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.
Toronto, ON
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Toronto, ON
A named Shopify team on a sprint cadence, owning the app stack that a cross-border Canadian store accumulates faster than most.
Delivered remotely for brands across Toronto and Canada.
Scale · Toronto
Why Toronto brands come to us for this
- App stack scored on cost, script weight and overlap, with the USD subscription total surfaced as a real CAD cost line
- Duplicate tools retired where Shopify Markets, native tax calculation or a small Function already covers the job
- Carrier, tax and duty apps audited specifically — the category where Canadian stores carry the most redundancy
- Code freeze, monitoring and named cover agreed before Black Friday through Boxing Day, not during it
- Two business-hour response on revenue-blocking issues, with peak cover shifted to the Eastern Time open
Canadian stores collect apps faster than single-market ones, because every border and language adds a tool. A currency app, a duty calculator, a tax reporting app, a translation app, a carrier-rate app, a returns app that handles cross-border labels — each one solving a real problem, each adding scripts to the page and a line to a subscription bill that is almost always denominated in US dollars. That last detail matters more than brands expect: your app stack is an unhedged USD cost against a business whose Canadian revenue is in CAD, and it grows quietly every year the exchange rate moves.
The retainer exists so the store does not decay into another rebuild eighteen months from now. We audit and own the app stack, scoring every app on cost, script weight, overlap and whether anyone still uses it. Several of the tools a Canadian store carries are duplicating capability that Shopify Markets, native tax calculation or a small Shopify Function now covers for nothing. Removing them is usually the cheapest speed win available and it lands in the first sprint.
Beyond the cleanup, it is a named developer and strategist, a fixed sprint capacity, a ranked backlog that ships every month, and priority response on anything blocking revenue. Custom apps and Shopify Functions get built where a subscription stack costs more in fees and page weight than owning the code. You get a monthly report and a store in better shape at the end of the year than at the start, which for a brand whose year is decided between October and Boxing Day is the only comparison that matters.
Local context
Eastern Time cover for a store whose peak week is the whole year
Support arrangements are judged on the days that go wrong, and for a GTA brand those days are concentrated: Black Friday weekend, the December shipping cutoff run, and Boxing Day week, when Canadian discounting is at its most aggressive and your checkout is under the most load it will see all year. We plan for it rather than staffing up in a panic. Code freeze agreed before the peak, no app installs and no theme changes during the window, monitoring and alerting live in advance, and named cover with a two business-hour response on anything revenue-blocking. Toronto is two hours ahead of Albuquerque, so your morning starts before ours — we shift cover during peak so someone is watching your checkout from the Eastern Time open rather than answering at 11am your time. Outside peak, the two-hour offset means the rest of your working day overlaps ours completely and nothing waits overnight.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Toronto 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 Toronto store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Toronto 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 Toronto — your questions
For a Canadian brand it is a larger line than it looks, because the invoice is USD and a chunk of your revenue is CAD. We convert the full stack cost into your reporting currency in the first audit and rank apps by real annual cost against actual usage. It is common to find several hundred US dollars a month going to tools that duplicate each other or that nobody has opened since the person who installed them left.
Currency converters that Shopify Markets replaces, translation apps layered on top of Shopify's native translation, duplicate carrier-rate tools, and tax apps doing work Shopify calculates natively once registrations are entered. We do not remove anything without confirming the native path covers your case, because there are genuine edge cases — complex filing requirements and unusual shipping profiles among them.
A written freeze date after which nothing ships to production, monitoring and alerting verified in advance, a named person on call and an agreed escalation path your team already has. We also do a pre-peak health pass in October: speed, checkout, carrier rates, inventory sync and app updates. The point is that nobody is diagnosing a broken shipping profile at 8am on Boxing Day.
Regularly. We sit inside your repository, your branching model and your board, and code review is the interface rather than territory. A common arrangement is us covering Shopify-specific work — theme, Functions, apps, Markets configuration — while an in-house engineer owns integrations and the wider stack. Being on Mountain Time with a two-hour offset means standups and reviews land inside your day, not after it.
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 Toronto 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.