Generic AI is brilliant at suggesting. AIOS ships. ChatGPT can write you a Liquid snippet, but it can't see your theme, deploy to a preview, run QA against your checkout, or have a senior dev review the change before it goes live. AIOS does all of that inside Slack. Use ChatGPT or Claude when you want a thinking partner. Use AIOS when you want your Shopify store actually shipped on a real brand standard.

Other Shopify AI tools are dev engines you operate yourself. AIOS is the team that operates them for you. Every code change still passes a senior Shopify dev (Rob or Andrew) before it goes live, which is why our clients' stores look custom, not templated. Tools push you toward generic patterns. We push toward your brand. If you have a dev team and want a faster IDE, those tools are great. If you want a partner who owns the outcome, that's us.

Mostly your dev agency, sometimes your in-house dev's tedious work, never your creative or strategic team. If you currently pay a Shopify agency £3K to £8K per month for ongoing dev work, that's the budget AIOS replaces. If you have an in-house Shopify dev, we sit alongside them and handle the daily grind (bug fixes, app config, theme tweaks, lifecycle marketing) so they focus on bigger projects. We don't replace your brand designer, your fractional CMO, or your strategy partner. Those people make AIOS more effective.

That's exactly what the senior dev is for. Most Shopify work fits the AI plus dev review system. Smaller dev work counts as in-quota capacity units (Simple, Standard, or Complex). Major projects over 12 hours with defined scope are quoted as Custom Builds. Anything that needs deep human judgment (complex custom logic, Shopify Plus migrations, headless builds, anything we'd call high-touch dev) goes to a senior dev directly. Same Slack channel, same Notion portal, same team. We tag the work at intake so you know upfront which path it's on.

Every AIOS tier comes with a fixed number of capacity units per month (8, 20, or 40 depending on tier). Each task that lands in your channel gets tagged by complexity at intake: Simple (0.5 units), Standard (1 unit), or Complex (2 units). You see the tag and the unit cost on your Slack canvas before any work begins.

Anything bigger than 12 hours of dev work becomes a Custom Build. These are quoted as fixed-price projects (£1,950, £3,950, £7,950, or bespoke SOW for enterprise). You can pay with cash OR use capacity units from your monthly allowance (8 units = Quick Build, 16 units = Standard Build, 32 units = Major Build), OR a mix. Studio includes 2 Standard Builds per year. Suite includes 1 Quick Build per quarter plus 2 Standard Builds per year.

If you don't use all your capacity in a given month, you can roll over up to 50% to next month on quarterly or annual commitments. If you have a busy month, you can borrow forward against next month's capacity.

If our tagging is wrong (a task we called Simple takes more than 2 hours, or a Standard exceeds 5 hours), that's on us. Our senior dev re-tags any category that consistently runs long for your store, at no charge. That's our tag accuracy guarantee, included in every tier.

Different stores have different stacks. The same task, say fixing a cart drawer bug, might take 30 minutes on one store and 2 hours on another. We tag by complexity (what our senior dev needs to do), not by raw minutes (which varies wildly).

Over a month, your tasks balance out. Some Simples land at the low end, some at the high end. If a category consistently runs long for your store, our senior dev re-tags it for you at no charge. You're covered by our tag accuracy guarantee, which applies to every AIOS tier.

You have four options. First, borrow forward against next month's capacity (up to 25% on monthly plans, 50% on quarterly and annual). Second, commission a Custom Build for any large project. These can be paid in cash OR with capacity units from your monthly allowance, your choice each time. Third, use one of your included Standard Builds (Studio and Suite tiers come with these annually). Fourth, tell us in advance if you know a big month is coming and we'll align the team early. Launch months are when AIOS shines, not when it strains.

Because AIOS isn't an AI tool. It's a team that uses AI. Every code change passes a senior Shopify dev before it goes live. Your tier includes a Notion portal, live capacity dashboard, weekly performance reports, and strategy reviews. That's a different product to ChatGPT or a Shopify AI dev engine, and it's priced accordingly.

For reference: a senior freelance Shopify dev costs £100 to £150 per hour. A full Shopify agency retainer for ongoing work typically runs £4,000 to £8,000 per month. AIOS Core sits at £999 per month. AIOS Suite sits at £4,999 per month and includes Shopify Plus expertise. You're paying less than an agency for more output and faster turnaround, with a real team behind every change.

No. The autonomous work the always-on agents do (daily speed scans, regression detection, auto-fix and verify, and the SEO, accessibility, QA, and merchandising agents as they come online) is part of your subscription. None of it counts against your monthly capacity units.

Capacity units are reserved for explicit requests. When you Slack the channel saying "can you update the homepage hero" or "add a size guide to PDPs", that's a unit. When AIOS detects a speed regression overnight, fixes it, verifies it, and ships it without bothering you, that's free.

The reason this distinction matters: most months, your store reaches a steady state where the always-on agents have already fixed the long tail of issues and are just monitoring. Your capacity units stay reserved for the campaigns, sections, and one-off projects you actually want done. You get more value from the same plan because we're not double-billing for the autonomous work.

If you want the autonomous agents to clean up a big initial backlog faster (common on brand-new stores with years of accumulated issues), an optional 30-day Accelerator add-on lifts the daily cap for one month, then drops back to your tier's normal pace.

It happens. The system is built to catch mistakes before they reach your live store. Every code change deploys to a preview theme first. Every change is reviewed by a senior dev before going live. We monitor your store after deploy for any regression.

If something does break, we fix it immediately at no charge. No ticket queue, no excuses. You're also covered by our 14-day money-back guarantee for the first month and our tag accuracy guarantee on every task. We'd rather catch and fix our own mistakes than let you find them.

Yes to both. Monthly plans cancel any time with 30 days' notice. Quarterly and annual commitments run their term but renew on the same notice.

Everything we build is yours. Code lives in your Shopify theme and your repo. Designs are yours. We don't gate anything behind a license. If you ever leave, you walk away with everything we shipped together.

Your Notion portal stays accessible in read-only mode for 60 days after cancellation. As part of offboarding, we prepare a final export of your task history, custom build records, performance summaries, and design assets so you have everything in one package.

Your Slack channel stays in your workspace. We remove AIOS team members and bots on the cancellation date.