App Stack Audit & Management
Every app scored on cost, script weight, overlap and actual usage. We remove what is redundant and own the relationship with what stays.
Scale · A named team, a shipping cadence, no ticket queue
Stop paying for a rebuild every eighteen months
A named Shopify team on retainer: app stack management, custom app development, theme maintenance and a prioritised backlog that ships every sprint.
The problem
What ongoing support is actually fixing
- You pay for 22 apps and could not say what six of them do.
- Three freelancers have edited the theme and none of them documented anything.
- Small fixes sit in a backlog for months because nobody owns the store.
- App subscriptions cost more each year than a custom build would have cost once.
Stores decay. Apps accumulate, each adding scripts and a monthly fee. Theme edits pile up from three different freelancers. Speed drifts down, the backlog grows, and eventually the answer is another expensive rebuild eighteen months after the last one.
The retainer exists so that never happens. We audit and own the app stack, build custom apps and Shopify Functions when an off-the-shelf tool would cost more in subscriptions and page weight, keep the theme clean and documented, and work a prioritised backlog every sprint. You get a named developer and strategist, a monthly report, and a store that is measurably better in December than it was in January.
Median result across Apps & Support engagements. Individual outcomes vary with baseline, budget and category.
Scope
What you actually get
No line item here is optional-extra padding. This is the standard shape of the engagement.
Custom App & Function Development
Private apps, Shopify Functions and admin extensions built when a subscription stack is more expensive or slower than owning the code.
Theme Maintenance & Speed
Quarterly Core Web Vitals review, dead-code removal, dependency updates and regression testing against Shopify's platform releases.
Priority Bug Support
Named Slack channel with defined response times: two business hours for revenue-blocking issues, one business day for everything else.
Monthly Optimisation Workstream
A ranked backlog of improvements, features and experiments, with an agreed sprint capacity so a fixed number of items ship every month.
Quarterly Roadmap Review
A session on what shipped, what it moved, and what the next quarter should target. Priorities get reset against your commercial plan, not a fixed contract scope.
How it runs
The engagement, step by step
You will always know what week you are in and what lands next.
Store Health Check
App stack, theme code, speed, integrations and open bug list documented in the first two weeks. You get the findings whether you continue or not.
Stabilise
Redundant apps removed, urgent bugs cleared, monitoring and staging environments set up. Usually pays for a chunk of the first quarter in cancelled subscriptions.
Backlog & Cadence
A shared, ranked backlog and a fixed sprint rhythm. You always know what is in flight, what is next, and what capacity is left.
Ship Monthly
Two-week sprints with a demo and changelog at the end of each. Work is visible in your own board, not hidden in an agency system.
Review & Reprioritise
Monthly reporting on what shipped and what it moved, then a quarterly reset of priorities against your commercial goals.
Quoted per engagement, never off a rate card
We do not publish a price for this, because the honest number depends on your catalogue, your stack and how much of the work is already done. You get a fixed statement of work with named deliverables and named dates before anyone starts — and we will tell you plainly if this is not the right first move for your brand.
Get this scopedTools we run this on
Shopify PlusShopify CLIShopify FunctionsRemixGitHub ActionsSentryLinearSlack
Proof
Apps & Support, in the wild
Anonymised at the client’s request. Metrics come straight from their own dashboards.
All case studiesSupplements (Subscription DTC)
~$4.2M/yr, 60% subscription revenue, 22 SKUs, US · Shopify Plus (Recharge, Klaviyo)
Monthly subscription churn hit 9.4% and the cancel flow was a single button on a hosted page nobody had touched in three years. Support processed 340 subscription changes a month by hand because customers could not do it themselves. The named constraint: no forced logins. The brand refused to gate account access behind a password reset, which ruled out every off-the-shelf portal.
9.4% → 6.1%monthly subscription churnheld for five consecutive months, not a single-month dip
+34%12-month customer LTV$187 to $251 on the subscriber cohort
19% → 38%of revenue from email + SMScategory benchmark for a healthy program is 25-40%
-71%subscription support tickets340/mo to 98/mo after the self-serve portal launched
What we did
- Built a passwordless, on-theme subscription portal on Shopify customer accounts. Skip, swap, delay and change frequency without a support ticket.
- Replaced the cancel button with a save flow: pause, downgrade cadence, or a one-time offer, ordered by predicted save rate rather than by margin.
- Rebuilt the Klaviyo flow set from 6 to 17, including a pre-billing notice, four-touch failed-payment dunning, winback, and an RFM-segmented replenishment series.
- Added a post-purchase bundle upsell through Shopify checkout extensions with a 90-day supply option at a per-unit discount.
“The portal paid for itself in support hours inside one quarter. The churn number is what actually changed the business.”COO, Supplements DTC
Outdoor & Sports Gear
~$7M/yr, 480 SKUs, US + EU via Shopify Markets · Shopify Plus (Shopify Markets, 3 regions)
Paid social carried 81% of revenue and CAC had climbed 44% in eighteen months. Organic sat at 2,100 sessions a month against category competitors doing ten times that, and the EU storefront duplicated the US catalogue with no hreflang at all. The named constraint: three national retailers own the head terms with link profiles this brand could not match in a year, so the plan had to win on query depth instead of authority.
+186%organic sessions2,100 to 6,000/mo, branded queries excluded
+21%conversion rate on organic traffic1.9% to 2.3% after the collection and PDP work landed
$61 → $45blended CACorganic share of revenue went from 8% to 24%
+38%revenue year over yearwith paid media spend down 12%
What we did
- Rebuilt collection architecture around buyer intent (activity × condition × capacity) instead of the internal merchandising taxonomy. 34 new indexable collections, each with genuine buying-guide content.
- Fixed the Shopify Markets duplication: correct hreflang across three regions, region-scoped canonicals, and separate Search Console properties so problems were diagnosable.
- Published 41 comparison and spec pages targeting the long-tail questions the big retailers do not write for, structured for extraction by AI answer engines.
- Ran a parallel CRO workstream on collection filtering and PDP spec tables so the new traffic had somewhere to convert.
“We stopped trying to outrank the big three and started answering the questions they ignore. That was the entire strategy and it worked.”Marketing Director, Outdoor Gear Brand
In their words
What clients said afterwards
$1,900/mo of app spend cancelled
“First month they cancelled eleven apps we were still paying for, just under $1,900 a month, which covered more than half the retainer before they shipped a line of code. The backlog lives in our own board and we rank it together — it is not a bucket of hours that quietly evaporates. Two years in and I have never had to chase a bug fix twice. We are twenty minutes from their office and they still turn up in person for the quarterly, which I appreciated more than I expected to.”
OwnerSporting goods brand, ~$4M/yr · Albuquerque, NM
Verified client, 2025FAQ
Apps & Support — straight answers
A named developer and strategist, an agreed sprint capacity, priority bug support, app stack management and monthly reporting. Capacity is set in hours per month and rolls over one month if unused. Anything outside scope gets quoted separately before work starts.
Three months, then rolling with thirty days' notice. The three months exists because the first month is mostly stabilisation and you would not see the benefit of the arrangement inside a shorter window. We do not do twelve-month lock-ins.
When the subscription cost exceeds roughly $500 a month, when the app injects scripts that hurt Core Web Vitals, or when you need logic no vendor offers. Below that threshold, buying is almost always the right answer and we will say so.
Frequently. We work in your repo, your branching model and your board, and we code review rather than compete. Plenty of engagements are us covering Shopify-specific work while an in-house team owns the rest of the stack.
Anything blocking revenue: checkout failures, cart errors, payment problems, catastrophic layout breaks or a site outage. Those get a two business-hour response. Everything else runs on a one business-day response and enters the normal backlog.
It can include implementation of it. Strategy-led programmes like the experimentation roadmap or SEO content sit in their own retainers because they need dedicated specialist capacity. Many brands run the support retainer alongside one growth retainer.
By location
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support where you trade
How we deliver Apps & Support in each of the markets we work in — the local buying behaviour, the competitive set, and what changes because of it.
Apps & Support for Miami brandsApps & Support for New York brandsShopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Los AngelesShopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in ChicagoApps & Support for Houston brandsDallas Apps & SupportAtlanta, GAApps & Support for Austin brandsPhoenix, AZApps & Support for Denver brandsour Apps & Support work in SeattleSan Diego Apps & SupportShopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in AlbuquerqueApps & Support for Washington brandsApps & Support for Philadelphia brandsBoston Apps & SupportShopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in San FranciscoRiverside, CADetroit Apps & SupportMinneapolis, MNTampa, FLApps & Support for St. Louis brandsBaltimore, MDCharlotte Apps & SupportApps & Support for Orlando brandsour Apps & Support work in San AntonioApps & Support for Portland brandsShopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in SacramentoApps & Support for Pittsburgh brandsApps & Support for Las Vegas brandsCincinnati, OHKansas City Apps & SupportColumbus, OHour Apps & Support work in TorontoApps & Support for London brandsApps & Support for Sydney brandsShopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in DublinApps & Support for Dubai brandsSingapore, SingaporeAmsterdam, NetherlandsApps & Support for Berlin brandsParis Apps & SupportMadrid Apps & SupportMilan Apps & SupportZurich Apps & SupportApps & Support for Stockholm brandsShopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in CopenhagenIstanbul, Türkiye
Pairs well with
What usually comes next
These are the services clients most often add once this one is live.
01
Scale
Shopify Plus & Headless Commerce
Plus-tier engineering for brands that have outgrown a standard theme: checkout extensions, Shopify Functions, B2B, Markets and headless Hydrogen storefronts.
Plus brands above $10M a year
02
Scale
Analytics, Tracking & Data
GA4, server-side tracking, Conversions API and consent mode implemented properly, plus reporting that ties every channel back to contribution margin.
Brands spending $30k+ on paid media
03
Build
Shopify Store Design & Development
Custom Shopify and Shopify Plus storefronts designed around your catalogue, built in clean Liquid, and launched with a measured conversion baseline.
DTC brands doing $1M-$20M a year
Next step
Ready to talk about Apps & Support?
A named Shopify developer and strategist on a fixed sprint cadence: app stack owned, theme kept clean, ranked backlog shipped every month. The first stabilisation pass typically cancels around $1,840/mo of redundant app spend.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.