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.
New York, NY
Shopify Apps & Growth Support in New York
A named Shopify team on retainer, at a fraction of what a senior ecommerce developer costs to hire in this city.
Delivered remotely for brands across New York and New York.
Scale · New York
Why New York brands come to us for this
- Specialist Shopify depth without competing with Flatiron tech salaries for a full-time seat.
- Named developer plus a named strategist, so continuity survives your own team's turnover.
- Two-business-hour response on revenue-blocking issues, inside the Eastern working day.
- Deploy freezes agreed around market weeks and the compressed New York Q4.
- App stack audited on cost and script weight — most stores we inherit are paying for overlap.
The build-versus-hire maths is different in New York. A senior Shopify developer here commands a salary set by the Flatiron and DUMBO tech market, not by the ecommerce market — you are bidding for that person against funded startups. Most consumer brands in this city cannot justify the seat, so the store ends up owned by whoever has time, which is nobody.
The result is predictable. Twenty-two apps, six of which nobody can explain. Three freelancers' worth of undocumented theme edits. A backlog of small fixes that has been three months from getting done for a year. Speed drifts down and eighteen months later someone proposes another rebuild.
The retainer exists so that does not happen. We audit and own the app stack, build custom apps and Functions when a subscription pile costs more than owning the code, keep the theme clean and documented, and ship a fixed sprint capacity every month. A named developer, a named strategist, and a store that is measurably better in December than it was in January.
Local context
Cheaper than the seat you are trying to fill in Flatiron
New York's ecommerce hiring market is the specific reason this service sells here. Brands compete for developer talent against a tech corridor that pays software salaries, and the roles that do get filled are usually generalists stretched across the site, the apps and whatever integration broke that morning. A retainer gives you the specialist depth without the seat, and it comes with a second person for continuity — which matters in a city with the turnover rate this one has. The operating rhythm is Eastern-time too: our working day covers your full business day, so a revenue-blocking bug at 9:15am on a Monday gets a response inside two business hours rather than overnight from another hemisphere. And we work around the calendar that actually governs your risk appetite here — no releases during market week, no theme changes in the four weeks before Christmas, deploy freezes agreed in advance rather than negotiated in a panic.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a New York 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 New York store
We do not work off a rate card. Every New York 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 New York — your questions
For most mid-market brands, yes, and it is not close once you account for the full loaded cost of a senior seat in this city plus recruitment time. You also get more than one skill set: a developer, a strategist and access to design and analytics when a project needs it. The trade is that you do not have someone sitting in your office, which for most teams here matters less than it used to.
Yes, agreed in advance. No theme releases during a market week your wholesale revenue depends on, and a code freeze through the compressed Thanksgiving-to-Christmas window with emergency-only cover. The backlog work moves either side of those dates rather than being negotiated under pressure.
That is a large share of what we take on. First step is an audit: what the theme actually does, what the apps duplicate, what is dead code and what is load-bearing. You get a documented picture and a prioritised list before we change anything, which is also the point at which we tell you honestly if a rebuild is cheaper than maintenance.
Usually when you are paying for two or three apps that overlap, or one app whose annual cost exceeds a few weeks of development and whose scripts are measurably slowing the store. We model it plainly: subscription cost over three years against build and maintenance cost, plus the page-weight difference. Sometimes the app wins and we say so.
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 New York 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.