Shopify looks after hosting, security and the checkout infrastructure, so 'maintenance' on Shopify does not mean server updates. It means the theme, the apps, tracking, speed, campaigns and the integrations around the store — the parts that break when someone installs an app on a Friday afternoon. A retainer is how most brands pay for that work. Whether it is good value depends almost entirely on what is written down.
Three ways to buy Shopify support
- Ad-hoc work: you pay per job or per hour. Fine for stores that rarely change. Response times are not guaranteed, and every request starts with a quote.
- Maintenance plan: monitoring, app and theme checks and small fixes. Cheap, but rarely includes building anything new.
- Development retainer: a monthly pool of hours, a response-time guarantee and planned work — new sections, campaigns, integrations, tests.
What a good retainer includes
- A defined number of hours per month, and a written rule for unused hours: limited rollover, or a pool that expires.
- An SLA that defines what counts as a bug and promises a fix time, not only a reply time.
- Monitoring of Core Web Vitals and the checkout, with an alert when something regresses.
- A release process: changes built on an unpublished theme, previewed, then published — with a way back.
- Seasonal planning, including a change freeze before Black Friday.
- Named people, and a monthly report of what was done and how the store performed.
What it costs
Our own retainers are published, so here are real numbers rather than a range:
| Plan | Monthly price | What you get | Bug-fix SLA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Care | £1,100 | 20 development hours, monthly performance report, one strategy call | 48 hours |
| Momentum | £2,900 | 60 hours across disciplines, A/B testing programme, dedicated PM and Slack channel | 8 hours |
| Embedded | £7,500 | A tech lead, two engineers and a designer, weekly demos | 2 hours |
To compare a retainer with buying days, divide the monthly price by the hours and add the value of the guaranteed response time. Typical UK rates are discussed in Shopify development day rates in the UK.
What a retainer should not be
- Hours that expire silently, with no report of how they were used.
- An SLA that promises a reply within hours but says nothing about a fix.
- Work done directly on the live theme, with no version history.
- Lock-in: your theme code and app accounts should belong to you, and access should be handed back when the contract ends.
- 'Unlimited small changes' — an undefined scope always ends in a disagreement about what small means.
Questions to ask before you sign
- Who exactly will work on our store, and who covers holidays?
- How do we submit requests, and how are they prioritised?
- What is the notice period, and what do we receive when we leave?
- How do you test a change before it reaches customers?
- What did the last monthly report for a comparable client contain?
Do you need one?
If you change something most months, run campaigns, depend on integrations or would lose real money from a broken checkout for a day, a retainer pays for itself in response time alone. If the store is stable and changes a few times a year, ad-hoc work is cheaper. Most of the urgent requests we see come from app stacks and speed regressions; what apps does a Shopify store use and why your Shopify store is slow explain why. The full scope of our plans is on Shopify support and maintenance, and the prices on our pricing page.