jmbonline.cz — a long-term Appfleece partner we'd worked with since their early days — sat us down. They needed a loyalty program. They'd shopped the Shopify App Store carefully, three times, and walked away every time.

The reasons stacked up the same way every conversation:

• Pricing didn't fit a European mid-market store. Either free with the features they wanted gated behind $199+/month, or cheap with a feature set that stopped short of native customer accounts and checkout extensions.
• Localization was treated as an afterthought. Auto-translated Czech and Slovak strings that read like Google Translate output from 2014. No respect for vocative case in customer emails. No regional polish a Czech customer would consciously notice — but would viscerally feel as off.
• The feature mix was always 80% there. Either points without proper tiers, or tiers without referrals, or referrals without a Klaviyo bridge — the four core mechanics never came together in one app without paying for three other things on top.

We told them we'd think about it. We left the meeting knowing we were going to build it — for them first, custom, then see where it went.