What your apps cost

Every theme in this category publishes a saving. Booster says $281 a month. Shoptimized says $2,011 a year. Debutify says $3,000 a year.

None of them shows you the basket.

That is the problem with all three numbers, and it is not a small one: a saving is a subtraction, and without the list of apps and what each one costs you cannot check either side of it. The number is chosen to be large and it is unfalsifiable by construction.

So this page does not have a number on it. You do.

Your bill, not ours

Tick the things you pay a Shopify app for today and put in what each actually costs you. Open your Shopify bill in another tab if you are not sure — most merchants underestimate this by a wide margin, because the charges arrive separately and none of them individually feels like much.

Four rows are ticked to start with, because they are the four a store running paid traffic most often has installed together. The prices are placeholders, not researched figures — see below for why there are no real app prices on this page. Change them to yours.

Why we do not fill the prices in for you

We could. We would rather not, and the reason outlives this page.

We do not track third-party app prices, and a table of them starts rotting the day it ships. App vendors change their tiers monthly, price by order volume, and put the real number behind a plan selector three clicks in. A page here quoting "$29 a month for a bundles app" would be a claim about somebody else's product that nobody on this side re-checks — and a stale price in our favour is indistinguishable from a dishonest one.

It is the same rule that keeps our comparison pages against the other paid themes unwritten. We will compare published terms, because those are quotable and dated. We will not publish a number we cannot stand behind six months from now.

There is also a better reason. Your own bill is more persuasive than our average, because you already believe it. An average is somebody else's store.

What the ticking actually buys you

Two things worth being precise about, because "replaces apps" is a claim that usually hides a lot.

These are theme code, not bundled apps. Every row above is a section or a block in the theme's own build — the same list /pricing generates from the build manifests, so it cannot offer you something the zip does not contain. Nothing here installs, nothing here has a separate dashboard, and nothing here adds a script from another company to your storefront. That last part is the half that does not show up in the monthly total: each app you remove is also a third-party request on the critical path, which is why core.css and core.js between them are 27.9 KB gzipped.

Some rows are Pro and some are Core, and the calculator works out which edition your ticked set actually needs rather than quoting you the higher one. If everything you pay for today is in Core, it says so.

Somebody else said this first, and better

The argument on this page is not ours. It is what merchants say to each other in public when nobody is selling them anything — asked how to make a slow store faster, on Shopify's own forum:

"Replacing 3-4 apps with one multifunction app (or native Shopify features) made the biggest speed gains."

Shopify Community, "Anyone else struggling with balancing speed, apps and custom code", accessed 4 August 2026

"Each app adds extra code to your store, which can slow it down."

Shopify Community, "Does anyone know how to speed up your Shopify store", accessed 4 August 2026

Those are two merchants answering a third, with no product in the conversation. We are quoting them rather than paraphrasing them because a sales page saying "apps slow your store down" is a sales page, and the same sentence from someone with nothing to sell is evidence. Neither of them is talking about this theme, and that is the point.

What this does not replace

Being straight about the edges, because a merchant who finds them after paying is a refund and a bad review:

• Email, SMS and reviews. A theme can render a review score — Hullara reads Shopify's own rating metafield, which every review app writes — but collecting reviews, sending campaigns and managing flows are jobs for an app, and should be. Keep paying for those.
• Anything with a back end. Loyalty points, subscriptions billing, wishlists, back-in-stock alerts. A theme has nowhere to store them.
• Analytics and A/B testing.
• Fake urgency. Some of what a conversion app sells is a countdown that restarts for every visitor, a stock number nobody set, or a review score typed into a settings field. Hullara cannot produce any of those, at any price, and if that is what you are paying for then this replaces nothing.

The honest version of the arithmetic

A theme is a one-off cost and an app is a recurring one, so the comparison flatters us the longer you run the store — and it flatters us most in the first year, which is exactly when a new store is least sure it will still be trading.

The number worth looking at is not the annual total. It is the months-to-level figure the calculator gives you. If that is under a year, the decision is straightforward. If it is not, you probably do not have enough apps for this to be about money yet, and you should buy the theme because you want the storefront rather than because of a subtraction.