Find out what a Horizon migration would actually involve — and whether you should do it at all.
Five days. A written answer covering what you have today, what would break, what you’d gain, what it would cost, and whether it’s worth doing.
start to finish
Five business days from kickoff. Fee credited in full against a Horizon Sprint booked within 30 days.
Your team files a ticket, and then waits.
Somebody in marketing wants a new campaign page. A section moved. A banner swapped before the promo goes live.
None of it is hard. All of it goes into a queue.
Three weeks later it ships — or it doesn’t, because something more urgent landed and your developers were the constraint on both.
At some point, everyone stopped noticing this was strange.
Here’s the part that costs you: it compounds. Every quarter adds another custom section, another integration, another dependency nobody documented. The store gets harder to change, so more things route through developers, so the queue gets longer. The gap between what your commercial team wants to ship and what your store can actually ship widens every single quarter.
You know roughly how bad it is. What you don’t have is the number.
Migrating might be the highest-leverage thing you do this year. It might also be wrong for you right now.
Both are true, depending on the store.
- You’re already planning a redesign
- Your merchandising team is blocked behind developers
- Nobody in-house understands the theme an old agency built
- Your theme is mature and already current with the latest Shopify has to offer
- A business-critical app has no Horizon path from its maker
- Your site carries so much custom script and integration that a rebuild would cost more than it returns right now
Most agencies will tell you the first thing. Almost none will tell you the second.
A written assessment, presented by the architect who wrote it.
Not a proposal. Not a call with a slide deck. A diagnostic you could hand to your CTO, your CFO, or a different agency entirely.
Every section, template, custom snippet, and integration in your theme, documented. How far your theme has drifted from its base version. Where the technical debt sits. For a lot of teams this is the first written record of what’s actually in their store.
Every app in your stack scored against Horizon: works as-is, needs configuration, needs a vendor update, needs a custom rebuild, or has no path today. Each red item gets a named owner and a cost. This is the document that prevents the surprise in week three.
Run by us, three times, median reported, throttled mobile. Not pulled from a dashboard. Your Core Web Vitals, your technical SEO baseline, your WCAG failures by severity.
How you compare to three competitors you name. And how you compare to three brands you admire — which is a different question, and usually the more uncomfortable one.
Four things Horizon would give you that you don’t have today, specific to your store. Not a feature list. Any apps you’d be able to cancel.
Developer hours recovered. Campaigns and pages shipped per quarter, before and after. Turnaround time on a content change. Modeled on your numbers, with every assumption printed next to the figure it produced.
Migrate now, migrate later, or don’t. With the specific conditions that would change the answer. If you’d rather work through that question yourself first, our decision framework lays out the criteria we use.
With the architect who ran it. Bring whoever needs convincing.
One number, four dimensions, and a rubric we’ll show you.
Every audit produces a Horizon Readiness Score out of 100:
Note the third one. If your store is already fast, you score lower, not higher — there’s less to gain and more to lose. The score is built to tell some people not to migrate.
You’ll see where you actually stand.
Speed, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, technical SEO, and theme generation — yours, measured next to three competitors you name.
We’ll also look at the brands you admire. Not necessarily competitors: whoever you look at and think they’re making the right calls. It’s usually the more interesting comparison, because it’s less about who’s faster and more about who can move.
| Measured, 3× median | Your store | Competitor A | Competitor B | Competitor C |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint | 4.1 s | 2.3 s | ||
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.21 | 0.04 | 0.09 | |
| Accessibility failures (serious) | 17 | 3 | ||
| Technical SEO baseline | ||||
| Theme generation | OS 2.0, drifted | Horizon | OS 2.0 |
A sample of the competitor comparison panel, redacted. Every audit includes both panels — competitors and the brands you admire.
This is for you if any of these sound familiar.
Who we’ve done this for.
Anatta has built and run Shopify storefronts for:
Before / after data from a completed Horizon migration lands here.
Before / after data from a completed Horizon migration lands here.
Before / after data from a completed Horizon migration lands here.
Questions we get about the audit.
How long does it take, and how much of my team’s time?
Five business days from kickoff. On your side: a 30-minute kickoff call, a couple of short questions we may email mid-week, and the 45-minute presentation at the end. That’s it.
What do you need from us to start?
A short call to get set up, the competitors and brands you want to be compared against, and a few numbers our tools can’t see — sessions, conversion rate, AOV, roughly how many developer hours a month go to site changes. We’ll walk you through the access side on that call; it’s read-only and temporary.
Who runs it?
A lead engineer or architect, start to finish. The same person who writes the recommendation presents it.
Who should be on the presentation?
Whoever owns ecommerce, whoever runs merchandising day to day, and whoever owns the app budget. Bring anyone who’d need convincing either way — it’s a better use of the 45 minutes than forwarding a PDF.
What format is the deliverable?
A written document, delivered before the presentation so you can read it first. Yours to keep, forward, or hand to another agency.
Can you capture years of customization in five days?
Not from memory — nobody can. So we don’t work that way. (See our full migration methodology.) Your theme is a file system, not a memory: every section, setting, snippet, metafield, script, and integration is enumerable, and our tooling reads all of it. You don’t get asked what you built; you get handed a list of what you built. The one thing that genuinely needs your team is the business logic that isn’t in the code — why the bundle rules work that way, what changes during a sale — and even then you’re reacting to a list rather than starting from a blank page.
What if the answer is that we shouldn’t migrate?
Then that’s what the document says, along with the conditions that would change it. It happens a few times a quarter.
Do we have to use you for the migration?
No. The document stands on its own — plenty of it is useful whether you hire us, hire someone else, or do nothing. If you do go elsewhere, take the compatibility register with you; it’s the part most teams would have missed.
Is the $2,500 refundable?
It’s credited, not refunded. If you book a Horizon Sprint within 30 days of delivery, the full fee comes off the price.
Does the audit speed up the migration itself?
Yes, materially. Most agencies spend the first week or two of a migration working out what your store does. The audit has already documented it, so a Sprint starts with a one-to-two-day review and sign-off rather than a fortnight of investigation. It’s the reason we can hold a four-week timeline at a fixed price.
What does the migration itself cost?
$40,000 for a single store and single market, $75,000+ for multistore or multimarket. Four weeks. See our full migration pricing. We publish the prices, but we won’t quote your specific project without having looked at it — which is what the audit is for.
What’s not included?
The audit covers your current state, compatibility, scores, benchmarks, what you’d gain, and what it’s worth. It isn’t a design critique, a CRO study, or a code security review.
The $2,500 comes off if you move forward within 30 days.
Not a discount and not a promotion. The audit’s real job is to make a fixed price possible, so once it’s done that job we don’t charge for it twice.
Thirty days from delivery. After that the audit stands on its own and the Sprint prices normally.
Three steps. Five days.
A 30-minute kickoff call to get set up: what your team is trying to do, who you want to be compared against, and the handful of numbers we’ll need from you.
Five business days. You’ll hear from us once in the middle, if at all.
The document lands first so you can read it, then 45 minutes with the architect who wrote it. Bring whoever needs to be in the room.
Find out where you actually stand.
What you have. What would break. What you’d gain. What it’s worth. And whether you should do it at all.
Five days, $2,500 — credited in full if you move forward within 30 days.
Not ready for that? Get a free benchmark scorecard → Two minutes, nothing to install.
Nothing is charged here. We come back within one business day to set up the 30-minute kickoff and confirm the start date.
