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 Francisco, CA
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in San Francisco, CA
Ongoing Shopify work for brands with no engineering team — and for the ones whose engineers have better things to build.
Delivered remotely for brands across San Francisco and California.
Scale · San Francisco
Why San Francisco brands come to us for this
- Every app scored on cost, script weight, overlap and real usage — then the redundant ones removed
- Shopify Functions written to replace stacked subscription apps where the maths and maintenance work
- Regression testing against Shopify platform releases so an update does not break your subscription flow
- Mountain Time coverage starting an hour before the Bay Area working day
- A written build-versus-buy position on each request, including when the answer is keep paying for the app
Two very different San Francisco businesses end up needing the same retainer. The first has no technical staff at all: an owner and a small marketing team running a store that accumulated thirty-one apps over four years, several of which do overlapping jobs, three of which are still billing for functionality nobody uses, and collectively add enough script weight to make the product page feel slow on a phone. The second has plenty of engineering talent, all of it correctly pointed at the product rather than at the storefront, and needs someone whose job is Shopify so theirs does not become Shopify.
The first job in both cases is the same audit: every app scored on cost, script weight, overlap and actual usage. Removing four apps typically does more for page speed than any optimisation project, and it takes back a monthly bill nobody had reviewed since installing them. What stays, we own — meaning we handle the vendor relationship, the version updates and the support tickets rather than forwarding them to you.
After that it is a steady rhythm rather than a project: quarterly Core Web Vitals review and dead-code removal, regression testing against Shopify's platform releases so an edition update does not break your subscription selector on a Saturday, priority fixes with a defined response window, and a small, ordered queue of improvements that gets worked through in priority order instead of arriving as a surprise proposal every quarter.
Local context
An hour ahead of you, and willing to argue against building it
Our office is in Albuquerque, on Mountain Time, which is one hour ahead of San Francisco — so work filed at the end of your day is looked at before you open, and a Monday morning incident on the West Coast lands mid-morning for us rather than at dawn. That is the practical part. The less obvious part is that this city produces more build-versus-buy arguments than any market we work in, because the founders here can build, and the answer is genuinely not obvious. A custom Shopify Function that replaces three stacked subscription apps often pays for itself and simplifies the stack; a bespoke app that duplicates something Shopify ships natively becomes an obligation your team maintains forever. We take a position on each one and put the reasoning in writing, including the times we recommend keeping a paid app rather than writing code — which is not the answer that grows an engagement, but is usually the right one for a business between one and ten million a year that does not need a permanent engineering dependency.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a San Francisco 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 Francisco store
We do not work off a rate card. Every San Francisco 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 Francisco — your questions
With usage and overlap before cost. We list every app, what it actually does on the storefront, what scripts it injects, whether anyone has opened it in ninety days, and which other app duplicates it. The usual outcome is a handful of clean removals, one or two consolidations, and a shortlist of things that are genuinely load-bearing. Speed improvement is a side effect of the removals rather than a separate project.
For the work that is specifically Shopify and specifically ongoing: platform release regressions, theme and Liquid performance, app ecosystem decisions, Functions and checkout extensions, and the queue of small merchandising changes that would otherwise interrupt your product roadmap. We are comfortable reviewing your team's pull requests instead of writing the code, and we would rather do that than duplicate capability you already pay for.
By testing before it reaches you where we can, and by having a defined response path when it does not. Platform releases are tracked, the areas most likely to be affected — checkout extensions, subscription selectors, custom Functions and app dependencies — get regression tested, and anything that touches revenue is treated as priority with a stated response window rather than joining the general queue.
It depends on how much of the app you actually use and how stable that need is. If you are paying for a platform to get one rule, and that rule is settled, a Function is usually cheaper over three years and lighter on the storefront. If the app is being actively developed against a moving target — tax, compliance, carrier logic — buying is the better answer and we will say so. We put the comparison in writing before either path starts.
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 Francisco 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.