Limits and known limitations Rubik Combined Listings Swatch

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Rubik Combined Listings Swatch saves your product groups inside your own Shopify store, as Shopify metaobjects. Your storefront reads swatches straight from Shopify, so they always show live prices, stock, and images, and they need no call to our servers. The trade-off is that Shopify's platform limits for metaobjects and metafields also apply to your groups.

Most stores never come close to any of them. This page lists the limits that matter, what you would notice if your store reached one, and what to do about it.

Limits at a glance

Limit	Value	Set by
Different swatches one page can load	1,000	Shopify
Products per family in a multi-option setup	1,000 ÷ options (max 250)	Shopify
Products per group shown on your storefront	250	Shopify
Products per group, absolute maximum	1,024	Shopify
Swatch entries per store	1,000,000	Shopify
Storefront filters with Search & Discovery	25 per store	Shopify
Groups shown for one product	50	Shopify
Variants counted when sorting by diversity	First 50	Shopify
Product groups	Depends on plan	App
Products per request from an AI assistant or Sidekick	200 / 25	App
Custom CSS	50,000 characters	App

The per-page limit on swatches

Every swatch is a metaobject entry in your store. When Shopify builds a page, it lets that page load up to 1,000 different swatch entries. The limit is not listed in Shopify's public documentation. When a page goes over it, the swatch data of the products after that point goes missing, and Shopify leaves this message in the page source in its place:

<!-- Liquid error (swatch-data line 21): Exceeded maximum number of unique metaobjects accessed for type app--306581864449--rubik_swatch. -->

How the count adds up

To estimate a page, add up the products in each different active group that appears on it, counting at most 250 per group. A total above 1,000 is over the limit.

• Different swatches count, repeats do not. Twenty product cards from the same 40-product group load 40 swatches, not 800.
• Every active group of a product counts, even when its product card only shows the first group.
• Up to 250 swatches per group are loaded, so a page always has room for four groups of 250 products, and never for five.
• Inactive groups are not loaded, so they never count.

Where it can happen

• Collection, search, and home pages whose product cards use the app's Swatches (Product Card) block. The block builds every card's swatch data into the page itself, so one page loads the swatches of every group on it. For example, 24 products from 24 different groups of 50 products come to 1,200, over the limit, while the same 24 products from 6 groups of 50 come to 300.
• Product pages of a product whose groups add up to more than 1,000. This happens most often in multi-option setups, where every product belongs to several groups.

Multi-option setups

In a multi-option setup every product of a family belongs to every option group: all the boots are in the Color group and again in the Style group. Each product page therefore loads the family once per option, so multiply the number of options by the number of products in the family (counting at most 250 per group). The result has to stay at 1,000 or less:

Options	Largest family	Swatches per product page
2 to 4	250 products	Up to 1,000
5	200 products	1,000
6	166 products	996

Five or more options reach the limit quickly. A family in 7 colors, 4 sizes, and 2 choices in each of three more options is 224 products, and with five option groups every one of its product pages needs 1,120 swatches. On collection pages that use the card block, each family on the page adds its own total, so cards from several families can go over even when every family fits on its own.

To bring a family under the limit:

• Use Shopify variants for one option, usually size. Each product then carries its sizes as variants, so that option needs no group and the family has fewer products. In the example above, moving size into variants leaves 56 products and four options: 224 swatches per product page.
• Split the family, for example into one family per style.
• Keep only the option rows your shoppers need.

What you would notice

• Product cards: swatches still appear. When a card's data is missing from the page, the app loads it in the background instead, so its swatches show up a moment later.
• Product pages: the swatches may not appear.

What to do

1. Remove the Swatches (Product Card) block from your product cards and let the app place card swatches automatically. The app then loads card data in small background batches, and each batch stays well under the limit. For most stores the block is the faster option, because the data arrives with the page, so only make this change if your store reaches the limit. If your theme needs the block to place swatches correctly, chat with us first.
2. Show fewer products per page on the collection template in your theme editor.
3. Split very large groups, for example by product type, so each product loads fewer swatches. Keep any one product in no more than four groups of 250 products, and in a multi-option setup follow the tips above.
4. Deactivate groups you no longer use.

Large groups: 250 products

Shopify loads at most 250 swatches per group on a page, so a group's swatch row on your storefront stops at its first 250 products. Products after that do not appear as swatches, and their own product pages show the group without a swatch for themselves.

The app's group editor and CSV export also work with only the first 250 products of a group, so editing or re-importing a larger group can remove the products after the 250th from it. Groups larger than 250 products are not supported. If a family of products is bigger than that, split it into several groups, for example by product type.

Shopify's absolute maximum is 1,024 products per group; a group larger than that cannot be saved.

Well before either limit, long swatch rows get harder for shoppers to use and add weight to every page that shows the group. The Max visible and Limit to one row settings keep long rows tidy. They change what shoppers see, not what the page loads.

Swatch entries per store: 1,000,000

The app creates one swatch entry for each product in each group, so a product that belongs to two groups uses two. Shopify allows up to 1,000,000 entries of each metaobject type per store. (Until October 2025 the limit was 64,000, or 128,000 on Shopify Plus.)

If a store reaches it, new groups and new products added to existing groups cannot be saved, and the app shows Shopify's error message when you click Save. Deleting groups you no longer need frees their entries.

Storefront filters with Search & Discovery

With storefront filters turned on, each option name you use (Color, Size, Material) becomes a filter you can add in Shopify's Search & Discovery app. Shopify's limits for those filters apply:

• 25 filters per store in total, including price, availability, and any other filters you use.
• 100 values per filter are shown on your storefront.
• No filters on collections with more than 5,000 products, or on searches with more than 100,000 results.
• Fewer than 256 option names can be synced. Each option name uses one product metafield definition, and Shopify allows an app 256 of them per store, including the one the app uses for its own data. An option name you have renamed still counts.
• Filter values appear in your store's default language. The translations you add in the app apply to swatches, not to filter values.

Groups, variants, and images per product

Shopify's storefront code stops a loop after 50 items, which sets three smaller limits:

• A product shows its first 50 groups. Rarely reached, but worth knowing if products belong to many groups.
• Sort by diversity of available variants counts the first 50 variants of each product. Products with more variants are scored on those 50.
• The Last product image swatch source uses the last image among a product's first 50 media items (images, videos, and 3D models).

Good to know

• Saving a large group takes time. Every product in a group is written to Shopify, and Shopify limits how fast an app can write to a store (Shopify Plus stores get a limit ten times higher). A new group of 200 products takes about two minutes to save. Bulk group creation runs in the background and emails you when it finishes.
• Products must be on the Online Store. Draft and archived products, and products not published to the Online Store sales channel, are skipped automatically because Shopify does not show them on the storefront.
• Duplicated products do not join the group. When you duplicate a product in Shopify, the copy shows no swatches until you add it to the group in the app.
• Other apps cannot read your groups through Shopify's admin API. Shopify does not let one app read another app's data that way, so search, filter, and product feed apps that draw their own product cards do not show swatches unless they read the data from your storefront. If you use one, chat with us and we can share integration details with its developer.
• Uninstalling removes swatches from your storefront. Shopify deletes the app's data from your store after you uninstall. If you reinstall and a group shows Product group needs restoration, click Restore product group to recreate it.
• Plan limits. The number of product groups you can create depends on your plan. See pricing.
• AI assistants and Sidekick. An assistant connected through the MCP server can create or update a group of up to 200 products in one request, and Sidekick handles up to 25 products at a time. Larger groups can be managed in the app.
• Custom CSS can be up to 50,000 characters.

Need help?

If your store is running into one of these limits, chat with us and include the address of the page. We can check how close it is to the limit and suggest the best change for your store.