Every App Is a Subscription and a Script

Apps accumulate quietly

Each one is installed to solve a specific problem, seems reasonable at the time, and is never reviewed. Two years later the store has eighteen apps, a substantial monthly bill and a homepage carrying scripts from twelve different services.

We audited a store paying £340 a month in apps. Four of them did overlapping jobs, three had not been used in a year, and removing them took two seconds off the homepage load.

Three costs, not one

1. The subscription, which is the visible cost and usually the smallest
2. Page weight — scripts and styles loading on every page, often on pages the app does not affect
3. Leftover theme code, because uninstalling an app frequently leaves its snippets behind

That third one is the reason a store that has had twenty apps over three years is slower than one that has had four, even after the uninstalls.

Auditing what you have

• List every app, its monthly cost, and what it is actually for
• Identify overlaps — review apps, popup apps and upsell apps commonly duplicate
• Check the last time anyone used each one's dashboard
• Look for apps whose function your theme now handles natively
• Check your theme for leftover code from apps you removed

That exercise takes an afternoon and it typically removes a third of the apps and a meaningful share of the bill.

Which are usually worth keeping

Check what they load

Before installing, look at what the app adds to your pages. A well-built app loads only where it is needed; a poorly-built one adds scripts to every page including checkout-adjacent ones.

Reviews and install counts tell you about popularity. Opening the network tab on a demo store tells you about cost.

Frequently asked questions