort analysis as the reason they stay. That maps exactly to what Peel is built for, which is the sign of a focused product doing its job.
The flip side is the same as the pricing story. The brands raving about Peel are, by design, growth-stage DTC businesses with real retention to analyse and a team to act on it. That is who should be reviewing it well. It is not evidence that a small store, or a brand that needs one blended dashboard rather than deep cohorts, will get the same value.
The measurement reality no dashboard escapes
One caveat applies to Peel and every analytics tool in this review. All of it is backward-looking, and none of it sees the whole customer journey. Since Apple shipped App Tracking Transparency with iOS 14.5 in 2021, a large share of users opt out of the tracking that attribution depends on, so every tool here is modelling a picture with gaps in it, however good the model.
The one read no pixel can fake is the customer telling you, in their own words, where they found you and why they came back. That is why a post-purchase survey belongs in any serious measurement stack, as the human check on whatever your analytics tool is modelling, and why voice-of-customer tools sit next to the dashboards rather than under them. Peel will tell you which cohorts retain. It will not tell you why in language you can act on.
Who should buy Peel Analytics, and who should not
Buy Peel if retention is the lever you are actually pulling, you sell on Shopify or Amazon or both, you are doing the order volume its plans are drawn around, and you have someone who will read the cohorts and change something because of them. For that brand, Peel is one of the best tools in its class and the reviews are not lying to you. If you run subscriptions on Smartrr, start with the free plan regardless of your size, because it costs you nothing to find out whether the depth is useful.
Do not buy Peel if you run a smaller store outside the free tier, if you mainly want a single blended profit-and-loss and attribution screen, or if serious paid-attribution rigour is your real need. In those cases you are paying for retention depth you will not touch, and a different tool will serve you better for less.
If you only need lifetime value and profit, a focused tool such as Lifetimely or TrueProfit does that job for a fraction of the price. If you want the all-in-one blended dashboard, Triple Whale or Polar Analytics is the shape you are after, though both price on revenue rather than orders. If your real need is paid attribution at scale, Northbeam is built for it. And if you have a data team that wants to model everything itself, Daasity goes deeper on the warehouse side.
Peel Analytics alternatives, by the job
The best Peel alternative depends entirely on which of Peel’s jobs you are replacing. Here is the shortlist by need.
| If you need | Strong pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Deep retention and cohort analysis | Peel | Its home turf, especially with Amazon and subscriptions |
| LTV and profit, cheaply | Lifetimely or TrueProfit | Focused tools at a fraction of Peel’s price |
| An all-in-one blended dashboard | Triple Whale or Polar Analytics | One screen for the whole business, though priced on revenue |
| Serious paid attribution | Northbeam | Built for brands spending heavily on ads |
| Enterprise, warehouse-native modelling | Daasity | Deeper data modelling for larger data teams |
| A free daily glance | Shopify Analytics, or Tydo’s Report Card | Covers the basics at no cost |
Shopify’s own analytics sits alongside Peel rather than replacing it, and is worth keeping whatever else you run.
Frequently asked questions
What happened to Peel Analytics? Did Shopify buy it?
In May 2024 Shopify acqui-hired Peel’s founding team, including CEO Nicolas Grasset, while the Peel product moved to Relay Commerce. Relay runs it today as part of its retention portfolio, so the app is still live and sold as standalone software. It is just no longer an independent, founder-led startup.
How much does Peel Analytics cost?
Peel prices on your monthly store order volume, not revenue. In 2026 the Essentials plan is 449 US dollars a month billed annually, or 499 monthly, from around 16,000 monthly orders. Accelerate is 809 annually or 899 monthly from around 29,000 orders, and Tailored is custom-priced from around 62,000. There is also a free plan for brands using the Smartrr subscription app, and a 7-day free trial with no card and no sales call, though the trial only computes your last twelve months of data.
What does Peel Analytics do?
Peel is a retention analytics platform for Shopify and Amazon DTC brands. It automates cohort analysis, lifetime value, repeat-purchase and churn reporting, RFM and custom customer segments you can push to email and ads, subscription analytics across tools like Recharge and Smartrr, and daily Slack or email digests. It connects Shopify, Amazon, GA4, the main ad networks and Klaviyo.
Is Peel Analytics worth it?
For a subscription or repeat-purchase DTC brand doing the order volume Peel’s plans are built around, roughly 16,000 orders a month and up, that wants deep retention and cohort analysis and will act on it, yes. If you already use Smartrr, check the free plan before you price anything else. For a small store, or a brand that mainly needs one blended profit-and-loss and attribution dashboard, no.
What is the best Peel Analytics alternative?
It depends on the job. Lifetimely or TrueProfit for lifetime value and profit on a budget, Triple Whale or Polar Analytics for an all-in-one blended dashboard, Northbeam for heavy paid attribution, and Daasity for enterprise, warehouse-native modelling. Shopify’s own analytics covers the basics for free.
The one-line version
Peel is the best retention and cohort tool in its class, and in 2026 that class is high-volume subscription and repeat-purchase brands, not small stores. Check your monthly order count against the bands before you compare quotes, start with the free Smartrr plan if that applies to you, and if you are nowhere near 16,000 orders a month, buy the one job you actually need for a great deal less.
