Shopify apps businesses model is close to the end

Hi! I’m a software engineer, obviously working with latest AI tools and I want to give my opinion specifically about Shopify apps in the AI world

So, very recently I replaced a complete stack of apps for a client that has over 5k products, obviously hard to manage within Shopify limits

Apps replaced were:
- Okendo
- Matrixify
- Wishlist Hero
- Advanced Collections
+ a couple of custom made extensions

It took a month for a Sr engineer to build MVPs for those all those apps, costing around 5k dollars + infrastructure costs around 200 dollars per month

The outcomes are high quality and reliable, but it will take them 2 years to recover that investment in “app savings” if none additional updates are made, which is unlikely

Here is my opinion:
The savings of building your own apps, barely justify the effort and complexity it adds to the business, it only makes sense if the “human” guiding the AI is low cost and you keep cloud costs under control (unlikely for a non-engineer)

Buut I do see a lot of value in adapting AI generated apps to each store needs and processes, so businesses with an innovation culture will take the most out of it

In other words, depending on the type of company AI could be a boost, but requires a painful cultural change from the inside

What do you think? Are you replacing your apps already?