Auditing apps by monthly fee and milliseconds added — most stores can cut both by half.
Apps are how Shopify stores add capability quickly, and how they accumulate cost quietly. Most stores are paying twice: once in monthly fees, and again in page speed.
Audit by both numbers
List every installed app with its monthly fee and what it actually does today. Then check what each one injects into your storefront. A review app, a popup app, an upsell app and a chat widget can add several hundred kilobytes of JavaScript to every page, executed before your own content finishes rendering.
Look for overlap and abandonment
The usual finding is three apps doing versions of the same job, and two more installed for a campaign that ended a year ago. Uninstalling is not enough on its own: many leave script tags and theme snippets behind, so the storefront keeps paying for an app you no longer subscribe to.
Replace the small ones with theme code
A countdown timer, a size chart or a trust badge does not need a monthly subscription and a third-party script. Where the functionality is genuinely simple, moving it into the theme removes both costs permanently.
Run this audit twice a year. App stacks grow by one reasonable decision at a time, which is exactly why nobody notices the total.
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