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Meet LittleworksA little backend for what you’re building on Shopify.Littleworks or your own appWhat it takes to give a Shopify feature a backend: with Littleworks, or with a custom app you build and run yourself.Connect to LittleworksChoose the CLI, a plugin, or a remote MCP connection.CLIConnect from your terminal with Shopify approval and no manual tokens.Claude pluginThe Littleworks MCP connection and agent guidance in one package.OpenAI pluginThe Littleworks MCP connection and agent guidance in one package.MCP with OAuthConnect a compatible client directly, without a marketplace plugin.Build with an agentThe operating guide for agents building on Shopify with Littleworks.Write a workA JavaScript handler, a small manifest, and a version you test and then publish.Keep secretsEncrypted credentials, shared across your store’s works.Call external servicesMake public HTTPS API requests from a work using http.fetch().Store dataDocument collections with a small API, scoped automatically to the work that uses them.Call ShopifyCall Shopify’s Admin and Storefront GraphQL APIs with credentials held by Littleworks.Store filesKeep uploads such as artwork and photos in the merchant’s Shopify Files, uploaded by the browser straight to Shopify.Expose an endpointConnect an existing frontend to a work through a small JSON API.Customer access and invitationsRequire a signed-in shopper or a narrow, expiring invitation before a work runs.RecipesUseful things to build for your store, with the backend already taken care of.Product reviewsCollect customer reviews, verify purchases, and publish approved content directly into your Shopify theme.Customer wishlistsGive signed-in customers a persistent list of products they can revisit across devices.Customer quote requestsCollect a customer’s products, quantities, and requirements without turning a request into an order.Back-in-stock alertsCollect confirmed signups on sold-out variants, email them through your own provider when stock returns, and see every signup and send in your admin.Transactional emailSend email from your works through your own provider, never twice for the same thing, and see what was sent and what failed.Build a merchant pageDescribe your records and what merchants do with them; Littleworks renders a native Shopify admin page.Run works on their ownRun a work when something happens in the store, on a schedule, or from a Shopify Flow workflow.MCP tool referenceTools to inspect, deploy, run, and organize the backend for a connected store.Usage and allowancesSee what your works use, how much capacity remains, and when allowances reset.Inspect and troubleshootFind the relevant run, understand the failure, and make the next change deliberately.Limits and securityThe current runtime boundaries, data isolation model, and execution allowances.
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Littleworks or your own app

What it takes to give a Shopify feature a backend: with Littleworks, or with a custom app you build and run yourself.

Most store features that need a backend are small: a form that saves submissions, a wishlist, a review queue, a back-in-stock alert. The feature is a few hundred lines of code. The Shopify app it needs around it is not, and that app has to keep running for as long as the feature does.

Littleworks is that app, already built and running. Your agent writes only the feature, as plain JavaScript works that run with your store’s data, Shopify access and admin pages. You approve access and publish from Shopify admin.

What a custom app makes you build

A custom Shopify app needsWith Littleworks
An app in the Partner dashboard: configuration, scopes, distribution and, for an app used by more than one store, Shopify’s app reviewInstall Littleworks. Each store approves only the permissions its builds use.
The OAuth install, session tokens for the embedded admin, and encrypted storage and refresh of access tokensHandled. Works call shopify.admin.graphql and shopify.storefront.graphql; credentials never reach your code.
Hosting, a database, migrations, backups and monitoringHosted on Cloudflare’s edge and isolated sandboxes, with two application instances and PostgreSQL with a standby and point-in-time recovery.
Shopify’s mandatory privacy webhooks and uninstall cleanupHandled. Each customer data, customer redact and shop redact request is tracked to its 30-day deadline.
Webhook subscriptions, HMAC verification, de-duplication and retriesAn event trigger with a when filter. Littleworks subscribes the store, verifies every delivery, runs each work once per delivery and retries failures after 1 minute, 10 minutes, 1 hour and 6 hours. Events that don’t match when cost nothing.
A job schedulerA cron schedule in the store’s time zone.
File storage and an upload endpoint for customer files such as artwork or photosshopify.files: the browser uploads straight to the merchant’s Shopify Files, and a work saves the file and keeps its ID on a record. See Store files.
An app proxy and signature checks to know which customer is signed in, on a theme or a Hydrogen storefrontauth: "customer". The work receives a verified context.customer.id through the app proxy, or from a short assertion your Hydrogen server signs with a store secret.
Rate limiting, input validation and CORS for public endpointsAutomatic, before your code runs. Each endpoint declares its input schema and allowed origins.
An embedded admin UI built with App Bridge and PolarisViews: describe the records and what staff do with them, and Littleworks renders a native Shopify admin page: a queue, table, cards, board, settings form or dashboard.
Versions, a staging setup, rollback and run logsEvery deploy is a version. Test drafts with preview URLs, publish when ready, roll back by publishing an earlier version, and inspect every run.
A Shopify Flow actionRun a Littleworks work, in the Flow editor of every store with Littleworks, with checks when the workflow is saved.
Keeping dependencies, the Shopify connection and security patches currentLittleworks keeps the platform current.

What stays yours: the feature’s logic, its storefront UI in your theme, and the decision about when to publish.

What it costs

Plans are per store and billed through Shopify, with a 14-day trial. Starter is $19 USD per 30 days with 10,000 runs, 2,000 retained documents and 2 published admin pages. Growth is $39 USD per 30 days with 50,000 runs, 10,000 retained documents and 5 published admin pages. Scale is $79 USD per 30 days with 250,000 runs, 50,000 retained documents and 15 published admin pages. Every plan includes Shopify GraphQL, external HTTPS requests, secrets, events, schedules and Flow. There are no overage charges: a plan’s limits stop new runs instead of adding to the bill.

A run is one execution of a work, so what uses runs depends on how you build. Content your storefront shows can live in Shopify itself: the reviews recipe publishes approved reviews to metaobjects, so product pages render them with Liquid and use no runs. Only submissions and moderation do.

What you’re buildingRuns per monthPlan
Quote requests: 50 a day, each reviewed and answered by staff in an admin inboxAbout 5,000–8,000, including staff opening the inboxStarter
Back-in-stock alerts: 300 signups a month, restock events filtered with whenA few thousandStarter
Wishlists on a store with 200,000 visits a month, loading a signed-in shopper’s list once per visit30,000–60,000, depending on how many shoppers sign inGrowth or Scale

A custom app’s hosting can be cheap. Its real cost is the engineering time to build everything in the table above and to keep it working.

Your data and your code

  • Export everything with one command. littleworks export in the CLI writes every record, every work’s manifest and source, and every view to plain JSON and JavaScript files, with no support request. Agents can read the same data with read_collection and get_function, and Data in Shopify admin exports records as JSON.
  • Works are plain JavaScript with a small SDK: db, shopify, http, secrets and auth. Every version’s source is saved, and your agent can keep it in your repository.
  • Storefront content can live in Shopify. Metaobjects and metafields stay in your store and keep rendering even if a work is paused.
  • Leaving is clean. Uninstalling revokes access, and Shopify’s shop deletion request then removes the store’s data from Littleworks.

How Littleworks runs

  • Every request enters through Cloudflare’s edge. Works run in isolated sandboxes, with no network or platform access beyond the capabilities Littleworks gives each run.
  • Two application instances serve requests. PostgreSQL has a high-availability standby, and point-in-time recovery copies are kept for seven days.
  • Shopify events are recorded before they run, then delivered from a queue with retries, so a failed run doesn’t lose the event.
  • Usage, run history and logs for every run are in Shopify admin and available to your agent.

Try it

Every store gets a 14-day trial. Start from a recipe or connect your agent.