About
A small studio
that writes the code.
HeapByte is a senior Shopify engineering studio. We work with merchants who have outgrown template edits and need someone who can read a theme, an app stack and a data model at the same time.
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Projects
- 84 delivered
- Job success
- 96%
- Status
- Upwork Top Rated
Position
Most Shopify problems are engineering problems wearing a marketing costume.
Slow product pages, broken inventory sync, a checkout that cannot express the promotion you actually run — none of it gets fixed by another app. It gets fixed by someone who will open the code, trace the request from click to server response, and change the part that is actually wrong.
01Who we are
HeapByte started as one engineer taking on the Shopify projects other agencies were quoting six weeks and a discovery workshop for. Eight years and 84 delivered projects later, the shape of the work has changed — more Shopify Plus, more custom apps, more migrations off legacy platforms — but the operating model has not. We stay small on purpose.
A larger studio solves the wrong problem: it hires account managers to translate between the client and the engineers who actually understand the codebase. Every translation loses information. We remove the layer entirely. The engineer who audits your store is the engineer who writes the pull request, and the one who joins the launch call at 6am if that is when your traffic peaks.
That constrains how much work we take on at once, which is deliberate. We would rather turn down a project than staff it with someone who was not part of the original audit.
02How we operate
N1Six rules that decide what we take on and how we run it. None of them are negotiable mid-project.
- 01
Read the code before quoting
We do not price work we have not inspected. The audit comes first, and sometimes it concludes you need less than you thought. A quote written before anyone has opened the theme is a guess, and we do not charge for guesses.
- 02
The senior engineer stays on the project
The person who scopes the work writes the code, reviews the pull requests and joins the launch call. There is no hand-off to a junior team after the sales conversation, because there was no sales conversation — just an engineer reading your store.
- 03
Every decision is written down
Architecture notes, rejected options and known trade-offs are documented in the repository, not left in a Slack thread that disappears in ninety days. Your team inherits reasoning, not just files, so a decision made two years ago can still be understood today.
- 04
Measure what was promised
One agreed metric per engagement, measured on field data — real visitors, real devices — not a synthetic Lighthouse run in a quiet lab. We report honestly, including when the result is smaller than hoped, because a number you can trust is worth more than one that flatters us.
- 05
Version control is not optional
Every change ships through Git against a staging theme in reviewable slices. The live theme is never edited directly in the admin, which means every regression has a commit that caused it and a commit that fixes it — not a mystery.
- 06
Boring technology, on purpose
We reach for Shopify's native primitives — metafields, Functions, sections — before we reach for a third app. Fewer moving parts means fewer things that can break at 2am during a launch, and a store your next developer can actually maintain.
03What we refuse to do
Saying no to the wrong work is how we keep every yes trustworthy.
- 01
We will not quote work we have not read
If you ask for a fixed price before an audit, we will offer the audit instead. Pricing blind serves nobody.
- 02
We will not stack apps to hide a code problem
A fourteenth app rarely fixes what a rewritten section could fix properly, and it always costs you render time.
- 03
We will not lock you out of your own store
You own the repository, the documentation and every account, from the first commit. We work as your engineer, not your landlord.
- 04
We will not report a vanity metric
If the number moved sideways, we say it moved sideways. Cherry-picked charts do not survive contact with a real P&L.
04The record
0+
Years on Shopify
0
Projects delivered
0%
Job success score
0+
Tracked hours
These are the only numbers we publish, and they come from our Upwork record. We do not quote revenue uplift we cannot attribute or awards we have not won.
05How we're structured
Flat by design — one senior engineer per engagement, no bench.
There is no project manager layer between you and the code. Communication is direct, written and dated, so context never depends on one person remembering a call from three weeks ago.
06Who we work best with
Established merchants, in-house teams that need engineering depth, and agencies that need a technical partner they can put in front of a client.
The common thread is not size — it is that something real is at stake. A store with existing revenue that a slow checkout is quietly taxing. A brand relaunch on a fixed date. A migration where a mismapped SKU means a customer's order goes missing. We do our best work when the cost of getting it wrong is visible to both sides.
- Shopify Plus merchants
- In-house ecommerce teams
- Design & brand agencies
- DTC brands scaling internationally
- B2B / wholesale operations
07Questions
About
Talk to the engineer, not a salesperson.
The first call is technical. Bring the store, the symptom and the constraint you are working under.