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.
Denver, CO
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Denver
A named Shopify team on Mountain Time: app stack ownership, custom app work, theme maintenance and a backlog that keeps shipping between seasons.
Delivered remotely for brands across Denver and Colorado.
Scale · Denver
Why Denver brands come to us for this
- App stack scored on cost, script weight, overlap and real usage — with removals scheduled into shoulder season.
- Custom Shopify Functions and private apps replacing subscription stacks that cost more than owning the code.
- Change freeze and monitoring posture through your peak weeks; heavy build work in the quiet months.
- Named developer and strategist in a shared Slack channel on Mountain Time, two-hour revenue-blocker response.
- Quarterly Core Web Vitals review so the store is measurably faster at the end of the year than the start.
Seasonal businesses decay in a specific pattern. Everything gets bolted on in a panic before the season — a stock-notification app, a second reviews widget, a size-chart tool someone found on a Thursday — and none of it gets removed afterwards. Three years of that and you are paying for twenty-two apps, six of which nobody can explain, and your product page is carrying scripts from a promotion that ended two winters ago.
The retainer exists so that stops. We audit and own the app stack, scoring each on cost, script weight, overlap and actual usage, and we build a Shopify Function or a small private app when a subscription stack is genuinely more expensive and slower than owning the code. The theme stays documented and clean rather than accumulating edits from three freelancers who have all moved on.
The rhythm matters as much as the work. Heavy development and speed work in the shoulder months, a freeze and monitoring posture through your peak, and a named developer in a shared Slack channel with a two-hour response on anything revenue-blocking. Not a ticket queue that answers next Tuesday while your best sales week is happening.
Local context
A support calendar shaped like your season
A Denver brand's support needs invert twice a year, and a generic retainer handles neither end well. In the ramp toward a winter or summer peak, what you need is a freeze on structural change, tight monitoring, fast triage and someone awake in Mountain Time when a size-chart app breaks at 7am on the biggest Saturday of your season. In the shoulder months you need the opposite: aggressive app removal, dead-code cleanup, Core Web Vitals recovery, custom Function work replacing subscription bloat, and the backlog items that never survive contact with a busy quarter. We plan the retainer around those two postures explicitly, and the app audit lands in the quiet window where removing something is a decision rather than a risk.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Denver 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 Denver store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Denver 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 Denver — your questions
Differently, on purpose. We move to a change-freeze posture: no structural deploys, tighter monitoring, and fast triage with a two-hour response on anything blocking revenue. Structural work queues up for the shoulder months. Shipping a refactor into the week your season opens is how brands turn a good quarter into an incident report.
That is the common shape here — plenty of Front Range brands have a strong marketer and a merchandiser and no developer at all. We slot in as the technical layer: your team owns merchandising and campaigns, we own the theme, the app stack, integrations and the development backlog. Everything we build ships with a README and a named owner, so you are not locked in.
Often, once you total three years of fees plus the page weight. A bundling, gifting or size-chart app at $200 a month that also costs you 300ms of load time is not a cheap solution. We do the arithmetic per case, and plenty of times the honest answer is that the app is fine and you should keep it. The point of the audit is knowing which.
Albuquerque, New Mexico — same Mountain Time zone as Denver and Boulder. It matters more than it sounds: a support relationship where the response arrives at 9am your time rather than after your day has ended is a materially different service. We travel up for kickoffs and quarterly planning, and we are on your clock the rest of the year.
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 Denver 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.