Can I run Prime Lock and Locksmith at once?

During a migration, yes. Permanently, no, because two apps enforcing overlapping rules on the same products will produce results neither app's support team can explain. Rebuild your locks in Prime Lock, verify each one, then uninstall.

Will my customer tags carry over?

Yes. Both apps read Shopify's native customer tags, which live on the customer record and belong to your store, not to any app. Nothing is copied or migrated: the same wholesale tag that opened a gate before opens it after. Uninstalling either app leaves the tags exactly where they were.

What happens to my locked pages' SEO when I switch?

If you used Locksmith to hide pages entirely, those URLs were likely not indexed, and moving to price-only hiding can bring them back into the index, which is usually the outcome you want for a catalog. If you were already hiding only the price, nothing changes. Either way, keep the URLs the same; that is what preserves whatever ranking history exists.

Prime Lock vs Locksmith

4.7
286 reviews
Lightward
Launched 2014
Last verified 30 Jul 2026
App Store listing

Locksmith is the most thoughtfully designed app in this category and has been shipping since 2014. If you are an agency building something bespoke, or your access rules do not fit anyone's dropdown, the locks-and-keys model plus the Liquid and API hooks make it the right tool. The two things that send merchants looking elsewhere are structural: there is no free plan, and Checkout Validation sits on the $199/month tier.

9 of the 10 capabilities Locksmith publishes are on the Prime Lock free plan

The remaining country / ip rules sit on our $9.99 Pro tier. Everything else, including checkout enforcement, is free and stays free for your store.

At a glance

The short version

Prime Lock and Locksmith compared on plan, pricing and headline capabilities
	Prime Lock	Locksmith
Free plan	Yes	No
Entry price	$9.99/mo	$12/mo
Top price	$19.99/mo	$199/mo
Enforced at checkout	Available	Plus only
Registration + approval	Available	Not listed
SEO-safe hiding	Available	Not listed
Per-language text	Available	Not listed
No theme code left behind	Available	Not listed
Built for Shopify	No	Yes

availableProon a paid tierPlus onlyShopify Plus or top tierNot listednot published on the App Store page

Honest assessment

Where Locksmith is a good fit

The locks-and-keys model is genuinely elegant, and twelve years in it still reads as the cleanest mental model anyone has applied to this problem. A lock is a thing you protect. A key is a reason someone gets in: a customer tag, a passcode, an email address, a purchase in their history, a location or a secret link. Any lock takes any number of keys. Once that clicks, complicated access rules stop feeling complicated.

For agencies this is the pick. The Liquid hooks and the API mean you can build access logic that no settings screen would ever expose, and Lightward have a reputation for support that treats a hard question as interesting rather than inconvenient.

Twelve years of continuous shipping on a platform that changes as often as Shopify is not nothing. If longevity is part of your risk calculation, and for a wholesale channel it should be, Locksmith has more of it than anyone else here.

The difference

Where Prime Lock is different

Prime Lock compiles locks into a Shopify Function that validates cart and checkout server-side. Locksmith publishes the same class of protection as Checkout Validation, so this is not a capability gap. It is a pricing one. Their listing places it on the $199/month Shopify Plus tier, which makes the enforcement layer the single most expensive line item in this category. We ship it on the free plan, on every Shopify plan, because Functions run on every Shopify plan.

There is also no free tier at all: Locksmith starts at $12/month. For a merchant testing whether a gated catalog is even the right idea, that is a real barrier, and it is the most common reason we hear for people looking around.

The third difference is registration and approval. Locksmith gates access, and deciding who earns the key is left to another app. Prime Lock includes the application form, the metafield storage, the approval queue and the auto-tagging in the same install.

Feature by feature

All 20 capabilities

Recorded only where the app publishes them. An em dash means not listed on the App Store page as of the verification date, not that the feature does not exist.

Prime Lock and Locksmith compared across 20 capabilities
Capability	Prime Lock	Locksmith
Enforced at checkoutCart and checkout validation, not just theme-side hiding	Available	Plus only
Hide price	Available	Available
Hide add to cart	Available	Not listed
Lock pages	Available	Available
Lock products / collections	Available	Available
Lock entire store	Available	Available
Passcode gate	Available	Available
Secret links	Available	Available
Customer tag access	Available	Available
Scheduled locksDate window that opens and closes on its own	Available	Available
Registration form	Available	Not listed
Approval queue	Available	Not listed
Auto-tagging on approval	Available	Not listed
EU VAT validationChecked live against VIES	Pro	Not listed
File upload on form	Pro	Not listed
Age verification gate	Pro	Not listed
Country / IP rules	Pro	Available
SEO-safe hidingPage stays indexable; only the price is withheld	Available	Not listed
Per-language storefront text	Available	Not listed
No theme code left behindSingle app embed, nothing written into Liquid	Available	Not listed

availableProon a paid tierPlus onlyShopify Plus or top tierNot listednot published on the App Store page

Migration

Switching from Locksmith

Step 1
Note your existing rules
Write down every rule you have configured in Locksmith: what it protects, who it lets in, and any schedule attached to it. This is the only step that takes real time, and doing it before you install anything makes the rest mechanical.
Step 2
Recreate them as locks
Build each rule in Prime Lock as a lock: pick the lock type, set Applies to, set Who can unlock, and add a schedule if the original had one. Your customer tags carry over unchanged, because both apps read Shopify's native customer tags rather than storing their own copy.
Step 3
Uninstall Locksmith and check your theme
Locksmith supports Liquid hooks, so check your theme for any {% if %} blocks or snippets added around locked content during setup. Those are custom code in your theme and will not be removed when the app is uninstalled. After uninstalling, view a locked product as a guest and as a tagged customer, and try a direct cart permalink to confirm the checkout Function rejects it.

FAQ