PartnerLensSHOPIFY · INTELLIGENCE
Sign Up

Why we built PartnerLens — the dashboard the Partner Dashboard isn't

Every Shopify app developer keeps a tab of 'things competitors changed last week.' This is the story of why we deleted ours and built something better.

If you publish on the Shopify App Store, you already have a "dashboard." It just lives in five browser tabs.

Tab one: the Partner Dashboard — installs, MRR, payouts. It tells you what happened. Not why.

Tab two: the App Store search bar. You type your category once a day and count down to your listing. Did you move? You can't tell unless you remember yesterday's number.

Tab three through six: every competitor you watch. You check their pricing page, then their listing page, then their reviews. You copy-paste anything that changed into a Google Sheet. Three months later your sheet is a graveyard of "they raised pricing, when?" notes with no dates.

This is the actual job of running a Shopify app, and nobody tools for it.

What we wanted

One screen that connects your rank, your installs, your reviews, and your competitors' moves — and tells you why each number changed.

App developers on other platforms have had tools like this for years. They cost tens of thousands a year and pay for themselves the first quarter for any serious studio. Nothing equivalent existed for Shopify. The closest we found:

  • The Partner Dashboard — your own data only, no rank, no competitors, no reviews.
  • Various "spy" tools that scrape App Store search results but stop at the listing page.
  • Multiple paid review-summarization tools that don't know what a Shopify Partner is.

So we built it. PartnerLens is one dashboard for your rank, your installs, your MRR, your reviews, your competitors' pricing and listing edits, your category trend, and the changes that drove all of it.

What's actually in the box

  • 12,000+ apps tracked across every public category in the Shopify App Store.
  • 7,800+ unique partners indexed — searchable, ranked, sortable.
  • 1.3M+ reviews indexed and AI-summarized into theme clusters: feature requests, pain points, sentiment over time.
  • Your Partner API data — installs, uninstalls, gross + net revenue, MRR, churn — pulled directly when you connect a token.
  • Alerts — email, Slack, and Discord — for rank changes, new 1-star reviews, competitor pricing edits, and launches in your category.

What we deliberately didn't build

  • A scraper for merchant data. We never touch merchant accounts. The Partner API pulls your own aggregate revenue, not individual orders.
  • A "AI replies to your reviews" tool. Plenty of those exist and they make every app sound the same.
  • Custom dashboards / drag-and-drop builders. Two hours of "let me configure my widgets" is what kills these tools. We picked the screens that matter and shipped them.

How we price it

This is a launch post. PartnerLens has a free tier — track one app, forever — because the product should sell itself the moment you connect your slug. When you're ready for more apps, competitor tracking, and AI review intelligence, Pro is $15/month. The current plans live on the pricing page.

The roadmap that's actually shipping in the next 90 days:

  1. ASO score with concrete fixes per listing field (not vague advice).
  2. Cross-category competitive comparison reports — pick two apps, get a one-screen diff.
  3. Public partner profiles (you can already see them, but we're making them prettier).
  4. Deeper Slack and Discord webhook alerts.

If you ship even one app on apps.shopify.com, start free. If you want to talk to me before signing up, the founder reads every email.

— Harish, building PartnerLens at Binary Chakra