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.
Austin, TX
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Austin, TX
A named Shopify team on retainer for Austin brands running lean, with a backlog that ships every sprint instead of every rebuild.
Delivered remotely for brands across Austin and Texas.
Scale · Austin
Why Austin brands come to us for this
- App stack audit scored on cost, script weight and overlap — most Austin consumables stores are paying for four apps doing one job.
- Subscription, bundle and shipping-rule apps replaced with Shopify Functions where owning the code costs less than renting it.
- Seasonal shipping and cold-pack rules maintained through the May-to-September window instead of patched in a panic.
- Change freezes held around SXSW and ACL activation weeks and the Q4 peak.
- A named Slack channel on Central hours: two business hours for revenue-blocking issues, one business day for everything else.
Count your apps. If a consumables brand in this city has fewer than fifteen, that is unusual. The stack accrues in a predictable order: subscriptions, then bundles, then a loyalty app, then reviews, then a shipping-rules app to handle summer cold packs, then an upsell app, then a second upsell app nobody remembers installing. Each one adds scripts to every page load and a line to a subscription bill that quietly passed four figures a month.
Austin teams are small — often a founder, one marketer and a fractional ops lead — so nobody owns the store. Fixes sit in a backlog for months, three freelancers have edited the theme without documenting anything, speed drifts down, and eighteen months later the recommended fix is another full rebuild.
The retainer exists so that never happens. We own and audit the app stack, replace subscription tools with Shopify Functions or a private app where owning the code costs less than renting it, keep the theme clean and documented, and work a prioritised backlog every sprint with an agreed capacity. A named developer, a named strategist, a monthly report, and a store that is measurably better in December than it was in January.
Local context
Owning the store when nobody on your team can
The lean-team pattern here is structural, not accidental: Austin's cost advantage over the coasts comes partly from headcount discipline, and venture-backed brands in particular are pushed to stay small between rounds. That means the store ends up owned by whoever has the least on their plate that week. It also means the operational calendar is unforgiving — a summer where cold-pack rules and shipping cutoffs have to be right every day from May through September, a March and October where an activation can double traffic with no warning, and a Q4 where a break costs real revenue. We hold change freezes around those windows, keep an audited app stack rather than an accumulated one, and make sure the person answering a customer at 4pm Central can reach a named developer, not a ticket queue.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Austin brand’s realities.
Full service detailCustom 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.
Scoped and quoted for your Austin store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Austin engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
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.
Proof
Apps & Support results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Supplements (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
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%
In their words
Clients on this work
$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 in Austin — your questions
Usually when a tool costs more than a few hundred dollars a month, does one narrow job, and adds script weight to every page. Bundle pricing, tiered discounts and custom shipping rules are the three most common cases — all buildable as Shopify Functions that run server-side, cost nothing monthly and do not slow the storefront. We show the payback period before we build anything.
Yes, and it is one of the more valuable pieces of a retainer here. Cold-pack availability, insulated packaging options, order-by cutoff days and destination-zone rules all need to change with the forecast rather than sit at whatever was set in April. Getting that wrong in a Texas August costs replacements and reviews at the same time.
It is usually the opposite. Small teams are exactly where store ownership falls through the gap, and the cost of a fifteen-app stack plus a stalled backlog typically exceeds the retainer within the year. What matters is scoping the capacity honestly — some Austin brands need a full sprint cadence, others need a smaller maintenance and priority-fix arrangement.
Yes. We agree freeze windows in advance around your highest-risk weeks — usually the March activation period, ACL weekend if you run one, and Q4 peak — and front-load anything structural well before them. Shipping a theme change into a traffic spike is how a good week becomes an incident report.
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.
Next step
Apps & Support for your Austin brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
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.