You are renting functionality you should own.

Sometimes you should rent it — reviews and subscriptions own data we have no business rebuilding. But most conversion apps inject scripts you cannot style, cannot measure and cannot remove, and charge monthly forever. Six typical apps cost $2,000–$5,700 a year. If the functionality is core to how your store sells, owning it is cheaper by year one and faster on every page load.

Not if it is built on OS 2.0 primitives. We use sections, blocks and metafields rather than Liquid hacks or DOM injection, which is exactly why the themes we sell have shipped updates without breaking anyone. Anything genuinely fragile gets flagged before it is quoted.

You own the code and the documentation. There is no license key, no hosted component and no dependency on us staying engaged. That is the difference between custom development and a bespoke app.

Usually, and we will read it first and tell you honestly whether extending it is cheaper than replacing it. Building on a foundation we would not have chosen is sometimes the right call; pretending it is fine when it is not costs you twice.

From a written brief with defined edge cases. Fixed price, fixed scope. If discovery reveals the brief was wrong, we re-quote before continuing rather than silently absorbing it or silently billing it.

Yes, and it is often the highest-return custom engagement — most Shopify stores are carrying three or four abandoned app scripts. We measure first, so you see what the work bought.

Eight recurring shapes: sections your merchandisers can use without filing a ticket; metafield-driven product data that powers cards, filters, finders and structured data from one model; guided selling and multi-step finders; buy box and cart logic — variants, bundles, pairing, thresholds; faceted search and filtering built on Shopify search so it stays crawlable; structured data and feeds; third-party integrations wired with fallbacks; and performance work that removes what the app stack left behind.

The recurring six: product bundles ($29–$79 a month), upsell and cross-sell ($49–$99), product filters ($19–$59), finders and quizzes ($39–$149), size and fit guides ($15–$39), and back-in-stock ($19–$49). Each is rebuilt natively — bundle logic priced by real automatic discounts, pairing rules driven by your own metafields, sizing as structured data. The exception is where an app genuinely owns the data, like reviews and subscriptions.

Three. A single build, one to three weeks: one piece of functionality scoped from a written brief, built in your theme, documented, with a thirty-day defect window. An app-stack replacement, three to six weeks: a stack audit with its real monthly cost, the functionality rebuilt natively, data migrated rather than abandoned, and performance measured before and after. Or retained development — a fixed monthly allocation with a priority queue for stores that ship continuously.

Six, and they are the same ones our themes are held to: it survives Shopify updates because it is built on OS 2.0 primitives; it survives your next merchandiser because everything configurable is a setting; it degrades honestly when an integration fails; it is documented where it matters; it carries no required app subscriptions; and it is measured after launch against the baseline the audit set.