How fast can a Shopify app be delisted? I had 20 days to fix mine
Seven months ago, I posted here about my Shopify app failing to find traction.
At the time, Saku had 31 merchants and ran entirely on free infrastructure. I ended that part of the story with a simple conclusion:
>Costs me nothing. So it stays up.
After that, I put the app into maintenance mode. I stopped building features. I still fixed urgent bugs and supported merchants, but otherwise left it alone.
For a while, my conclusion seemed right. Hosting stayed near zero and merchants kept installing.
Then, over the past three months, the obligations started stacking up.
Shopify flagged the app twice. The second email, shown above, arrived on July 2. That gave me 11 days until demotion and 20 days until delisting. A two-week vacation starting then would have meant returning to a demoted app. After three weeks, it could already have been delisted.
The App Store is Saku's main acquisition channel. Missing one action-required email could damage its rankings and eventually cut off new installs.
I fixed the issue before the deadline. Shopify was right to flag it. A high-quality bar protects merchants from broken or abandoned apps.
The warning was only one part of the maintenance burden that had started to surface. During the same period, Mantle, which Saku uses for billing, announced it would wind down. A new Shopify requirement means existing public apps must adopt expiring offline access tokens before January 1, 2027.
Merchants also sent 51 support requests. I resolved all of them.
None of this is unreasonable on its own. Together, it exposed something I had missed: there is no frozen state for a public Shopify app. You can stop developing it. You cannot stop operating it.
That would be manageable if the app funded the work. But despite growing from 31 to 132 merchants without active promotion, Saku has only four paying merchants. At $9 each, that is a 3% paid conversion rate and $36 MRR.
At the same paid conversion, reaching basic MRR milestones would require roughly:
- $100 MRR: 370 merchants
- $500 MRR: 1,850 merchants
- $1,000 MRR: 3,700 merchants
Net growth has averaged about 14 merchants per month. Even if that continued and paid conversion held, reaching $500 MRR would take roughly 10 years.
The problem is not that merchants dislike Saku. It has seven reviews and a 4.9 rating. The first review explains the business-model problem better than I could:
>This app replaces the paid version of Linktree, so I'm saving $10 a month.
That is a good product review and a bad business-model review.
The free plan solves the main job. Saku can attribute purchases, but that value is less immediate than a bundle or upsell app showing added revenue. Most merchants create a page once and have little reason to return, let alone upgrade.
So the app is useful. The current business model is not.
Open sourcing it did not change that equation. I hoped the public code would act as a trust signal. As far as I could tell, it had no effect on merchant adoption or upgrades.
My original conclusion was incomplete: an app can cost almost nothing to host and still become a liability.
For me, that leaves two responsible paths: change the product and business model until it can fund the work, or sunset it properly. Leaving it unchanged would only let that liability grow.
For other solo Shopify app developers: where is that threshold for you? If this were your app, would you change the product or sunset it?