Is building a Shopify app worth it in 2026? A builder's honest answer

About two years ago, I spent a weekend sketching an idea on graph paper. An app that teaches merchants how to use their own store. Ten months later, I shipped Chapters LMS to the Shopify App Store. Today it has a handful of installs, a humbling review or two, and a very specific story I can finally tell.

Every week I get the same DM. "Thinking about building a Shopify app. Is it worth it?" And every time I try to answer in one paragraph, I fail. So this is the long answer. It includes the receipts I wish someone had shown me before I spent eight months writing billing code.

Here's the honest version.

The App Store math nobody shows you

The Shopify App Store has around thirteen thousand apps. Depending on which public dataset you trust, somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of them make less than a hundred dollars a month. The top one percent pulls revenue you'd need a Series A to replicate. The middle is thin, which is to say most of it is empty.

I remember reading that stat and feeling a kind of anger at it. Surely I wasn't going to be in the bottom seventy percent. Surely my idea was different.

Reader, the bottom seventy percent is full of people who also thought their idea was different.

Shipping Chapters LMS: the receipts

Chapters LMS is a learning-management tool for Shopify stores. Merchants build lessons, link them to products, track who completed what. It solves a real problem for a specific kind of merchant. Online course creators, membership stores, coaching businesses. Not every store. That's the point.

Here's what actually happened after launch.

• Build took roughly eight months of nights and weekends. If I'm being honest, closer to ten.
• First month of listing: two installs. One uninstalled in eleven minutes.
• Review queue rejected my first submission over a billing flow detail I'd misread in the docs. That cost a week.
• The first merchant who stayed wrote to ask if I could add bulk import. That one email taught me more about the product than any of my own planning did.

I won't pretend the revenue numbers are inspiring. They aren't. What I will say is that every single thing I thought I'd learn about SaaS, billing, distribution, customer support, and keeping my ego small, I learned in the first ninety days after going live. That alone was worth the weekends.

The hidden costs

When people ask "is it worth it," they usually mean "how much money." They should also mean the following things, which nobody budgets for.

Then there's merchant support. A single merchant with a Liquid issue on a custom theme can eat four hours. You need a support channel. Email works until it doesn't. After the tenth "my app broke" message for something that turned out to be their theme, you'll understand why every successful app eventually has an in-app chat widget.

And API breaking changes. Shopify's GraphQL Admin API deprecates fields on a roughly two-year clock. If you don't pay attention, one morning your webhook stops firing and you find out from a merchant, not from your monitoring. Ask me how I know.

Build vs wrap vs skip

The real decision isn't "should I build an app." It's which of these three paths actually fits your situation. I've watched friends pick each one, and I can tell you roughly how each goes.

The middle option, wrap, is the one I think people overlook. If you're a developer with no merchant audience but you want something Shopify-shaped on your resume, you can build small, focused apps that wrap an existing API. Image optimization. Currency conversion. A gift-card tool. These rarely earn much but they teach you the platform and give you a portfolio piece. That's a fair trade if you're honest about it.

The one question to answer first

Before you write a single line of code, answer this.

Who is the first merchant who will install this app, and how will they hear about it?

Not "Shopify has a million merchants." A name. A store. A plausible sentence about how they discover you: a friend, a forum, a YouTube tutorial you'll make, a listing ad, whatever. If you can't finish that sentence, the App Store isn't your problem. Distribution is your problem, and the app is a very expensive way to learn that.

If you can finish that sentence, and you're cool with the review queue, the support load, the API drift, and the weekends — then build the thing. It's a real craft. There's a quiet satisfaction in seeing a merchant renew at ninety days that no other kind of software I've shipped has given me.

Just go in with the math in your pocket.