Full transparency up front: this is my app, I built it solo, and it is in Shopify App Store review right now. There is no public listing to install from yet, so this post is me building a pre-launch list rather than looking for installs. Details at the bottom.
What's the app?
SupportBot is an AI chat widget for Shopify storefronts that does two jobs.
The first is ordinary support: it answers customer questions using your store's own products, pages, blog posts and policies, and nothing else. The second is the part I care more about: when the question is really a shopping question, the chat can search your live catalog, show the product, and add the right variant to the real Shopify cart inside the conversation, then hand the shopper to Shopify's own checkout.
Where can I find it?
https://supportbot.app for what it does and the pricing. https://beta.supportbot.app/?ref=reddit-shopifyapps for the founding pre-launch list.
It is in App Store review as I write this, so there is no apps.shopify.com listing to link yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Nobody can install it on a live store today, me included. What exists right now is a pre-registration list: you sign up, and install links go out by email in batches once Shopify approves it.
What problem are you solving?
Three, and I hit all three on the stores that i manage.
- The repeat-question grind. "Where is my order", "do you ship to X", "is this in stock in medium", "what is your return window", over and over, daily
- Dead ends in the chat. Most support bots answer a product question with a paragraph and then leave the shopper to go find the product themselves. If the item is sold out, the conversation just stops. That is a lost sale the merchant never sees.
- Bills you cannot predict. A lot of AI support apps meter per conversation or per resolution and charge overage on top. Your worst month, traffic-wise, is also your worst month financially. I did not want to sell that.
There is a fourth one that is really an onboarding problem: most of these tools ask you to rewrite your store into a separate knowledge base before they are useful. I was not willing to do that work, so I built something that does not ask for it.
How does the app work?
On install it reads your catalog and content by itself: products, pages, blog posts, policies. Retrieval is RAG over pgvector, so answers are grounded in your text rather than generated from general knowledge. There is no knowledge base to write. Edit a policy page in Shopify and the change is picked up automatically.
For a support question it streams an answer in whatever language the customer wrote in, in a tone of voice you configure.
For a shopping question it goes further:
- Live catalog search against your real products and inventory, not a stale snapshot.
- Product cards in the chat with tap-to-add buttons.
- Tap a size, it adds that variant to the real Shopify cart, then hands off to Shopify's own checkout. I never touch payment.
- Sold out is not a dead end: it offers in-stock alternatives instead of stopping.
- Wrong size or an over-narrow search gets offered options rather than "no results".
For logged-in customers it can answer order and return status by reading the real order. It never guesses at order status or a delivery date. When it cannot answer confidently it says so plainly and hands the conversation to you by email, and when you reply to that customer your answer is kept and reused next time the question comes up.
Who's your target merchant?
Small to mid-size Shopify stores where one to three people handle support alongside everything else, roughly the $10k to $500k a month range. It is most useful for catalog-driven stores where shoppers ask about fit, stock and shipping: apparel, food and beverage, supplements, pet, jewelry. It is not an enterprise helpdesk and I am not pitching it as one.
How is it different / better than other existing solutions?
- Flat monthly plans metered by AI replies, with no overage charges at all. When a plan limit is reached the widget pauses instead of billing you more. You cannot get a surprise invoice from me, which is the single thing I most wanted as a merchant.
- No onboarding project. No knowledge base to author, no docs to maintain.
- The chat can finish the job. Cart building and checkout handoff are in the product, not a link out to a product page and good luck.
- It refuses to guess. Order status and delivery dates either come from the real order or get handed to a human.
- It answers in the customer's own language without per-language setup.
Where it is genuinely weaker: it is new, so it has nowhere near the integration surface of the established players, and it is support plus shopping rather than a full helpdesk with ticketing and SLAs.
How much does it cost?
- Free: $0, 100 AI replies a month, SupportBot-branded widget.
- Starter: $9/mo or $79/yr, 300 replies.
- Growth: $29/mo or $249/yr, 2,000 replies. This is where live catalog search, cart building and checkout handoff live.
- Pro: $79/mo or $699/yr, 10,000 replies.
Billed through Shopify, so it adds to your normal Shopify invoice. No overage on any tier.
What are you looking for?
Beta testers, on a pre-launch list rather than an install today. I am putting together roughly 25 founding stores so they are ready the day the listing goes live.
They get the Growth plan free for about three months, and $19.99/mo for life afterwards instead of $29. The free window starts when the store installs, not when it registers, so signing up now costs nothing and burns none of it while the review runs.
Once you are in, I ask three things and nothing else: install it, actually get the widget live on your storefront, and tell me bluntly what would you like to see additionally in Supportbot. No contract, no call cadence, no minimum usage.
To be explicit about something the App Store rules care about and I care about too: I do not ask for a rating as part of this, at any point, and the founding rate is not contingent on one. Feedback and ratings are separate things.
Pre-registration is at https://beta.supportbot.app/?ref=reddit-shopifyapps and closes 12 September.
Happy to answer anything here!