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.
Sydney, NSW
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Sydney
A named Shopify developer and strategist on a fixed cadence, with the shipping and payments stack that Australian stores depend on actually maintained.
Delivered remotely for brands across Sydney and Australia.
Scale · Sydney
Why Sydney brands come to us for this
- App stack audited for cost, script weight and overlap, with the shipping, BNPL and subscription layer treated as load-bearing infrastructure
- Shipping rates reconciled against actual carrier invoices, so the store stops quoting one freight figure while you are charged another
- Routine deploys scheduled into the Sydney overnight window and verified before your team starts the day
- Change freeze from mid-November through January — critical fixes only, with the peak checklist run before it starts
- Named developer and strategist on a fixed sprint cadence, with a ranked backlog agreed monthly and a quarterly roadmap review
Australian Shopify stores accumulate a specific kind of app debt. There is a shipping platform connecting Australia Post and couriers, a rates app doing zone logic, a click-and-collect app, one or two BNPL apps, a subscriptions app, a reviews app, a bundle app and usually something a previous developer installed to solve a problem that no longer exists. Individually they are all defensible; together they slow the store, duplicate each other's functions and disagree at exactly the moment volume peaks. The first pass on any new retainer is an audit that establishes what each app costs, what it weighs and whether Shopify now does it natively.
The shipping layer deserves particular attention here because it is load-bearing. When the rates app and the shipping profiles disagree, customers are quoted one figure and you are charged another, and nobody notices until a month of margin has quietly gone. We treat freight configuration as production infrastructure: tested when carrier pricing changes, checked against real invoices, and reviewed at least annually as your weight and destination profile shifts.
Beyond stabilisation, the retainer is a shipping cadence rather than a ticket queue. A ranked backlog agreed monthly, work delivered in fixed sprints, a named developer and strategist who already know why your product page is built the way it is, and a quarterly review that decides what the next three months are for. Custom Functions or a light custom app get built when they genuinely replace a stack of subscriptions; we will also tell you when the app you already pay for is fine.
Local context
Deploys land overnight, and nothing ships in December
The seventeen-hour offset changes the operating rhythm of a retainer more than any other service, and mostly in ways that are workable if you plan for them. Our working day is Sydney's night, so routine deployments, theme updates and app changes land during your lowest-traffic hours and are verified before your team logs on — which is genuinely convenient for releases and genuinely inconvenient when something breaks at 2pm Sydney time and our team is asleep. We handle that honestly rather than pretending otherwise: a documented severity definition, a rollback your own team can execute without us, and an agreed contact path for the things that cannot wait. The calendar rule is firm. From mid-November through January the store goes into change freeze — critical fixes only, no app installs, no theme releases, no experiments — because a broken checkout during the single biggest trading fortnight of the Australian year is not recoverable by working faster afterwards.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Sydney 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 Sydney store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Sydney 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 Sydney — your questions
This is the honest cost of the time difference and we plan for it rather than talking around it. There is a written severity definition, an agreed contact path for genuine emergencies, and — most importantly — a rollback procedure your own team can execute without us, because the fastest fix for a bad release is reverting it. Anything that cannot be reverted is not deployed close to a peak period in the first place.
Fewer than most are. The stores we take on typically run several apps that overlap, and a common pattern is two shipping-related apps plus native shipping profiles all trying to do the same job. Some Australian-specific tooling is genuinely worth keeping — carrier integration and label workflow in particular. The test we apply is whether an app earns its subscription cost, its script weight and its failure risk, and a meaningful number do not.
Mid-November through the end of January, covering Click Frenzy, Black Friday, Christmas and the Boxing Day period into the January run-out. During the freeze we handle critical bug fixes, monitoring and merchandising changes made through the theme editor. What stops is app installs, theme releases and structural experiments. The backlog does not stop — it queues, and February is usually the busiest development month of the year for exactly that reason.
Sometimes, and the maths is more favourable in Australia than people expect because so many stores stack multiple apps to express one set of shipping rules. If three subscriptions exist to do something Shopify Functions can do server-side in one place, replacing them usually pays back and removes a failure point at peak. If a single well-maintained app does the job, we leave it — building custom software to save a subscription and then owning it forever is rarely the win it looks like.
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 Sydney 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.