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.
Boston, MA
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Boston, MA
A named team that knows not to ship anything in the last week of August and can be reached when a nor'easter breaks your fulfilment.
Delivered remotely for brands across Boston and Massachusetts.
Scale · Boston
Why Boston brands come to us for this
- Written code freeze across the move-in ramp and commencement week, agreed at the start of the year
- Storm runbook your ops team executes without us: ship-day closures, messaging swaps, notification flow
- App stack audited for overlap between subscription, shipping-rate, cold-pack and wholesale apps
- Native Shopify Functions replacing paid apps where the platform now does the job better
- Growth backlog sequenced into the quiet months so changes land where they can be measured
Ongoing support in this market is mostly about knowing what week it is. A Boston store has two windows where a deployment is genuinely dangerous and a long winter stretch where an operational problem can arrive with eighteen hours of warning from a weather forecast. A retainer that treats every week as identical will helpfully ship a theme update on the Wednesday of move-in and then be unreachable on the Saturday a storm closes the warehouse. We run the opposite pattern: build in the quiet months, freeze in the peaks, stay reachable through the weather.
The app stack is the other recurring job. Boston stores accumulate apps in a specific pattern — a subscription app, a shipping-rate app, a second shipping app somebody added for cold-pack rules, a B2B or wholesale app installed before Shopify B2B existed, and a bundle app for move-in kits. Several of those overlap, several are billing monthly for something a Shopify Function now does natively and better, and collectively they are the reason the collection page takes four seconds on a phone. We audit the stack against cost, script weight and native replacement, and we usually remove more than we add.
Then the growth work. A backlog that mixes CRO, speed, merchandising and small feature builds, sequenced so the significant changes land where there is room to measure them — October and November, or February through April — and the peak windows only receive things that have already been tested. Every month you get what shipped, what it cost, what it moved and what is queued next, and a quarterly session where we re-rank the backlog against where the business actually is rather than where it was in January.
Local context
Freeze windows, storm runbooks and a two-hour offset
Three operational commitments define what this looks like for a Boston brand. First, a written code freeze covering the ramp into move-in and the week around commencement — nothing ships in those windows except a fix for something already broken, and everything intended for the peak is live and proven weeks earlier. Second, a storm runbook: named steps for closing affected ship days, switching delivery messaging, pausing perishable ad zones and triggering the customer notification flow, written down so your team executes it at 6am without waiting for us. Third, the time difference. We are in Albuquerque on Mountain Time, two hours behind you, which means our team is starting as your morning gets going and we are still at desks through your late afternoon — and for the peak weeks we agree escalation coverage in writing rather than leaving it to goodwill.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Boston 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 Boston store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Boston 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 Boston — your questions
Monitoring and escalation, not development. The store is frozen, the seasonal layouts are already live, and our job that week is to watch performance, checkout errors and inventory sync and to fix anything genuinely broken. New work resumes once the curve breaks. The most valuable thing a retainer can do in that window is not touch anything.
That is one of the first jobs. We inventory every app against what it costs, what scripts it injects and whether Shopify now does it natively — shipping rules, bundles, volume pricing and wholesale pricing are the four we most often replace with Functions. Removing dead weight is usually the cheapest speed improvement available and it lands before any new build work.
For genuine incidents affecting orders or revenue, yes, and the escalation path is written into the engagement rather than assumed. Most of a storm response should not need us though — that is the point of the runbook. Your team closes the affected ship days, swaps the messaging and fires the notification flow, and we are there for anything that actually breaks.
October and November, and again from February into April. Those are the stretches where traffic is steady enough to measure a change and there is no peak to protect. We plan the year that way deliberately, so the work that needs a clean read gets one and the peak windows only ever receive things that have already proven themselves.
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 Boston 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.