Most mobile app solutions for ecommerce charge a monthly fee that never ends. We decided to do something different by offering a one-time license for a native app. This move isn’t just about the pricing structure, but about how we think store owners should own their tech stack.
The problem with renting your growth
Early-stage founders often get trapped in the subscription cycle. You pay $299 for a theme, $49 for a loyalty plugin, and $150 for an email tool. By the time you scale to $50,000 a month in revenue on Shopify or WooCommerce, your fixed costs are massive.
Adding a mobile app builder usually adds another $200 to $500 to that monthly bill. Over three years, you have spent $18,000 on a tool you don’t actually own. If you stop paying, your app disappears from the App Store and your customers lose their direct line to your brand.
We built Mobimint because we saw store owners hesitant to launch apps despite knowing their mobile web conversion rates are terrible. They were afraid of the ‘subscription tax’ eating their margins. We wanted to build a way for a brand to buy its infrastructure once and just focus on the marketing.
Ownership is the only way to protect your margins as you scale toward seven figures.
Why 100 spots is a practical limit
We are a small team of builders, not a massive agency with a thousand support tickets. To ensure every app looks like a premium native experience, we had to be honest about our capacity. We aren’t interested in a ‘growth at all costs’ model that ruins the product quality.
Limiting this to 100 founding members allows us to work closely with the first cohort of Shopify and WooCommerce stores. We want to see those specific 100 stores increase their repeat purchase rates by at least 20% in the first quarter. Getting that result requires focus.
Each founding member gets the lifetime license for $2,999. This covers the full native builds for iOS and Android. After these spots are gone, we will likely move to a much higher price point or a recurring model to handle the scale. For now, we want the right partners who are serious about mobile commerce.
What native really means for your store
Many ‘app builders’ are just mobile websites wrapped in a thin layer of code. They feel sluggish because they are still loading web elements over the air. A native app, which is what we build, lives on the phone’s hardware. It uses the phone’s actual processing power.
This is why Amazon and Nike don’t just use a mobile website. They know that even a 100-millisecond delay in page load correlates to a drop in conversion. Native apps load instantly because the core UI is already downloaded on the user’s device.
Comparing the mobile experience
If you look at the data from the Baymard Institute, mobile cart abandonment is significantly higher than desktop. A mobile website is a ‘leaky bucket’ for your ad spend. An app is a sealed container for your most loyal customers.
Feature Mobile Web (Shopify/Woo) Native App (Mobimint) Loading Speed Depends on browser and 4G/5G Instant (Assets are local) Customer Retention Low (Requires ads/Email) High (Push Notifications) Checkout Friction High (Form filling) Low (One-tap Apple/Google Pay) Offline Access None Limited browsing/Wishlist
The difference in the table above translates to real dollars. If you are doing $20,000 a month and 70% of your traffic is mobile, a 5% lift in mobile conversion pays for the license in a matter of months. Everything after that is pure profit for your brand.
Launch in 60 minutes or less
The biggest hurdle for founders is the fear of another ‘big project’ that takes months to finish. We designed the Mobimint builder to sync directly with your Shopify or WooCommerce product feed. You don’t have to re-upload photos or rewrite descriptions.
Most of the setup involves picking your brand colors and arranging your homepage layout. If your store is already healthy, the app is just a mirror of your best performing assets. We handle the technical heavy lifting of the submission process to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
We have seen stores go from ‘interested’ to ‘ready for review’ in an hour. It is a streamlined process because we stripped out the fluff that slows down custom development. You get a functional, high-converting shopping tool without the six-month wait time.
- Direct integration with your current inventory and order management
- Real-time syncing for prices and stock levels
- Customizable push notification center for flash sales
- Native biometrics for faster login and security
- Support for your existing payment gateways
The economics of push notifications
Email marketing is getting harder. Between Gmail’s promotions tab and privacy changes, open rates are a constant battle. SMS is effective but expensive, often costing 3 to 10 cents per message depending on the country and length.
Push notifications are different. They are free to send and they land directly on the lock screen. They don’t get buried in an inbox. When you have a native app, you own the communication channel with your customer. You don’t have to pay a toll to Facebook or Klaviyo just to tell your customers about a new drop.
We keep the maintenance fee low at $49 a month specifically to cover the server costs for these notifications and the ongoing OS updates. As Apple and Google release new versions of iOS and Android, we ensure the app stays compatible. You get the stability of a big tech firm with the cost of a basic Shopify app.
Building for the long term
We are looking for stores that are already seeing traction. If you are doing between $5,000 and $200,000 a month, you are in the ‘sweet spot’ where an app makes sense. You have a customer base that already likes you; now you just need to make it easier for them to buy again.
Choosing a founding member spot means you are betting on your own brand’s longevity. You are deciding that a year from now, you’d rather have a fully functional app asset you own rather than a list of canceled subscriptions. It is a shift in mindset from ‘renting’ your business to ‘owning’ your business.
One early customer told us that they were spending $400 a month on a competitor’s app builder for their jewelry store. Switching to our license saved them nearly $4,000 a year in recurring costs. That is money they can now put back into Meta ads or new product development.
Takeaway
Mobimint offers a high-performance native app for a one-time license fee, freeing you from the trap of monthly subscriptions while giving your customers a faster way to shop. We are limiting this offer to the first 100 brands to ensure we launch every single one with the attention it deserves.
DM us ‘Founding’ to see if there is a slot left for your store.
