Storefronts that load fast, convert hard, and never lose your rankings

For a custom Shopify Plus store, realistic setup runs roughly $15,000–$30,000, with enterprise builds $20,000–$50,000+; serious merchant builds rarely start below $40,000. Headless is far higher — $80K–$120K for a basic Hydrogen storefront, $150K–$250K+ for complex multi-region or B2B/B2C hybrids. We quote against an itemized SOW, not an 'all-inclusive' number that hides what's covered.

An advanced custom Shopify build is typically 4–6 weeks; larger builds run a phased ~4 weeks discovery, 8–12 weeks build and integration, and ~4 weeks UAT and SEO mapping. Custom integrations add 2–6 weeks, with data mapping and testing the biggest time sink. We give you honest dates in the SOW rather than a hopeful one.

This is the number one risk, and it's almost always self-inflicted. The single biggest mistake is blanket homepage redirects — Google reads a product-to-homepage redirect as a soft 404 and drops it. We run migration as an SEO project: one-to-one 301 maps, no chains, preserved metadata, redirects kept live indefinitely. Clean migrations lose 10% or less of traffic and typically recover within a 4–6 week stabilization window.

Senior engineers own every architecture decision, every line of production code, the redirect strategy, and the integration wiring. AI accelerates the grunt work underneath them — tech audits, integration inventories, baseline metric pulls, draft redirect maps, 404 sweeps, and continuous Core Web Vitals monitoring. Nothing AI produces ships without a named engineer verifying it.

Probably not, and we'll tell you so. Under about $5M GMV, don't. Between $5M–$20M, only for UX a theme genuinely can't deliver. $20M+ with a dedicated frontend team before it's really viable. Headless costs 2–3× to build, 3–5× to maintain, and most headless Shopify stores convert worse than a good Dawn theme. 'Headless is better for SEO' is a myth — a well-tuned Liquid theme ranks identically to a well-tuned Hydrogen one.

You own the code — that's in the terms. And no single-developer dependency: multiple people on our side understand your build, so you're never held hostage by one person's calendar or exit. Selling you a store only one developer can touch is selling dependency, not capability.

The platform fee understates it. Between payments at volume, your app stack, ongoing custom dev, ERP and integration costs, and support, the all-in for a serious store lands around $4,000–$10,000+ per month. Headless maintenance alone can add $50K–$180K/yr for a brand doing $100K/mo. We'd rather you see that upfront than discover it in month three.

Against the three metrics that actually matter — conversion rate, AOV, and bounce/abandonment — plus Core Web Vitals as an engineering bar (LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1). We baseline them before we touch anything, then track them live in Aphra so you can see movement instead of taking our word for it.

You get a retained senior team, not a disappearing act. Post-launch means CRO sprints, technical SEO monitoring, feature development, security patches, and QA. Performance retainers for this kind of ongoing work typically run $5,000–$10,000/mo. The absence of a post-launch plan is one of the clearest red flags in this industry.

The honest comparison isn't hourly rate — it's total cost to a result you can rely on. Cheaper per hour usually means more communication overhead, more management load on you, and more risk on the highest-stakes parts: migration, checkout, and integrations. Where a botched redirect map or a slow checkout costs real revenue, senior execution pays for itself.