Retained Shopify Plus development

Most brands on Plus do not need a full-time developer. They need someone who knows the store, who is available when a campaign is about to go live, and who is not going to spend the first two hours of every job working out how the theme fits together.

That is what a retainer is for. It is the arrangement most Graftstudio clients end up on, and several have been on it for years.

What is included

Development work on your store, prioritised by you. In practice a month tends to be a mix of four things.

Things that broke or drifted. An app update that changed the cart, a Liquid error appearing in a specific market, a payment method not showing where it should.

Things the marketing team needs. Landing pages for a campaign, a new section type so the team can build pages without asking, a change to how a collection sorts, tracking that needs to fire on a new event.

Things that make the store faster or simpler. Removing an app that is costing more in script weight than it returns, cleaning up a section that has accumulated six variants, moving logic out of Liquid and into a Function.

Things that need a developer's opinion before they become projects. Whether a feature is worth building, what an integration will actually involve, whether a proposed app is going to cause problems.

The last one is the part people underuse. A retainer includes the conversation, not just the code. Asking whether something is a good idea does not cost extra.

How work is prioritised

There is a shared list. You order it, and we work down it. If something urgent comes in, it goes to the top and something else moves down, which is a conversation rather than a change request.

The list is visible to both of us at all times, so there is never a question about what is being worked on or what is queued behind it. Most clients run this in a shared board or directly in their own project tool. Working in your tools rather than mine is the default.

Response times

Urgent work, meaning the store is broken or losing orders, is picked up within 24 hours. Everything else is scheduled into the month rather than interrupt-driven, because a developer who is interrupted constantly does not do good work on anything.

There is a limit to how far this stretches, and it is worth being honest about it. A retainer is a set amount of time. If a month's requests exceed it, the options are to move something to the next month or to agree extra time for that month. What does not happen is silently deprioritising work and hoping nobody notices.

What it is not

It is not a helpdesk with a ticket queue and a first-line agent. There is one developer and it is the same one every month.

It is not an hourly arrangement. The rate is flat, so a fifteen-minute job does not carry the overhead of being estimated, approved and invoiced. This matters more than it sounds. Hourly billing quietly discourages exactly the small improvements that keep a store in good shape.

It is not a lock-in. Everything is documented as it is built, held in your own Shopify and GitHub accounts, and written so another senior developer could pick it up. Nothing about the arrangement depends on you not being able to leave.

Who it suits

Brands doing enough volume that the store changing matters, with a marketing or ecommerce team who have more ideas than development capacity, and no in-house Shopify developer. If you already have a developer in-house, the fractional arrangement is usually the better fit.