DorrisI was paying about $2,270 a month for twelve app subscriptions on my tent company's Shopify store. With AI coding agents, I built my own tools in their place, and they cost me about $145 a month to run on the plan I built them on. These are my own estimates, not audited. I'm not a developer, and it took me about three months.
Where I started
By my own list I was paying for a video widget, an ERP, a support inbox, a bundling app, A/B testing, a retailer order feed, and six smaller apps. The full list, by kind of tool, is in what my store paid in app subscriptions. The figures are from memory and still being checked against my statements, which is also why the home page's larger number is my count of everything and this page's is the part I've itemised.
What I built first
The support inbox, because it was my biggest single line, $500 a month by my estimate, and because it only needed to read my orders, not change them. Each customer's email sits beside their Shopify order, so nobody switches tabs. That inbox is the app the Dorris kit starts you with. After it came the others I could point at: reports, invoices and the spreadsheet feed.
What it costs me now
My estimate of the monthly running cost, on the AI plan I built it on:
| Line | Per month |
|---|---|
| AI plan | $100 |
| AI usage by the app itself | about $10 |
| Hosting | $25 |
| Database and storage | about $10 |
That is about $145 a month. I'm on a higher plan today because I direct agents across several businesses, which has nothing to do with this app. Current figures for a new buyer are on what you need.
Against the twelve itemised tools, that is about $2,130 a month less, by my estimates. I haven't promised you a saving, because yours depends on what you pay for and what you build.
What didn't go smoothly
I took about three months of wrong turns to get the first tool working. I'm not claiming nothing breaks. When something does, I paste the error to the agent and ask it to fix it, and the kit has a page of the usual ones.
If you want to do the same
Start with your own list: the short checklist sorts what to replace first. The kit gets you to a working support inbox in under an hour, instead of the three months it took me. Why pay does the sums, and not for you if says when to keep your money. The app stack audit is a worksheet for making the same list.
Want it built for you? Book a demo. Or build it yourself: the kit.
Tim Haines