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Can you share more details? I run Shopify and that's not something we would do.



Hi Tobi,

It was the change on limitations for variants. We woke up one day to product additions failing. Took about a week for the tech team to figure out that we were being throttled because we were exceeding 50k variants. Totally understandable in the bigger picture of things, but I didn't feel we received adequate warning. Developer support had told us that sometimes they grant temporary exemptions but in our case they refused. They advised we upgrade to shopify plus (they quoted us over $2000) to remove the throttling/limitation. Financially it was out of scope for us, so we had to throttle our own customers, which led to a massive disadvantage.

I ended up writing our own cart software, which was always part of the plan, but in the meantime our business suffered.

I don't hold any grudge about it since we were getting incredible value out of the previous arrangement, and I do think Shopify is amazing software. I've been a paying customer in multiple capacities since at least 2008 and recommend it to people all the time. What happened was just unfortunate timing for us.

Thanks for taking a minute to listen, though. Much appreciated.


You couldn't pay the 6,000-8,000 for like 3-4 months and keep your business afloat until you rewrote it? Kind of sounds like your business was really really in the red already, or more information is missing?


Not everyone is in the “money is no object” startup economy. Outside of tech small businesses are actually small.


OP wrote that they have employees. if 6k-8k is too much for a company with employees to literally keep it running, that means it was months away from going completely bust anyway


I believe you may have lost a connection to the developer experience over time Tobi and developers keep Shopify relevant. Look at any store it’s packed full of slow loading plugins picking up some of the very basics. It might be that 2020 is better suited to making some of the tooling better and if we can hope for consistent.


I'm working on an open-source app that allows users to use React and build their own interactions with the API instead of relying on apps:

https://github.com/openshiporg/openship




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