The short version
Atelier is the only app compared on this site that is not a lock. It does not hide a price on your store; it builds a second store for the sale and runs the sale there, invite-only, on its own URL. So the choice is not which app hides a price better. It is whether the sample sale should be a separate place people are let into, or the shop you already have with the buying gated.
That makes them the closest competitor here on the job we are both aimed at, which is private sample sales, VIP early access and drops, and the furthest away on how the job gets done.
There is a second decision folded into the pricing, and it is easy to miss on the way past: their plans are a monthly fee plus a percentage of what the sale takes. Ours is a flat fee and no share of sales. Below a certain volume theirs is the cheaper arrangement, and the number is knowable, so it is worked out further down rather than asserted.
Where Atelier is genuinely better
The sale is its own place. A branded capsule storefront, set up in a few clicks, with hidden collections shown only to the people you let in, and several sales running at once. If a sample sale is meant to look and feel separate from the main brand, that separation is architecture rather than a setting, and we do not offer it at all. We put the sale on the product pages you already have.
Nothing has to be true about your theme. Ours lives inside your theme and hides the price before that theme paints. Theirs renders its own storefront, so a theme that fights the app is not a category of problem they can have. If your theme is heavily customised or you did not build it, that is worth something real.
The bill for that arrives as the other half of the same fact, and their one negative review is where it shows: a merchant who found the sale could not be made to look like their store, because it is not their store. Nine of their ten reviews are five stars and the developer refunded that one in full, so this is a trade to understand rather than a warning. A storefront that owes your theme nothing also owes it nothing when you want them to match.
Markets is named on the listing. If the sale has to be priced in more than one currency, their listing says so and ours does not. Multi-currency we do not address at all, because the price we hide is whatever Shopify was going to show.
Klaviyo belonged in that paragraph until recently and no longer does. On Growth you connect your own Klaviyo account and the people we capture land in one of your lists, each tagged with where they came from, rather than reaching it the long way round through Shopify Flow triggers. Flow is still there, and is still the route on the plans below Growth.
Several sales at once, each its own place. Their listing describes running multiple private sales simultaneously, each on its own storefront. We can have any number of locks live at once, but they all live on one shop, so two concurrent sales for two different audiences are two sets of locks and codes on the same product pages rather than two separate places. If you genuinely run parallel sales for different lists, theirs is the cleaner model and ours will feel like bookkeeping.
Ten reviews since April 2024, at 4.3 stars. That is not a moat, and we are not going to pretend a small number is a large one. It is ten more than we have, and every one of them is a merchant who ran a sale on it.
Where we differ
The percentage, and where it crosses. Their entry plan is $9 a month plus 0.99% of what the sale takes, on top of what processing the payment already costs you. Their tiers exist to bring that percentage down: $49 a month at 0.79%, $249 at 0.69%. Ours is $14.99 or $34.99 a month, flat, whatever the sale does.
Their own numbers say where the lines are:
- Under about $600 of sales in a month, their $9 plan costs less than our $14.99 one.
- Past about $2,600, their $9 plan costs more than our $34.99 one.
- A sale that clears $50,000 pays them about $504 on the entry plan, or about $444 if you have moved up to Advanced. It pays us $34.99.
- Their own tiers cross at roughly $20,000 a month, and again at roughly $200,000. If you are near either, read the plan above the one you are on.
The half of this that runs in their favour is real and worth saying plainly: a percentage is only charged when something sells. A quiet month costs $9 there and $34.99 here. If you run one sale a year, their arrangement is kinder, and the arithmetic above only bites in the months the sale is actually on.
Where the sale lives, and whether it can be found. Theirs is hosted on its own URL, or embedded. Ours is your own product pages, still indexed, with the price replaced by your words and the buy button taken away.
A sale on a separate URL earns nothing that stays with you. The product pages that already rank do no work, the links the sale attracts point somewhere else, and when the sale ends the address it lived at is finished. That is the argument this whole product is built on, and the cost of our side of it is equally real: our locked pages are public pages. A price can still be read from a cache or a product feed long after we have hidden it, which is not true of theirs, because a capsule store has nothing public to leak and nothing public to link to. The sale itself we do now hold: a direct cart link to a locked product is refused at the cart rather than checked out, for locks that name their products or cover the whole store. If the sale must be genuinely sealed rather than merely private — nothing readable and nothing linkable, not only nothing buyable — that difference is still the whole argument and it is still theirs.
Who the sale is for. Their ways in are a password or email verification: keys, handed to a list you already own. Ours is built for the other direction: a stranger finds a locked product, asks on a form you designed, lands in a queue, and gets through on a rule rather than on your attention. Then a waitlist that tells someone their position, codes that expire, and attribution per creator so a campaign can be counted rather than estimated.
If your VIP list already exists and the job is letting it in, keys are the whole requirement and everything in that paragraph is machinery you will not use.
How you find out. Our paid trial is seven days and so is theirs, so that is not a difference. The difference is what sits underneath it: they have no free plan, and ours runs on a live store with no card and no time limit. Seven days is enough to build a sale and not always enough to run one, which is a real limit on both trials and the reason the free plan matters more than either.
What each of you is left holding afterwards. A capsule store ends when the sale ends. Ours leaves the sale's traces inside Shopify: everyone approved is a customer record with consent captured where it was given, everyone who redeemed carries a tier tag, the interest lists say what people wanted rather than only what sold, and the creator numbers say who brought them. That is the input to the next sale. Theirs integrates with your admin for fulfilment, so the orders are real orders, and what we cannot tell you from a listing is how much of the audience data comes back with them. Ask them, because for a brand running two sales a year it is the difference between starting the second one warm or cold.
Neither of us has a record, and theirs is slightly longer. Ten reviews since April 2024 at 4.3, against our almost none since August 2026. Neither app carries Built for Shopify. This is not a page where reputation decides it, and any merchant treating ten reviews as a verdict is over-reading them in one direction just as we would be over-reading the one-star in the other.
The honest test
Ask one question before comparing anything else: is this sale supposed to be findable?
If no, meaning invite-only, a list you already have, and nothing about it that should be public, then Atelier is shaped correctly for that and we are not. Stop here, take the seven days, and build the capsule store.
If yes, then it is our argument against their percentage. Take what your last sale turned over, multiply it by 0.0099, and compare that with $34.99. Then open a product you would put in the sale and decide which page you want a stranger to land on: one on your domain that Google already knows, or a better-looking one somewhere else that it does not.
Both are defensible answers. They are just not the same business.