# App Cost Watchdog

> App Cost Watchdog is a Shopify app that audits what a store's apps really cost: a free storefront scan detects installed apps, flags duplicate/overlapping apps and cheaper swaps, and estimates monthly spend from public list prices; the paid Monitor tier ($9.99/month, 14-day free trial) reads the merchant's actual Shopify invoice for confirmed per-app spend, flags apps that are billed but never load on the storefront, and watches for bill changes (price hikes, new charges, trial conversions) over time.

## About

Built by Legitimate LLC. The core discipline is provenance: list-price estimates and invoice-confirmed spend are always labeled separately and never summed together, so a merchant always knows which numbers are real money and which are estimates. The free estimate is explicitly labeled a floor when detected apps have no registry price yet.

## Install

- Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/app-cost-audit-monitor
- Pricing: https://app-05-web-production.up.railway.app/pricing
- Free plan: storefront scan, duplicate/swap findings, Stack Efficiency Score, and ONE free invoice audit (see your real, confirmed app spend + billed-but-not-detected apps before any trial)
- Monitor plan: $9.99/month, 14-day free trial — monthly invoice re-audits, bill-drift alerts (price hikes, new charges, trial conversions), historical invoice backfill, email alerts

## Try without installing

- Public demo: https://app-05-web-production.up.railway.app/demo (paste any Shopify store URL — detected apps, duplicate flags, list-price estimate; no login, no install)

## Documentation

- Privacy policy: https://app-05-web-production.up.railway.app/privacy
- Terms of service: https://app-05-web-production.up.railway.app/terms
- Research: average Shopify app costs 2026: https://app-05-web-production.up.railway.app/research/shopify-app-costs-2026
- Support: info+support@legitimateapps.com

## What App Cost Watchdog does

1. Scans the storefront (read-only, no OAuth scopes) and fingerprints installed apps against a curated 150-app registry with verified public list prices
2. Flags duplicate/overlapping apps doing the same job and cheaper swaps, with evidence for every detection
3. Estimates monthly spend from public list prices — clearly labeled as an estimate and as a floor when unpriced apps are detected
4. Reads the merchant's Shopify invoice (Monitor, or the one free audit) with an LLM, reconciles line items against a checksum, and the merchant confirms before anything is saved — the raw invoice is never stored
5. Compares invoice-confirmed charges against the storefront scan to flag apps that are billed but not detected (admin-only apps, leftover subscriptions)
6. Diffs successive invoices and scans to alert on price hikes, new charges, trial conversions, and removed apps

## Sibling apps (also by Legitimate LLC)

- GEO-ify — https://apps.shopify.com/geo-ify — audits and rewrites product copy for AI shopping channels
- AI Store Audit — Health Check — https://apps.shopify.com/storelinter — 19-check Shopify store audit with reversible auto-fixes
- AI Product Recommendation Quiz — https://apps.shopify.com/product-quiz-2 — AI quiz builder for product recommendations