SP Hide Price has a free age gate. Prime Lock charges for it. Why switch?

If a free age gate is your whole requirement, that is a fair reason to stay. Our age verification gate sits on Pro at $9.99/month. The reason to switch is checkout enforcement and the registration workflow, both of which are on our free plan. If you do not need those, staying put is reasonable.

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?

SP Hide Price publishes SEO-safe hiding, so your locked pages should already be indexed with the price withheld, and Prime Lock keeps that behaviour. Only the price is withheld; title, description, images and schema stay intact.

Prime Lock vs SP Hide Price & Access Control

5.0
49 reviews
Shopplaza B2B
Launched 2025
Last verified 30 Jul 2026
App Store listing

SP Hide Price is completely free with no paid tier and more capable than that suggests, covering locking by login status, tag, location, IP or age, with real-time rule preview and conflict detection that is unusually mature for a 2025 app. The question worth asking before you build a wholesale channel on it is how a free-with-no-paid-tier app funds its support and maintenance.

5 of the 7 capabilities SP Hide Price & Access Control publishes are on the Prime Lock free plan

The remaining age verification gate and 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 SP Hide Price & Access Control compared on plan, pricing and headline capabilities
	Prime Lock	SP Hide Price & Access Control
Free plan	Yes	Yes
Entry price	$9.99/mo	Not listed
Top price	$19.99/mo	Not listed
Enforced at checkout	Available	Not listed
Registration + approval	Available	Not listed
SEO-safe hiding	Available	Available
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 SP Hide Price & Access Control is a good fit

Free with no paid tier, and the feature list is not thin: access by login status, customer tag, location, IP or age, replacement CTAs that can point at a Login button or a WhatsApp link, and hiding prices from Google. For a store that needs a straightforward gate and has no budget, this is a lot of app for nothing.

Conflict detection is the mature touch. When two rules overlap on the same product, most apps in this category let you find out in production. Surfacing the conflict in the admin, with a real-time preview of what a given customer would see, is the kind of feature that comes from watching people get confused.

An age gate at no cost is also notable, since it sits on the paid tier for us and for most others in this category.

The difference

Where Prime Lock is different

Prime Lock's enforcement is a Shopify Function validating cart and checkout server-side. Checkout validation is not in SP Hide Price's published feature set, so its gate operates on what the storefront renders. Registration and an approval workflow are also not in the published feature set.

The difference we would actually weigh is sustainability rather than features. Free with no paid tier at all is a real question mark in a category where support, App Store review cycles and keeping up with Shopify's platform changes cost money, and it is worth asking the developer about their roadmap before you route a wholesale channel through it. Prime Lock is free on the same terms but funded: Pro and Plus pay for it, and the grandfathering promise is published in our terms as a binding commitment rather than a blog post.

That is an argument about risk, not about their code, which by all published evidence is good.

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 SP Hide Price & Access Control compared across 20 capabilities
Capability	Prime Lock	SP Hide Price & Access Control
Enforced at checkoutCart and checkout validation, not just theme-side hiding	Available	Not listed
Hide price	Available	Available
Hide add to cart	Available	Not listed
Lock pages	Available	Available
Lock products / collections	Available	Available
Lock entire store	Available	Not listed
Passcode gate	Available	Not listed
Secret links	Available	Not listed
Customer tag access	Available	Available
Scheduled locksDate window that opens and closes on its own	Available	Not listed
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	Available
Country / IP rules	Pro	Available
SEO-safe hidingPage stays indexable; only the price is withheld	Available	Available
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 SP Hide Price & Access Control

Step 1
Note your existing rules
Write down every rule you have configured in SP Hide Price & Access Control: 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 SP Hide Price & Access Control and check your theme
Confirm any IP or country rules you configured are documented before you uninstall. Prime Lock's country rules sit on Pro, so check that the equivalent rule exists on your plan before switching the old app off. 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