Last week's fit guide covered every product in the developer lineup and then dismissed an entire second catalog in one sentence: we build Shopify apps too, and “they run on their own terms.” That sentence was true and also a dodge. There are seven of them, all live on the Shopify App Store, and until today five of their names had never appeared anywhere on this blog. This is the promised follow-through: the other shelf, read the same honest way — what each app does, and what each one refuses to promise.
First, orientation, because this shelf has a different buyer. If you came here for ShipKit or the UI tooling, you are a developer and these are not for you — they are for merchants: people running a Shopify store who have a compliance question or a risk they can't see. You don't buy them from our checkout; you install them from the App Store, Shopify handles the billing, and they run inside your store's admin. If you sell on Shopify and one of the seven problems below sounds like yours, this page is the fit guide.
The Shared Shape
All seven apps are the same kind of machine: a narrow scanner pointed at one specific risk. One risk per app, deliberately — a merchant with a payout problem should not have to buy an accessibility suite to get an answer. Each connects to your store, reads what Shopify's APIs expose, and turns it into a report you can act on: what's wrong, where, and what to do about it.
And all seven share one refusal, which matters more than any feature list. A scanner surfaces issues; it does not make you compliant. None of these apps certifies you against the ADA, the FTC, COPPA, or anyone else's rulebook, and none of them takes on your legal exposure — that stays yours, exactly as it was before you installed anything. They exist to make sure the first time you hear about a problem is from a report you control rather than a letter you don't. Where that line matters most — AccessGuard, AgeProof, Old Glory — the app's own page says so in plain text, and this article will repeat it.
Pricing is uniform, which is deliberate too. Every app has a free tier at $0 that does real work, and a Pro tier at $29/month or $290/year. One app — AgeProof — carries a third tier above that; it's covered in its card. All prices below were read off the live pages this morning.
The Seven
Make AI recommend your store. It measures; it doesn't persuade.
Cited
The newest problem on the shelf: shoppers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity what to buy, and those assistants recommend specific stores — a storefront you cannot see and no analytics dashboard reports on. Cited measures whether the AI assistants actually cite your store when shoppers ask the questions your products answer, and tracks how that changes over time.
The refusal is the whole product philosophy: Cited is a measurement instrument, not an optimization trick. It will tell you whether you are visible and how that trends; it does not inject your store into anyone's model, and anyone who promises to is selling something that doesn't exist. What you do with the visibility picture — content, positioning, product data — is strategy, and strategy is yours.
Declare you ADA-compliant. It finds WCAG violations; the fixing and the exposure stay yours.
AccessGuard
AccessGuard runs a real, code-level audit of your storefront against WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA — the technical standard accessibility claims are measured against — and reports the violations it finds, where they live, and how to fix them. If you have ever received a demand letter about your store's accessibility, or want to make one less likely, this is the scan to run before someone else runs it for you.
The refusal is legal, and it is non-negotiable: no scan makes you ADA-compliant. Automated audits catch what automated audits can catch; accessibility has judgment calls no scanner can make, and compliance is a legal conclusion, not an app feature. AccessGuard shrinks your unknown risk to a known work list. It does not and cannot indemnify you.
Pretend it can see every script — or do the migration for you.
CheckoutProof
This one has a date on it: on August 26, 2026, Shopify shuts off legacy checkout scripts and the old Thank-you and Order-status pages. Stores still depending on them will have things silently stop working. CheckoutProof reads your checkout profile's upgrade status, the ScriptTags visible to apps, and your public storefront HTML, and turns them into one readiness score — plus a guided manual checklist for the parts no app can inspect.
That checklist exists because of the refusal, which CheckoutProof's own page states outright: Shopify's ScriptTag API is app-scoped, so no app can see every script on your store — claiming otherwise would be a lie of scope. And it is a migration-planning tool: it tells you what will break and what to move, but the moving is done by you or your developer, and the real proof is your post-migration test order.
Guarantee your payouts. It's an early-warning system, not a shield.
Payout Guard
Shopify can hold or reserve your payouts when your account's risk profile drifts — and the dashboard shows you numbers without warning you which ones are drifting toward a line. Payout Guard watches the signals Shopify's API exposes and scores them: chargeback rate against Shopify's ~1% line and Visa's 1.5% VAMP threshold, refund-rate spikes, products that brush against the Acceptable Use Policy, missing store policies, and the volume spikes that trigger new-store reserves.
The refusal is in the name it doesn't have: it is not Payout Guarantee. It monitors what the API exposes, which is not every cause of a hold, and if Shopify freezes your payouts, no app can unfreeze them. What it buys you is time — seeing the trajectory before the threshold, while you can still change it.
Appeal anything. It's the preflight check, not the lawyer afterward.
Merchant Guard
Google Merchant Center suspensions are famous for two things: how much revenue they erase overnight, and how opaque the reasons are. Merchant Guard scans your store against Merchant Center's disapproval and suspension rules before Google does — misrepresentation triggers, policy-page gaps, product-data problems — and hands you the fix list while your listings are still live.
The refusal follows from the timeline: Merchant Guard works before the suspension. If your account is already suspended, the appeal runs through Google's process, on Google's clock, and no third-party app can reinstate you. The honest pitch is prevention — it is much cheaper to fix a misrepresentation flag on Tuesday than to appeal one in week three of a suspension.
Tell you whether your product is actually made in the USA. It flags claims; substantiating them is your burden.
Old Glory
The FTC enforces “Made in USA” claims with penalties of up to $53,088 per violation, and its standard is stricter than most merchants assume — an unqualified US-origin claim requires that all or virtually all of the product be made here. Old Glory scans your store for risky origin claims: product titles, descriptions, and metafields that assert or imply US origin in ways that would need substantiation you may not have.
The refusal is about where knowledge lives. Old Glory can read your store; it cannot read your supply chain. It flags the claims, not the truth of them — whether your product actually meets the FTC's bar is a question only your sourcing records can answer, and the substantiation burden is yours under the law regardless of what any scanner says. What it prevents is the cheapest kind of violation: the one sitting in a product description nobody has re-read since 2023.
Call an age gate identity verification. A popup isn't compliance — its own page says so.
AgeProof
For stores selling age-restricted products, AgeProof does two jobs: a full-screen storefront age gate (one tap or date-of-birth entry, added as a theme embed that never edits your theme code) and — the part a popup alone can't do — server-side checkout blocking, so an underage buyer who slips past the front door still can't complete the purchase. It keeps the records to prove your checks ran.
It is also the one app with a third tier: Compliance, at $59/month or $590/year, which adds gating for only selected products rather than the whole store, per-country minimum-age rules, and automatic log retention.
The refusal is the first headline on its own page: a popup isn't compliance. An age gate records a declaration; it does not verify identity, and no theme embed can. Whether a declaration-plus-blocking setup satisfies the rules for your product in your jurisdictions is a legal question — AgeProof enforces and documents your checks, and the responsibility for the rules that apply to your products remains, in its own page's words, yours.
Why They're Not in the Developer Lineup
Three reasons, none of them secret.
Different buyer. Everything in the developer lineup assumes you write code or ship products; everything on this shelf assumes you run a store. A fit guide that mixed the two would waste half of every reader's time, which is why the 7/23 guide drew the line where it did.
Different distribution. These live on Shopify's App Store, under Shopify's review process, installed and billed through Shopify. We don't control that channel the way we control our own checkout, and pretending they're the same kind of purchase would misdescribe both.
Different economics. Most of the developer shelf is buy-once software. Every app here is a subscription, because every app here is a running service — scanners that re-check, monitors that watch trends, gates that enforce on every visit. A one-time price would be dishonest about what you're paying for, which is ongoing operation, not a download. (If the difference between those models interests you, we wrote about it in the state of software licensing.)
If you want the deeper background on the Shopify side of the studio — how the apps get built and what the practice looks like — the Shopify app development page covers it. And if you arrived here as a developer wondering what the rest of the catalog looks like, the lineup is the shelf you actually came for.
Same closing rule as the fit guide: everything above describes the apps as they exist today, July 30, 2026, prices read off the live pages this morning. Scanners, not shields; reports, not certificates. If one of the seven risks above is the one keeping you up, the free tier is the cheapest way to find out how real it is.
Seven Risks, Seven Free Scans
Every app on this shelf has a $0 tier that does real work. Install the one that matches the risk you're carrying and see what it finds.
See the Shopify Apps