Why we built this

I’ve spent the last ten years designing and building mobile apps and software, most of it in ecommerce and a good deal of it in pet ecommerce — including contract work for brands like Chewy and Purina. I know what goes into an app that a big brand ships, because I’ve built them.

What I kept running into was the other side of it. Owners with genuinely good Shopify stores, real customers, real repeat business — and no realistic way into mobile. Getting an app built meant months of design and fine-tuning. Keeping one running meant upwards of a thousand dollars a month, before anyone had downloaded it.

App builders don’t solve that. They hand you the tool and the job: another year of designing, tuning and maintaining something that was supposed to save you time, and a bill that arrives whether the app sells anything or not. That’s a second business to run, and most owners already have one.

So we build it for you. Your app is generated from the store you already keep up to date, we submit it to Apple and Google, and we keep it running. There is nothing to design, nothing to maintain, and no monthly invoice. You go back to running the business.

That’s also why the pricing works the way it does. Shoppers pay a 3% app service fee inside the app’s prices and merchants pay nothing — so we only earn when the channel earns, and we grow as it does. It’s worth saying that nothing about that is unusual in mobile: DoorDash, Instacart and the platforms themselves all mark up what you buy, usually far more. The difference is that this is your app, your brand and your customer, and 3% is the whole of it.

Nicholas LovettFounder, VendiNative