The short version
Locket is the cheapest way to do the obvious version of this job. Unlimited locks for $5.99 a month, everything else they sell for $14.99, and a free plan with no development-store line under it. Our Starter is $14.99 and our top tier is $34.99. If what you need is passwords on some products, they are less than half our price and we are not going to write a page pretending otherwise.
The two apps are built the same way, as a theme app extension with no theme edits and no code, so this is not an argument about mechanism. It is an argument about what happens at the door: they hand out passwords, and we are built for the visitor who does not have one.
There is one thing to check before either price matters, and it is set out at the bottom of this page rather than buried: both of their reviews are from 2021, and we could not find a public signal of recent development. That is not proof of anything, and it is the first question we would ask them.
Where Locket is genuinely better
$5.99 for unlimited locks. That is the whole of it and it is a strong argument. Our free plan is one lock; the tier that lifts that limit is $14.99, which is what their top plan costs. If your requirement is a dozen locks and nothing clever, they are the better buy by nine dollars a month, forever, and over a year that is more than a hundred dollars for a difference you would never notice.
A free plan that does not say "development stores". One lock, products only, password protection, and no small print restricting it to a store that is not yet selling. That is rarer in this category than it should be, and the roundup has a whole section on how often the word free means something narrower. Theirs appears to be the real thing. So does ours. Between the two of you there is a free way to test this idea before anyone gets paid.
A thirty-day trial, which is the longest here. Their paid tiers carry 30 days. Ours is seven, Locksmith's is fifteen, Sami's is fifteen. A week is enough to build a gate and not always enough to run one through a real sale cycle, so theirs is straightforwardly the better trial and we are not going to spin it. We hold ours at seven days on purpose and lean on the free plan instead, which is a different bet rather than a better one.
Vendors and customer tags as targets. They lock by vendor and auto-unlock by customer tag on Pro. We lock a product, a hand-picked set, a collection or the whole store, and we do not read tags at all. If your catalogue is organised by vendor, or your buyers are already tagged from somewhere else, they express that directly and we would have you rebuilding it as a collection.
Customer exemption lists, and multiple passwords per lock. A named list of people a lock never applies to, on Starter, and more than one password against a single lock on Pro. Ours has no equivalent for either. You would issue those people a code, which works, and is more administration than a list.
Where we differ
Neither of us has a track record. They have two reviews at five stars, on the App Store since April 2021. We have almost none, since August 2026. Everywhere else on this site the honest line is that the other app has hundreds of reviews and we have days. Here it is that you should not buy either of us on reputation, because there is not one on the table.
One-tap unlock links are their $14.99 feature and our free one. Theirs are on Pro, alongside tag auto-unlock and lock expiry. Ours are on the free plan, and they strip the code out of the address bar on arrival so the link cannot be bookmarked or burned twice. If magic links are the reason you are shopping, that inverts the price comparison entirely: their $14.99 tier against our nothing. The same is true of expiring access, which is their Pro feature and our free one.
What happens when somebody does not have the password. Their listing describes passwords, tags, exemptions and expiry, all of it about admitting people you have already decided on. Ours is built around the other person: the stranger who found a locked product, wants in, and has to ask. A form you designed, a queue that records what they asked for and which page they asked from, rules that let the obvious ones through without you reading anything, and an approval that issues a code or becomes a Shopify draft order you price by hand. Requests are on our free plan; the rules that automate them are on Starter.
If you already know who your buyers are, that machinery is not worth nine dollars a month to you, and the sentence above is an honest argument for Locket.
Launches, not just locks. Theirs expire. Ours open on a schedule as well as close, with a countdown on the locked page, a reminder signup that sends its own announcement when the drop opens, expiring codes, a waitlist that tells someone their position and moves them up on a referral, member invites, and attribution per code so a creator campaign can be counted rather than estimated. That is a different job from gating a catalogue, and if you are not doing it, do not pay for it.
Named tiers. Levels you name, ordered, each writing a Shopify customer tag on redemption. Their tag support runs the other way: they read a tag you already have, we write one you can then use in Shopify segments and discounts. Which direction you want depends on where the truth about your customers currently lives.
Google. Their listing lists "hide content" among the app's features and says nothing either way about search engines, so we will not claim it does or does not. Ours is deliberate and stated: locked products stay browsable and indexable, because the whole point is for a stranger to be able to find one and ask. Worth putting to them directly before you choose, because it is the answer that decides which of us is wrong for you.
Where our lock stops. The price and the buy button go on the storefront, and who holds access is decided on our server, so the page cannot be edited into granting it and no code can be forged. It reaches the checkout as well: a direct cart link to a locked product is refused at the cart rather than paid for. Two limits on that worth knowing before you pay us. It covers locks that name their products and locks covering the whole store, not locks pointed at a collection or at conditions like a tag or a vendor. And if our check cannot run, Shopify completes the sale rather than hold up your customer. A price may also remain readable from a cache or a product feed. Their listing does not describe checkout gating at all, so on the locks we do carry that far this is a difference in our favour rather than a shared limit. If a product has to be genuinely unbuyable under all of the above, unpublish it in Shopify and buy no lock for it.
The question we would ask them first
Both of their reviews are from 2021, the most recent in October of that year, and the listing carries no changelog or update note we could read. We are a competitor and this is exactly the kind of thing a competitor overstates, so to be precise about it: we do not know that the app is unmaintained, we have not tried to contact the developer, and an app can be quietly maintained without collecting reviews. Their two reviewers both singled out the developer's support by name, which is the opposite of a warning sign.
What we would do is send them a question before installing and see what comes back and how fast. That is a five-minute check, it costs nothing, and it settles a risk that no feature table can. Do the same to us.
The honest test
Both free plans work on a live store, so this costs nothing to settle.
Install both, lock the same product, and load it on a throttled connection with the cache cleared to see whether either flashes the price before it hides it.
Then ask the only question that actually separates us: does the person you are gating already have the password?
If yes, pay Locket $5.99 and stop reading. Nothing we charge more for will get used, and the ten dollars a month you would save is real money that buys nothing extra.
If no, and the point of the lock is that a stranger sees it, wants in, and has to ask, then compare what each of us does after the request arrives, and note that ours is on the free plan too.
Then ask the maintenance question above of both of us, and weigh the answers against the fact that neither app has enough reviews to answer it for you.