Three ways to work together

Three paths in order of commitment. Path 1: Book a free 30-minute strategy call so I can audit your store live and tell you what I’d fix first. Path 2: commission the $500 CRO audit (2-3 day delivery) and use that as the spec for any follow-on work. Path 3: skip the audit and start a weekly or monthly retainer if you already know the scope. Most clients start with the audit.

Three concrete differences. First, direct hire: you work with the person doing the work, not an account manager who relays your requests to a junior dev. The same engagement at a US Shopify Plus agency would run $100 to $250 per hour blended, which is 2 to 5x the $50 rate I bill at, mostly because the agency has overhead I don’t carry. Second, depth: 12 years on Shopify exclusively, 100+ stores, Top Rated Plus on Upwork (top 3% with 4.96 out of 5 across 100+ jobs), and I write the Liquid AND do the CRO strategy so there is no handoff gap between diagnosis and fix. Third, capacity: I work with a small number of brands at any one time, which means your engagement gets actual senior attention rather than being one of 30 accounts a junior is juggling. The tradeoff: I’m not the right fit if you need a 24/7 support desk, a multi-region rollout team, or a dedicated PM. For everything else, direct hire wins on price, on speed, and on the quality of the code that ends up in your theme.

Weekly retainer is best for short, scoped engagements (1-3 weeks) like a single sprint or a focused fix list. It runs at the standard $50/hr rate, billed Friday end-of-day for hours worked that week. Monthly retainer locks 60-80 hours per month at a 12% discount ($2,700-$3,600/mo vs $3,000-$4,000/mo at weekly billing), plus a rate freeze for 6 months, priority response, rollover hours, and a weekly check-in call on demand. Monthly wins on price and on speed once we’re past the second week of work together.

Industry standard for senior consultants and the reason monthly works financially. Payment by the 5th of each month confirms the engagement and reserves your hours for that month against my capacity (I work with a small number of brands at any one time). It also means I never spend client time chasing invoices, so 100% of billed hours go into your store. Weekly retainer avoids this by billing in arrears on Friday.

Yes, up to 25% of your monthly hours roll into the next month. So if you book 80 hours in a month and use 70, the remaining 10 stay available the following month (capped at 20 rollover hours). After two months without use, hours expire. This protects you against quiet weeks and means you don’t have to rush low-priority tickets at the end of the month.

Anytime, with 30 days written notice. You’re never locked in past the next billing cycle. The 30-day notice protects both sides: I can wrap any in-flight work cleanly, and you don’t get charged for a month you weren’t ready to commit to. The 6-month rate lock applies as long as you’re an active retainer client; once you cancel and come back later, the rate resets to whatever’s current.

Anything CRO or Liquid development on your Shopify store: audits, theme code, A/B test setup, Liquid sections, Liquid snippets, performance optimization, checkout extensibility migration, GA4 event setup, app replacement work, sprint planning, Friday written recaps, weekly check-in call (if needed) for monthly retainer clients, and the monthly 60-minute strategy review call. Excluded: paid ad management, copywriting from scratch, design from scratch, email automation builds (I’ll recommend specialists if you need any of those).