Every inquiry here starts with a quiet sort: is this actually a fit? Sometimes the honest answer is no, and saying so early is cheaper for everyone. Here’s the sort, published, so you can run it before you even write.
Don’t hire us if…
A hosted platform fits your selling. If your store is ordinary in the good way — products, cart, cards — Shopify-class platforms will serve you better than a custom build plus a maintenance relationship. We say this while selling the custom builds. (Want that judgment in writing, argued for your specific case? That’s the Build Roadmap — the paid, deep version of this paragraph.)
Your current developer is good and merely busy. A slow reply from someone who’s been reliable for years is not abandonment — it’s a busy season. Churning a working relationship over a bad month usually trades a known-good for an unknown, and the switching cost is real. Have the direct conversation first; most of the time it fixes it. (If it’s been months and the keys are drifting, different story.)
You want to rank first on Google by spring. We build fast, well-structured, honestly-written sites — which is the foundation SEO grows from, and we’ll happily build yours. But ranking outcomes on a deadline isn’t a thing anyone can sell truthfully, and we don’t.
The budget and the ask don’t rhyme. Our prices are published precisely so this sort can happen early. If the project is a $2,000 project, a $650-a-month relationship is the wrong shape for it — and a fixed-scope diagnostic or a well-chosen static site might be the right one.
You want a yes-machine. Our actual product is judgment: we’ll tell you when the rebuild is unnecessary, when the boring choice beats the exciting one, and when the answer is “don’t hire us.” If what you want is a vendor who executes whatever’s specified without pushing back — genuinely fine, some projects need exactly that — we’ll frustrate each other.
Why publish this
Because the sort happens either way — the only question is whether it happens in week one or month six. Week one is free. And a practice built on rescuing other people’s abandoned relationships has extra reason to be careful about which ones it starts.