As international trade regulations and tariffs shift, pricing transparency has become one of the most challenging issues for merchants. For thousands of Shopify sellers, communicating fees and duties clearly has long required a frustrating mix of manual updates and opaque markups. That’s where UpCharge App comes in.
The fast-growing Shopify app helps merchants automatically calculate and display region-specific fees, duties, and surcharges in a fully transparent way for customers. Instead of rolling hidden costs into the base price, UpCharge itemises them, ensuring compliance and building trust at checkout.
Today, Capitaliply has made a $900,000 strategic investment in UpCharge, combines growth capital and equity purchase, will boost the company’s ability to enhance features and grow its infrastructure.
Making cross-border selling as transparent as shopping at home
Founded by Vitali Dudin, UpCharge was created to make cross-border selling as transparent as shopping at home. UpCharge’s founding principles centre on fairness and clarity, aiming to protect both merchants and customers from confusion at checkout.
The app integrates directly with Shopify’s pricing engine, using lightweight code to identify a buyer’s location, calculate region-specific charges, and apply the correct fees automatically. The result is a clear, itemised cost breakdown that complies with major market standards across the U.S., EU, and UK.
Matt Gramovich, General Partner at Capitaliply, tells TFN, “UpCharge App is a flexible, rules-based revenue layer for Shopify that lets merchants add and manage surcharges without custom code – from gift wrap and paid add-ons to environmental fees, bottle deposits, import duties, and cost-recovery surcharges on Shopify Plus.”
It differentiates itself through granular targeting (by cart contents, shipping, location, customer tags, etc.), deep native integration with Shopify’s APIs for clean checkout behaviour, performance designed for high-volume stores, and transparent fee presentation that maintains customer trust.”
Unlike TaxJar, Quaderno, and Zonos, UpCharge has built‑in transparent fee labelling and real‑time fee adjustment. Gramovich adds, “It differentiates itself through granular targeting (by cart contents, shipping, location, customer tags, etc.), deep native integration with Shopify’s APIs for clean checkout behaviour, performance designed for high-volume stores, and transparent fee presentation that maintains customer trust.”
What about diversity?
On diversity, Gramovich says, “The team continuing to develop the app is distributed across 11 countries, with women representing around 25% of the group.”
What’s next?
The company plans to introduce a predictive fee module in 2026, enabling merchants to forecast potential tariff changes and simulate future cost scenarios. The funding will also be used to scale infrastructure and support larger enterprise-grade merchants as the app expands across the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Gramovich concludes, “Over the next 3–5 years, we’re evolving UpCharge App from a fee-management app into a full revenue optimization layer – expanding across online and POS, deepening our role in checkout and post-purchase, introducing protection products, and adding smarter automation, analytics, and AI-driven fee intelligence so brands can continuously optimize how and when fees are applied to support their business goals”
