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.
Washington, DC
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Washington, DC
Most Washington institutional stores are maintained by someone whose actual job is something else entirely, which is why they decay so quietly.
Delivered remotely for brands across Washington and District of Columbia.
Scale · Washington
Why Washington brands come to us for this
- App stack audited on cost, script weight and overlap, with redundant subscriptions removed rather than tolerated
- Custom apps and Functions for membership sync, entitlement checks and PO approval steps no off-the-shelf app covers
- Change-freeze windows around exhibition openings, annual meetings and the September fiscal close
- Regression testing against Shopify releases so a platform change never breaks the B2B or exemption path unnoticed
- Everything documented in plain language, because staff turnover between DC organisations is constant
In this city the store is rarely anyone's full-time responsibility. A membership director, a retail manager or a communications lead inherited it, keeps it running between everything else, and installs an app whenever something needs solving. Three years later there are eleven subscriptions, four of which overlap, two nobody can explain, and a theme edited by three different contractors — and the answer proposed is another rebuild.
The retainer exists to stop that cycle. We audit the app stack on cost, script weight, overlap and actual usage, remove what is redundant, and own the relationship with what stays. When the subscription pile costs more, or weighs more, than writing the thing yourself, we build a private app or a Shopify Function instead — which for institutions here most often means a membership or CRM sync, an entitlement check, or a purchase-order approval step that no off-the-shelf app handles the way your finance office requires.
Then the ongoing work: a prioritised backlog shipped every sprint, quarterly Core Web Vitals and dead-code review, and regression testing against Shopify's platform releases so a checkout change does not break your PO flow in the middle of the fiscal-year push. You get a named developer and strategist, which for a team of one running a store on the side is usually the actual value.
Local context
Sprints that run around your event calendar, not through it
Support in Washington has to respect a schedule set by exhibitions, annual meetings, renewal cycles and the 30 September fiscal close. That means change-freeze windows agreed in advance — nothing ships to production during an exhibition opening week or in the days before an annual meeting — and readiness work loaded into the quiet periods, typically mid-winter and high summer when the association calendar goes flat and Congress is out. It also means the backlog is shaped by your institution's turnover: staff move between organisations in this city frequently, and documentation is what stops a departure from becoming a crisis. Every change we make is written up, every custom app has a plain-language explanation of what it does and why it exists, and handover to a new hire is a document rather than a conversation with someone who left.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Washington 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 Washington store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Washington 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 Washington — your questions
With an inventory that puts a monthly cost, a script weight and a last-used date against every one. That conversation usually removes several subscriptions in the first month and measurably improves page weight, which is the cheapest performance work available. What stays, we take responsibility for — versions, renewals, support tickets and conflicts after Shopify updates.
That is one of the main reasons institutions here take one. Because we document every change and maintain the theme, an unexpected departure does not strand the store or force a rebuild. We can also run the day-to-day operationally for a period and then hand over properly to a new hire, with written guides and recorded walkthroughs rather than tribal knowledge.
When the workflow is specific to your organisation and the app-store alternative is either three subscriptions stacked together or a compromise your finance or membership team will not accept. Membership entitlement checks, dues-tier pricing rules and purchase-order approval steps are the usual cases in this market. When an existing app genuinely does the job, we say so and install it.
Yes, where they share one Shopify account — which they should. That covers register configuration, staff permissions, inventory rules between locations, receipt capture for marketing consent, and the reconciliation between in-person and online. In practice the register raises more support tickets than the website, particularly in high visitor season, so it belongs inside the same arrangement.
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 Washington 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.