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.
San Diego, CA
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in San Diego
A named Shopify team on retainer: app stack ownership, custom app and Functions work, theme maintenance, and a prioritised backlog that actually ships.
Delivered remotely for brands across San Diego and California.
Scale · San Diego
Why San Diego brands come to us for this
- App stack audit that usually finds four to seven overlapping or abandoned subscriptions
- Custom Functions replacing bundle and discount apps that charge monthly for a rules engine
- Theme kept clean and documented so subscription mechanics survive platform updates
- Deploy windows planned around charge runs and release dates, not around a generic Q1 lull
- A named developer and strategist on Pacific-overlapping hours, not a rotating ticket queue
Nobody plans to end up with twenty-two apps. It happens one reasonable decision at a time — a subscription app, a bundle app, a loyalty app, a quiz app, a reviews app, then a second bundle app because the first one could not do prepaid. Each adds a monthly fee and a script. Eighteen months later the store is slow, the theme has fingerprints from three freelancers, and someone suggests a rebuild.
The retainer exists so that does not happen. We audit and own the app stack, kill the overlaps, and build custom apps or Shopify Functions when an off-the-shelf tool would cost more in subscriptions and page weight than it would to write properly. The theme stays clean, documented and updatable.
The other half is a shipping cadence. A named developer and strategist, a prioritised backlog reviewed monthly, and work that goes live every sprint rather than accumulating in a ticket queue. You get a store that is measurably better in December than it was in January, which is a lower bar than most agencies clear.
Local context
The app stack that subscription brands accumulate, and what to do about it
San Diego stores end up app-heavy for a structural reason: consumable and subscription businesses need mechanics that no single app does well. Cadence controls, prepaid plans, stack bundling, gifting, loyalty tied to subscription tenure, quiz-driven regimen building — and each gap gets filled by another install rather than a Function. We audit that first, because for a subscription brand the app stack is not a cosmetic problem, it is a direct tax on both margin and page weight, and every added script lands on the same product page that already has to render a dosage table. Beyond the stack, the work is seasonal in ways a national playbook misses: San Diego's mild winter means there is no genuine off-season for outdoor and hydration brands, so the maintenance window most agencies assume in Q1 does not exist here. We plan disruptive work around your calendar — a beverage brand's release schedule, a supplement brand's charge run, a hardgoods brand's spring order book — rather than around ours.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a San Diego 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 San Diego store
We do not work off a rate card. Every San Diego 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 San Diego — your questions
We audit every install against four things: monthly cost, script weight on the page, functional overlap with another app, and whether anyone has actually used it in ninety days. Most stores we take on are paying for four to seven apps that duplicate each other or were installed for a campaign that ended. Removing them is usually the cheapest speed win available.
When the subscription cost over two years exceeds the build, or when the app is adding meaningful page weight for logic that belongs server-side. Bundle pricing, volume discounts and delivery rules are the usual candidates — those are Shopify Functions, and a Function runs server-side without touching your LCP. We show you the two-year cost comparison rather than asserting it.
Frequently, and San Diego has more brands with real in-house engineering than most consumer markets. We agree ownership boundaries in writing, work in branches with pull requests, and document everything we ship. The failure mode we are avoiding is two parties editing the same theme with no shared source of truth, which is how most of the messes we inherit started.
App stack management, theme maintenance and updates, priority bug fixes, and a prioritised optimisation backlog we work through every sprint. You get a monthly report showing what shipped, what it moved and what is queued next. Custom app or Functions builds beyond the monthly allocation get scoped separately so the retainer does not quietly become a fixed-fee build.
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 San Diego 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.