A Shopify CRO agency alternative — without pretending agencies are useless
Good CRO agencies earn their retainer. The question is whether your store, at its current stage, needs the strategic depth you are paying for, or whether it needs a steady stream of small fixes shipped and measured.
Source: Clicks Geek — CRO agency pricing guide, 2026
What a retainer actually buys
Strip away the deck and a CRO retainer is four things. Knowing which of them you are short of is the whole decision — most merchants are short of exactly one, and pay for four.
- Judgement — someone who has seen 200 storefronts and knows which of your problems is the expensive one
- Capacity — hands that will actually make the change, so it does not sit in a backlog
- Instrumentation — the tooling to see what is happening, usually rented and passed through to you
- Discipline — a cadence that keeps the loop running when you get busy
- Low end of the market3k
- Mid-tier, lower bound5k
- Mid-tier, upper bound10k
- High end20k
Typically includes a dedicated lead plus design and dev support
Source: Clicks Geek — CRO agency pricing guide, 2026
The part tooling can replace, and the part it cannot
Instrumentation and discipline are the two a tool genuinely covers: the data collection is automatic and the loop runs whether or not anyone remembered to schedule it. Capacity is partly covered — a change that arrives ready to preview and apply needs far less of someone's week than a change that arrives as a recommendation in a slide. Judgement is the one to be honest about. Software can rank your problems by the revenue attached to them, which is most of what junior CRO work is. It cannot tell you that your brand should not run that discount.
| In-house on tooling | Agency retainer | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | The price of the tool | $3,000–$20,000, per the published ranges above |
| Who finds the problem | Continuous analysis, ranked by revenue at stake | A researcher, on the agreed cadence |
| Who makes the change | You, from a previewable change that is already written | Their dev and design, inside the retainer |
| Institutional memory | Stays in your store | Leaves when the contract ends |
Where the other one wins: If nobody at your company owns conversion, an agency wins and it is not close. Tooling reports to someone; if that someone does not exist, the reports pile up unread and you have bought a more expensive silence. Hire the retainer, or hire the person, before you buy the software.
The closest single thing to the audit a retainer opens with — a full-store pass, costed and ranked — is the CRO Report. Read on →
How DynoWeb does it
Before you install
Can I use both?
Commonly, yes. Agencies often prefer clients who arrive with behavioral data already collected — it shortens the discovery phase they would otherwise bill for.
Do I need CRO experience to use this?
No. Suggestions come with the reasoning attached, which is where most of the learning happens. Judgment about your own catalogue and customers still has to come from you.
What does it cost compared to a retainer?
See pricing for our plans. We will not publish a comparison figure for agency retainers, because they range enormously by scope and market and any number we printed would be misleading.
Ship the fixes already in your backlog
Install DynoWeb and run the loop yourself.