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.
Portland, OR
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Portland, OR
A named team keeping a Portland store shipping: drops, subscription mechanics, repair and trade-in flows, and an app stack that stops growing.
Delivered remotely for brands across Portland and Oregon.
Scale · Portland
Why Portland brands come to us for this
- App stack audited on cost, script weight and actual usage, with overlapping tools consolidated out
- Subscription, warranty, trade-in and wholesale logic built as Functions or private apps where owning the code is cheaper
- Drop pre-flight as a scheduled routine: inventory staging, waitlists, queue handling and load headroom
- Gifting readiness for the fourth quarter tested in the shoulder months, not patched live in December
- Code freeze around your peak, with risky work front-loaded into the quieter part of the year
Portland stores accumulate apps faster than most, because the category keeps asking for another feature. A subscription app, a returns app, a warranty registration app, a size recommender, a trade-in tool, a reviews app, a back-in-stock app, a wholesale app. Each one arrives solving a real problem and leaves behind a monthly fee and a script tag, and eighteen months later the product page is carrying eleven third-party requests and the load time nobody can explain.
The retainer exists to reverse that drift. Every app scored on cost, script weight, overlap and whether anyone actually uses it. Overlapping tools consolidated. Where a subscription stack is more expensive or slower than owning the code, we build the Shopify Function or the private app instead — bundle and case pricing, wholesale rules, trade-in credit issuance and warranty registration are all commonly cheaper as code than as a subscription for a brand at this scale.
Then a shipping cadence rather than a ticket queue. A ranked backlog worked every sprint, a named developer and strategist who know your catalogue and your drop calendar, and quarterly Core Web Vitals and platform-release checks so the store is measurably better at the end of the year than it was at the start. Two business hours on anything blocking revenue, one business day on everything else, in a shared channel rather than a form.
Local context
Support scheduled around drops, wet season and a gifting fourth quarter
A Portland store's year has specific pressure points and the support plan should be shaped to them rather than spread evenly. Small-run drops need pre-flight work on a fixed date — inventory staging, notify-me and waitlist checks, queue or password handling, load headroom — and they fail in predictable ways if that is improvised the night before. The wet season brings a step change in traffic to outerwear and footwear categories, which is exactly when an untrimmed app stack turns into a slow product page. And the fourth quarter turns a roaster or hardgoods brand into a gifting business overnight: gift subscriptions, message fields, delivery-date choice and holiday cutoff logic all have to be tested in advance rather than patched live. We set a code freeze around your peak, front-load the risky work into the shoulder months, and keep the backlog honest about what fits before it. On timing, we are an hour ahead of you in Albuquerque, so an issue raised at the start of your day is already inside our working hours.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Portland 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 Portland store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Portland 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 Portland — your questions
Usually the ones that are pure logic with no ongoing service behind them. Discount and bundle rules, case-pack and wholesale pricing, trade-in credit issuance and warranty registration capture are all things a Function or a private app can do permanently for a build cost, with no script on the storefront. What is worth renting is anything with real infrastructure or compliance behind it — payment processing, subscription billing, tax calculation, review collection. We score each one on annual cost against build cost and page weight before recommending a move.
That is most of what we take on. The first sprint is an audit rather than feature work: what is in the theme, what the app stack is doing, where the custom code lives, what is undocumented and what is quietly broken. You get a written picture and a ranked backlog before anyone changes anything. Occasionally the honest answer is that the theme is beyond economical repair, and we would rather say that in week two than bill a year of patches.
As a scheduled event with a checklist, not a launch. Inventory and variants staged and verified, waitlist and back-in-stock flows tested against a real trigger, images and page weight checked because drop pages are usually the heaviest on the site, checkout and payment tested end to end, and a decision made in advance about whether a queue or a password window is warranted. Someone is available during the window, and we do not deploy unrelated changes in the days either side.
Yes, and for roaster and club clients it is often the majority of the work. That means cadence and skip mechanics, dunning configuration, the subscriber account portal, gifting and prepaid options, and the reporting that shows whether churn is moving. It sits in the same backlog as storefront work and competes for the same sprint capacity, so we prioritise it against everything else rather than treating it as a separate contract.
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 Portland 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.