Most Shopify apps are 200 lines of Liquid with a subscription attached. Am I wrong?

I've been working on StoreHand — an open-source set of Claude Code skills that helps Shopify store owners with everyday ops (morning briefings, stock alerts, product copy, health checks).

We shared it here recently.

Since then, I've been talking with a bunch of store owners, and one topic keeps coming up. Surprisingly, it's not really about operations. It's about the amount of apps they have to rely on.

A size guide app: €19/month.
A bundle app: €29/month.
A sticky add-to-cart app: €14/month.

Individually, none of them seem crazy. But after a while, you end up with dozens of small subscriptions, each adding another script, another dashboard, and another thing to manage.

The interesting part is that a lot of these features aren't actually that complicated. A good chunk of them are just Liquid, CSS, and some theme customization.

The problem is that most store owners don't want to risk breaking their theme, and they don't always have a developer they can ask every time they need a small change.

So we're experimenting with the next step for StoreHand: a theme builder inside Claude.

The idea is simple: you describe what you want, and Claude creates the Liquid, schema, and CSS directly in your theme. No extra app, no monthly subscription, and the code actually belongs to you.

This will be part of the paid hosted version of StoreHand. The core skills will stay open source and free.

Before we spend too much time building it, I’d love to hear your thoughts:

• Which Shopify app do you hate paying for the most?

• What's something you've always wanted your theme to do, but skipped because it required a developer?

I'm genuinely curious: do store owners actually value owning the code, or is the convenience of having an app and support team behind it more important?

@shopify x @StoreHand