Frequently asked questions

FlowPrint connects a Shopify store to the printers on your own desk. When an order comes in, gets paid, or ships, the documents you configured (invoices, packing slips, labels, anything you design) print automatically on your own hardware, with no browser tab open and no clicking Print. It also takes quote requests from your storefront and gives your customers document downloads.

You run a small program called the worker on the computer your printers are connected to. It pairs with your store in about a minute using a short code, then waits. When an automation fires, our cloud renders the document, encrypts it so only your worker can read it, and pushes it down; the worker decrypts it in memory and hands it to the printer. The worker never opens a port and never listens for anything from the internet; it only ever dials out, like a desktop app checking for updates.

Windows (any printer the PC can print to, thermal printers included) and Linux (any printer CUPS can print to). Both use identical pairing and encryption. The Linux build runs headless as a background service or with the same settings window the Windows version has.

Yes, printing needs the computer the printer is attached to. If the worker is offline when a job arrives, the job waits and prints automatically when the worker reconnects (up to 72 hours, after which it expires and is marked in the job log). You can also give any print step a backup worker and printer; if the primary is offline at delivery time, the job goes there instead.

Every job is tracked in the app with its outcome. You can reprint any past job with one click; FlowPrint fetches the order fresh from Shopify and renders it again, since we deliberately keep no stored copy of documents.

A drag-and-drop template designer: text with live order variables, images (including your store’s own Files), shapes, QR codes, barcodes (Code128, EAN-13, UPC), and a real line-items table that grows with the order. Any page size from A4 to thermal receipt rolls. Prefer code? You can hand-write raw Liquid and HTML instead, and there are starter templates (invoice, packing slip, quote, receipt) to begin from.

Yes. An automation can have any number of print steps, each with its own template, worker, and printer: the invoice on the office laser, the packing slip in the warehouse, a label on the thermal printer, all from one order event. Steps can also branch on real conditions (for example, order total over $500).

Yes, wherever you enable it: a download button in Shopify’s own notification emails (one snippet pasted into the email template), on the thank-you page, on the order status page, and inside customer accounts. Every download renders live from the order at click time; nothing is stored. Only templates you have explicitly listed as customer-downloadable can ever be fetched this way.

Yes. Email automations send a templated email (with an optional PDF attachment rendered from any of your templates) on the same triggers automations use. On the Free plan email sends from our address; on paid plans you can verify your own domain and send from your own store address.

Customers add items to a quote from product pages, collection cards, or their whole cart, then submit a request through a checkout-style window with the contact fields you choose. The request lands as a draft order tagged "FlowPrint Quote" in your own Shopify admin. You price it there and send Shopify’s own invoice email; Shopify collects payment. FlowPrint stores none of it.

Yes, optionally, per product via a tag you choose. Retail products keep their prices and normal checkout; tagged products show a customizable "pricing on request" note and quote button instead. Stores that sell at retail while quoting bulk orders run both side by side.

It adopts your theme’s own add-to-cart styling one-to-one, hover behavior included. Every aspect (background, border, text, typography, padding) can also be overridden with opt-in toggles, either in the theme editor or centrally in FlowPrint’s settings.

Yes, an acknowledgment email goes out immediately, and your store’s email gets a notification too. You can edit the acknowledgment’s subject and body (with order variables), attach a document rendered from the new quote, or turn it off entirely.

A "Notify me when this is back in stock" button appears automatically on any sold-out product page with the block added. A customer leaves their email (and optionally a first name); when that variant is restocked, they get one email and the request is then deleted. Like the quote button, it adopts your theme’s own add-to-cart styling by default, with the same opt-in override toggles.

No. The request is written directly into your own Shopify store as a Metaobject record, the same "store is the database" approach the quote system uses. FlowPrint reads it once, to send the single notification email when the item restocks, then deletes it. Nothing is ever held in FlowPrint’s own database.

Yes, both from Settings → Back in stock: the email’s subject and body (with a live preview), and central appearance defaults (heading, placeholder text, button color, corner radius) that any block set to "Follow FlowPrint settings" picks up automatically. Individual blocks can also be styled independently, same as the quote button.

By orders, not documents. An order counts once, the first time any document or email renders for it in a month; every further document, email, or reprint for that same order is free. Use FlowPrint on 3 orders and you’ve used 3, no matter how many packing slips and invoices each produced.

Free: 50 orders/month. Builder ($10/month): 250 orders/month. The Sky ($50/month): unlimited. Every plan has unlimited printers, workers, and templates. Billing goes through Shopify’s own billing system on your Shopify invoice, and plan changes happen on Shopify’s own plan page.

No. Previews render in your browser and never touch the meter. Reprints are free too when the order was already counted that month.

No. FlowPrint is built to transport a document to its destination, not to hold a copy of it. Order and customer data from Shopify is used transiently to render a document or compose an email, then discarded. A rendered PDF exists in storage only for the moment between rendering and one delivery attempt; it is deleted immediately afterward, success or failure, typically within seconds. Reprinting or previewing an old job re-fetches the order live from Shopify at that moment; there is no stored copy to hand back.

Yes, cryptographically, not just by a database filter. Every shop gets its own unique signing keypair generated at install. A worker you pair only ever holds the public half of your shop’s key and its own private key; a job for your store can only be decrypted by a worker you personally paired, and a leaked key from one merchant cannot be used to access another merchant’s data. This property is checked explicitly before any key- or encryption-related code in this project is considered done.

Every document sent to a worker is envelope-encrypted (AES-256-GCM for the document, wrapped with that specific worker’s RSA-2048/OAEP public key) and signed with a signing key unique to your store (ECDSA P-256) before it ever leaves our servers. Only that specific worker’s private key, which never leaves the device it was generated on, can decrypt it. Not even FlowPrint’s own backend can read a job payload once it is encrypted for delivery. All network traffic is HTTPS/WSS. Shopify access tokens and per-store signing keys are encrypted at rest.

No, it has zero inbound network exposure. The worker only ever makes outbound connections to FlowPrint’s cloud service; it never listens on a port and never runs a local server of any kind. This is a hard architectural rule, not a configuration option. It also holds no order data, customer details, or business logic; it receives an encrypted document and a printer name, decrypts in memory, prints, and retains nothing afterward.

Nothing, by design. "Logout and scrub" and uninstall delete every piece of local state the worker ever wrote, overwrite its private key before deletion, and ask our servers to delete that worker’s registration at the same moment. On Windows the uninstaller also removes the program folder, logs, and embedded browser cache; on Linux it removes the background service registration and the binary itself.

Your access token is revoked immediately. Shopify notifies us automatically via the mandatory shop/redact webhook, at which point every remaining record tied to your store is deleted, including any rendered document that happened to still exist (rare, given near-immediate deletion is already the normal path) and every template image you uploaded.

Yes. FlowPrint implements all three of Shopify’s mandatory compliance webhooks (customers/data_request, customers/redact, shop/redact) required of every public app. See the full Privacy Policy for exactly what data is processed, why, and your rights as a data subject.

Entirely on Cloudflare’s network (Workers, D1, R2, Queues, and Browser Rendering); no separate servers of our own to secure or lose track of. Email is sent via Cloudflare’s own Email Service (Free plan) or Amazon Simple Email Service (paid plans with a custom sending domain); those are the only two places email content ever passes through, and neither is authorized to use it for anything beyond delivering that one message.

Not at this stage; we would rather be straightforward about that than imply otherwise. What we do have is a genuinely small attack surface by design: no inbound network exposure on the worker, per-shop key isolation, immediate data deletion, and infrastructure entirely on a major cloud provider’s own hardened platform rather than anything we host ourselves. If a formal certification becomes relevant to your business, ask; we will tell you honestly where things stand.

Email development@flowprint.app with as much detail as you can share. We take security reports seriously and will respond directly; there is no separate bug-bounty program at this stage, but a genuine report will get a genuine reply, not a form letter.

Install the app, download the worker, and pair it with a short code: about two minutes to your first printed document. Storefront pieces (quote button, customer downloads) are guided one-click theme-editor flows from the app’s Settings page, each with a live status check showing whether it is actually installed and working.

No. Everything storefront-side is a theme app block added through Shopify’s own theme editor, and the notification-email download button is one copy-pasted snippet. Nothing touches your theme’s code files, and uninstalling leaves no residue in your theme.

Email help@flowprint.app; we usually reply within a business day.