Shopify access control apps, compared

There are a dozen apps that will hide a price on a Shopify storefront, and their listings all describe roughly the same thing. This is an attempt to say what actually separates them, written by people who make one of them, so read the last section first if you want to know where we think we are the wrong answer.

Three of the apps below are not locks at all. They host the private sale as its own storefront, or run the launch as a draw, rather than gating the shop you have. They are here because they compete for the same job even though they never turn up in the same search, and because two of them charge a percentage of what the sale takes, which is a pricing shape nothing else on this page uses.

Five questions that actually separate them

Feature lists in this category are nearly identical and nearly useless. Every app hides products, collections, prices and the buy button. These are the questions where the answers genuinely differ, and all five are worth asking before you install anything.

1. Does the price flash?

The most common implementation hides prices with JavaScript once the page has loaded. On a fast connection that is a few hundred milliseconds where the real price is on screen; on a slow one it is longer, and the number sits in the page source either way.

The alternative is CSS written into the page head before the theme paints anything.

You do not have to take anyone's word for this, ours included. Install on a free or trial plan, lock one product, and load it on a throttled connection with the cache cleared. You will see the flash or you will not.

2. What happens when the app's servers are down?

Two defensible designs, opposite failure modes:

• Fail closed. The gate holds during an outage. Your storefront may break or block buyers until the app recovers.
• Fail open. Your storefront keeps selling. Hidden prices may become visible until the app recovers.

Neither is wrong. Buying one without knowing which you bought is.

3. Can people ask for access, or only have it?

This is the real fork in the category, and it is the one the feature lists obscure.

Most of these apps are key-based: access follows something the visitor already has: a customer tag, a passcode, an email on a list, a secret link. That is the right model when you know who your buyers are and the work is letting them in.

The other direction is a stranger arriving, wanting in, and asking. That needs a form, an approval queue, a record of who asked and what they wanted, and something to send them when you say yes. Ymq's listing names an approve-requests feature and ours is built around one, so this is not a line with a single app on one side of it. But it is worth checking rather than assuming, because a listing saying "approve requests" can mean anything from an email notification to a queue with rules attached. If recruiting buyers is your actual problem, ask what happens after the request arrives.

4. What does it cost when the store grows?

Pricing in this category splits two ways: a flat fee, or a fee that scales with the Shopify plan you are on. The second can be the cheaper option on Basic and several times the price on Plus, so the comparison depends entirely on where you are and where you expect to be.

There is a third arrangement that looks like the second and is not. Several listings name their tiers after Shopify plans, at prices that rise the same way, while leaving you free to pick any tier you like. Whether the name is a rule or a suggestion is worth thirty seconds of reading, because on Plus it is the difference between $29.99 and several times that.

5. Is the free plan free on a live store?

Nearly every app here lists a free plan, and several of them mean something narrower than the word suggests. Free for development and trial stores is the common wording, and it means the plan works while you are building and stops the day the shop starts taking money. That is an unlimited trial rather than a free tier. It is an honest thing to offer and a useful one, but it is not what most people read, and it will not carry a live store.

This page had that wrong until August 2026: it recommended an app to merchants with no budget on the strength of a free tier their store would not have been eligible for. Open the pricing section and read the line underneath the word Free before you plan around it.

The apps

Figures checked on the Shopify App Store on 14 August 2026. Ratings, review counts and prices all move; each listing is the version that governs, and if you find a difference here, believe the listing and please tell us so this page gets fixed.

Ordered by review count, because it is the only ordering we can apply to a list we are ourselves on without quietly arguing for ourselves. It measures how long an app has been collecting reviews at least as much as it measures how good the app is, so read it as standing rather than as a ranking.

Sami B2B Lock, Password Protect, by Samita

The most-reviewed app in the category: 4.9 stars across 927 reviews, on the App Store since June 2023, carrying Built for Shopify status. Locks pages, products, collections and URLs, hides prices and the add-to-cart button, and grants access by password, customer login, secret link, customer tag or email. It will schedule a lock by date and time, and keep locked content out of Google.

$9.99, $19.99 and $29.99 a month, on tiers named after Shopify plans but not tied to them, with a fifteen-day trial. The free plan is one lock and development stores only.

Nearly a thousand reviews in three years is the headline. If you want the option most merchants have already stress-tested, this is it.

BSS B2B Lock, Login & Password, by BSS B2B Suite

4.9 stars across 602 reviews, on the App Store since December 2019, carrying Built for Shopify status. The widest set of conditions of the mainstream options: login, passcode, secret link, email subscription, age verification, customer tag, IP address and location. It locks products, variants, collections, prices, the add-to-cart button, pages, blog posts and URLs, and on Plus it will gate checkout itself.

A free plan that locks the whole site behind a condition, then $9.99, $24.99 and $49.99 a month with a seven-day trial. The tiers carry Shopify plan names and the listing calls them suggestions rather than requirements, which is question four in practice: read it and decide whether you believe it applies to you.

If your requirement is a long list of conditions rather than one, start here and at Sami, and pick on the strength of the admin.

Locksmith, by Lightward

The established one, on the App Store since 2014, 4.7 stars across 286 reviews, and carrying Built for Shopify status. Conditions are the most flexible in the category: customer tags, passcodes, email addresses, secret links, geography, date and time, purchase history, and custom Liquid for anything not on that list.

Priced against your Shopify plan rather than your usage, though the listing also carries Lightward's "pay what feels good" note, which is question four in a gentler form than most: $12 a month on Basic, $29 on Grow, $99 on Advanced, $199 on Plus.

If your rules are complicated and you are comfortable expressing them in Liquid, this is the app with the most room in it, and the reviews are earned. It is also the one whose price moves most as you grow, so the arithmetic is different at Basic and at Plus.

Easy Wholesale Lock for B2B, by Easy Lockdown Inc

4.5 stars across 224 reviews, on the App Store since February 2017, carrying Built for Shopify status. $9 a month flat, with a fourteen-day trial and development stores free.

The distinguishing feature is what it will gate on. As well as tags and customer groups, it grants access on order history and lifetime spend, so "customers who have spent over this much" is a rule you configure rather than a tagging job you run on a schedule. Locks pages, products, collections, blogs, the cart and prices, in eight languages.

If your access rule is really a loyalty rule, this is the one that expresses it directly.

Wholesale Lock Manager: B2B, by Wholesale Helper

On the App Store since 2018, 4.9 stars across 206 reviews, and carrying Built for Shopify status. $9.99 a month flat, or $107.89 a year, with a seven-day trial and development and trial stores free. Hides products, collections, prices, the add-to-cart button, pages and URLs, keeps products out of site search, and is built to sit alongside the same developer's wholesale pricing app.

If you are already running their pricing tooling, keeping the lock in the same family is a reasonable argument on its own.

SP Hide Price & Access Control, by Shopplaza B2B

5.0 stars across 51 reviews, on the App Store since August 2025, carrying Built for Shopify status. One plan, free, with no paid tier listed at all.

Hides prices on products, collections and pages and from Google results, locks by login status, customer tag, IP address, location or age, and will replace a hidden price with a login button or a custom call to action rather than a blank space.

The obvious question about a free app is what pays for it, and the listing does not answer that. We have not installed it. But it is free on a live store rather than free on a development one, which makes it the honest first stop for anyone with no budget, and there is nothing to lose by trying it before you pay any of the rest of us.

LockPro: Password Protect Lock, by Productive Passengers

4.9 stars across 41 reviews, on the App Store since May 2024, carrying Built for Shopify status. The free plan is all features against one product lock or one whole-store lock, and the listing does not restrict it to development stores. Then $9.99 a month, or $19.99 to add time-based and purchase-based locks and to hide prices from Google Shopping.

If you have exactly one thing to hide, the free plan is shaped precisely around that, and it is the cheapest way to find out whether hiding it solves your problem at all.

Ymq B2B Lock, Login & Password, by YMQ

4.9 stars across 26 reviews, on the App Store since August 2023, carrying Built for Shopify status. Paid tiers at $9.99, $19.99 and $29.99 a month tied to your Shopify plan, with a fourteen-day trial. Locks products, pages and prices by URL or customer tag, unlocked by account login, passcode or secret link. Its listing names an approve-requests feature too, so keys are not the whole of it.

Its free plan is for development and trial stores, so a live shop starts at $9.99. An earlier version of this page recommended it as the no-budget option and that advice was wrong; see question five.

Atelier Private Sales, by Lumber

4.3 stars across 10 reviews, on the App Store since April 2024. The first app on this list that does not hide anything on your storefront: it builds a separate invite-only capsule store for the sale, on its own URL or embedded in your site, with hidden collections shown only to the people you let in and several sales running at once. Access is a password or email verification. Klaviyo and Markets are named on the listing.

$9, $49 and $249 a month, and every tier also takes a percentage of what the sale makes: 0.99%, 0.79% and 0.69% respectively. There is a seven-day trial and no free plan. A sale clearing $50,000 therefore costs about $504 on the entry tier, which is the number to hold in your head when comparing it against a flat fee, and the number to ignore entirely in a month when no sale runs, because the percentage only applies to orders.

If the sample sale is meant to be a separate place with its own look, and it is meant to be invisible to everyone not on your list, this is the shape you actually want, and no lock will give it to you. The longer version.

EQL: Launches and Drops, by EQL

5 stars, 3 reviews, on the App Store since February 2025, and filed under loyalty and rewards rather than access control, so it never appears in the same search as anything else on this page. It runs the launch rather than gating the shop: draws instead of first-come-first-served, bot mitigation and entry rules, a Notify Me to size demand beforehand, and automated draft orders at the end.

Free to install, then 1% to 4% of what the launch takes depending on the launch type, with the option to pass some of that fee to customers.

The draw is the reason to pick it. A scramble rewards the fastest connection; a draw does not, and no lock app on this page offers that mechanic. The percentage is the cost of it: a launch turning over $50,000 pays them between $500 and $2,000. The longer version.

Droppable, by GenX Software

5 stars, 2 reviews, on the App Store since March 2025. From $299.99 a month, rising to $599.99 and $999.99, with limits on drops per billing cycle and items per drop on every tier. Built for high-demand launches specifically: queueing, bot protection, and access conditions including Discord roles and join dates.

Different category of problem and different category of budget. If you are running the kind of drop where bots are a genuine threat, that price is proportionate and the apps above are not built for it.

Locket, by Beauii Pty Ltd

5 stars, 2 reviews, on the App Store since April 2021. A theme app extension like ours, with named locks carrying their own passwords, targets by product, collection, vendor or tag, customer exemption lists, lock expiry dates, magic unlock links and auto-unlock by customer tag.

The cheapest paid tier on this page: free for one product lock with no development-store restriction listed, $5.99 for unlimited locks, and $14.99 for everything, which is what several apps here charge for their entry plan.

Two reviews in five years is the number to weigh against that price, and it is a strange pair of figures to see together. But if the job is passwords on products and the budget is the constraint, nothing here undercuts them. The longer version.

Exclusive Drops Guard, by Auremist

5 stars, 1 review, on the App Store since January 2025, and free with no paid tier listed. Password-protects products and collections, issues unique access codes for VIP early access, and runs launch timers that lock and unlock on a schedule. That is a tight description of the drop use case and it costs nothing.

One review is not evidence of anything, in either direction, and as with any free app the listing does not say what pays for it. Worth thirty minutes on a test product before you pay anybody, ourselves included. Note also that its App Store address is the handle of a different, unrelated app, which usually means a listing that has been repurposed. Not a fault, but a reason to read the current page rather than anything you remember about it.

Inner Circle, us

Free, $14.99 or $34.99 a month, flat, not tied to your Shopify plan, never a share of your sales, and the free plan works on a live store. Access is decided on our servers rather than in the page, and the price is hidden before the theme paints. It fails open after four seconds.

On question two, the one about what a lock actually stops, we no longer score ourselves the way we did. A shopper without access cannot buy a locked product: Shopify refuses it at the cart, so a direct cart link ends in a rejection rather than an order. That holds on every plan, including the free one, for locks that name their products and locks covering the whole store. It does not yet hold for locks pointed at a collection or at conditions like a tag or a vendor, which govern the storefront and stop there, and it does not hold if our own check fails, because we let the sale through rather than hold up your customer. Several apps above gate the checkout on more kinds of rule than we do, some of them only on Plus. If your rule is a tag and it has to hold at the till, buy one of them.

The flat fee is worth holding against the two apps above that take a percentage. On a $50,000 launch, EQL's cut is $500 to $2,000 and Atelier's is $345 to $495 on top of their monthly fee, where ours is $34.99 whatever the sale takes. Below a certain volume theirs is cheaper, and the crossover is arithmetic rather than opinion, so it is worth doing before you choose.

What the app is built around is question three, the asking direction, and how much happens after the request lands. A visitor with no code can build an interest list, submit a form you designed, and arrive in an approval queue. Approving them can issue a code, or turn what they wanted into a Shopify draft order you price by hand. Codes are attributable, so a creator campaign can be measured rather than guessed at.

We are not the only app on the App Store that will take a request, as Ymq lists that too, so the question to put to any of us is what happens next, and whether the answer is a queue with rules or an email telling you somebody asked.

We have been on the App Store since 10 August 2026, which is the honest headline number here: days, and almost no reviews. Sami's 927 and Locksmith's 286 are real advantages over us and will stay so for a long time.

Which to pick

• No budget, live store. SP Hide Price and Exclusive Drops Guard are free with no paid tier, and LockPro's and Locket's free plans each cover one lock. Try those before paying anyone, ours included, and ignore any free plan whose small print says development stores.
• A budget of about six dollars. Locket, at $5.99 for unlimited locks. It is the cheapest paid plan here by some way, and if the job is passwords on products it is the whole job.
• A long list of conditions. BSS or Sami. Between them they cover login, passcode, secret link, email, age, tag, IP and location, and they are the two with the most reviews behind them.
• Rules intricate enough to need code. Locksmith. It has the most expressive conditions in the category, custom Liquid for the rest, and a decade of edge cases behind it.
• The gate is really about how much someone has spent. Easy Wholesale Lock reads order history and lifetime spend directly, instead of you maintaining tags to stand in for them.
• You are already running Wholesale Helper's pricing app. Wholesale Lock Manager, for the integration.
• You are on Plus and watching the bill. Anything flat. Locksmith is $199 a month there, and most of this list is under $50 wherever you are.
• Bot-contested drops with real money on them. EQL or Droppable, or a queueing service. Ours is not built for that fight.
• More buyers than units, and the scramble is the problem. EQL, for the draw. Every other app here, ours included, opens the door and lets people race.
• The sale should be its own place, and invisible to everyone else. Atelier. A separate branded storefront is architecture, not a setting, and no lock will produce one. Budget for the percentage as well as the monthly fee.
• Strangers need to request access and you need to approve them, or a campaign needs attributing to the creator who drove it. That is what we built, and it is the case where we would argue we are the better answer.
• You are pre-launch and nobody is looking yet. None of these. Use the built-in password page; it is free and it is enough.

The general rule: if your problem is admitting people you already know, this is a crowded category and several of these are good. If your problem is recruiting people who do not know you yet while keeping the shop indexable, that is a narrower question, and it is the one we set out to answer.