Introduction
As you grow your tech stack and adopt new Shopify Apps, understanding how your money is spent is crucial to building and maintaining a profitable business. Whether you ’re a solo entrepreneur or a large brand, overhead matters.
A custom integration to Google Cloud’s Retail API can cost upwards of $500,000 with a consulting partner – we started Nimstrata to eliminate this large capital outflow. This allows you to avoid sunk costs, measure positive results before committing, and adopt this technology quickly.
Our Pricing Strategy
Platform Fee
We build, maintain, manage, and run all of the infrastructure required to sync your product catalog with Google Cloud’s Retail API. This includes at-least-once daily imports, along with real-time updates for inventory, pricing, and collections.
Serving Fee
Simply put, we scale based on the demand from your customers. Our serving fee allows us to run globally distributed, low-latency infrastructure that sits directly between Shopify and Google servers to ingest user events and return results on your website as fast as possible.
We don’t charge based on performance or ROI
Some recommendations apps demand a percentage of revenue and create interesting patterns to attribute revenue to their solutions. We believe that this creates a poor incentive structure and can lead to bitter relationships. If you earn significant incremental revenue because you use our app to connect to Google Cloud, we’re thrilled, and you should keep every cent.
How this benefits us
By charging our platform and serving fees, we are able to grow a recurring revenue stream to fund our business. While we’d love to offer our app for free, it’s not viable for us because we incur ongoing costs aside from product development.
Our pricing grows in two dimensions: As the number of SKUs in your catalog grows, you’ll pay $49 for every 10,000 SKUs. As your traffic volume grows, we simply charge flat-rate serving fees, just like Google Cloud.
Our aim is to continue to reinvest into our business, provide customers with world-class support, and integrate new Shopify and Google Cloud features as they are released.
How we handle price increases
In addition to sharing our current pricing strategy, we also want you to understand how this may change in the future. As a growing company, we’re likely to change our subscription fees as the Shopify and Google Cloud ecosystems mature together.
We intentionally set a floor of $99 today, but that could increase to $149. We believe this is very fair compared to the upfront and ongoing costs of a custom Retail API implementation. However, we want to maintain an inviting Starter price given that we often sell to entrepreneurs that are building their livelihoods on Shopify.
If we need to increase prices, we will always aim to maintain existing customer pricing and only raise prices for new customers. We truly appreciate our early adopters who took a chance on us as we started Nimstrata. If we ever do need to raise prices for everyone, we’ll provide at least six months of notice, so that you have abundant time to switch to another vendor if you feel that you need to.
Your Google Cloud Bill
We build and maintain a SaaS platform that connects ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, to Google Cloud. You maintain full control and ownership over the underlying Google Cloud platform environment, including your data and configuration settings, but this also means that you are responsible for paying Google Cloud charges separately.
You can estimate your monthly Google Cloud bill and potential ROI using our Vertex AI Search for Retail Pricing Calculator. We are always happy to help you estimate a total cost of ownership that encompasses both our SaaS pricing and your Google Cloud bill to make sure the platform makes sense for you and your store.
