I built a Shopify app to fix one annoying merchant task. Here's what I learned shipping it solo.

I'm Matt, solo founder of Ripen Studio. I just shipped DateCue: a Shopify app that turns product metafield dates into automatic tag changes, status updates, and emails.

The origin story is boring: I kept seeing Shopify merchants manually flip products to "draft" the day a sale ended, or forgetting to remove "Pre-order" tags after launch day. It's the kind of thing that should be automated but isn't, because Shopify's native tools don't read date metafields.

So I built it. Here's what surprised me along the way:

1. Scope creep is sneaky when you're solo.

My v1 spec was "tag products when a date passes." It shipped as: workflows, filters, retries, run limits, billing tiers, email actions, webhooks, full audit logs. Every feature felt necessary in the moment. In hindsight, half of them could've waited for paying customers to ask.

2. The boring infra decisions ate the most time.

Picking Railway over Azure (despite free credits), SQLite → Postgres migration path, the executor's atomic claim pattern for the worker — none of this shows up in marketing copy, but it's where weeks went.

3. Pricing is a feelings exercise, not a spreadsheet.

I redid the tiers four times. Final answer: Free ($0, 50 products), Starter ($9), Growth ($19), Pro ($49). Retry is on every plan because "all failures deserve a retry" felt right. Run limits are soft — I never want to silently break a merchant's store.

Where I'm at now: App is live, ~150 tests passing, working on SEO + directory listings (which is how I ended up here). Next milestone: first paying customer.

Would love feedback from anyone who's launched a Shopify app solo — especially on the discovery problem. The App Store is a black box.

(Profile has the link if you're curious.)