How Aligent Shifted from Custom Projects to Product-Based Development
The problem
For years, Aligent has been building exceptional digital experiences for their clients across Shopify, BigCommerce, and Adobe Commerce platforms. As a three-time consecutive winner of the Asia Pacific BigCommerce Partner of the Year, they have established themselves as leaders in the e-commerce space.
But with that success came challenges. Over time, the agency found themselves trapped in a cycle of custom, one-off solutions. Every time a client requested an app or integration, the team would build it from scratch, hardcoding store IDs and specific configurations into each deployment. This meant every new client store required duplicate effort, and scaling existing clients to new markets became a time-consuming process of cloning and modifying code.
When their client Laser Clinics Group began expanding into new markets, the team had to manually create new versions of each custom app, going into the code to add details for each new store and redeploy everything from scratch.
"If they added a store in Japan, we would have then gone into the app and added code for the Japan store," explained Jarrod Swift, who leads technology experimentation at Aligent. "We'd put in the details for each individual store and make a new deployment. Then we were left to manage all of those new apps."
This approach was tedious and unsustainable. The agency had started building their own starter kit to streamline the process, but maintaining it proved nearly impossible. As an agency without dedicated resources for infrastructure upkeep, managing the starter kit current was more of a burden than a benefit. Code is hard to keep up to date, and without enough clients to justify the investment, the effort simply wasn't worth it.
But the frustration extended beyond just the technical burden. Simple friction points that clients encountered daily went unaddressed because creating solutions wasn't cost-effective. When Laser Clinics Group complained about the tedious process of duplicating price lists for their complex marketing campaigns, or when they struggled with BigCommerce's buggy incomplete orders interface, Aligent wanted to help. But the reality of agency life meant they never had enough time to build the infrastructure that would make these small solutions viable.
"We're an agency," Jarrod said. "We shouldn't need to hire specialized developers to run infrastructure for us and worry about if stuff goes down. That’s what our clients hire us for."
The team was caught in an impossible position. They had the skills and vision to solve their clients' problems, but the backend complexity and maintenance burden made even simple apps prohibitively expensive to build and maintain.
The solution
Everything changed when BigCommerce announced a partnership with Gadget. Jarrod had been meaning to try the platform for a while, but it wasn't until he faced a particularly tight deadline that he decided to give it a try.
Gadget promised to handle all the complex infrastructure and platform integration work, providing a full-stack development environment with built-in connections to e-commerce platforms. For Aligent, this meant they could finally build apps the way they'd always wanted to: as reusable products rather than one-off custom solutions.
"I signed up for Gadget and it was kind of like, okay, this is great. This is the starter kit maintained for us," Jarrod explained.
The platform provided everything Aligent needed out of the box. Gadget's built-in BigCommerce and Shopify connections handled OAuth, webhook processing, and data synchronization automatically. The hosted infrastructure meant no more wrestling with deployment configurations or server management. And most importantly, the platform's multi-tenancy framework allowed them to build once and install everywhere.
For their first project, Jarrod tackled a simple but essential tool: a price list duplicator for Laser Clinics Group. The client's marketing team had created an incredibly complex promotional calendar where prices changed every few days, requiring constant duplication of price lists. What would have taken weeks to build and deploy traditionally took just a few hours.
"Gadget made it so easy that I wrote most of the app on a plane," Jarrod shared. "I mean, a long flight to Australia to be fair, but still — I built an app on a plane."
The simplicity of the platform unlocked everything. Since Gadget handled all the authentication, database setup, and platform integration, Jarrod could focus entirely on the specific business logic. The app was built as a production-grade app from the beginning, not as a prototype or a hardcoded solution that only served one client.
With Gadget, solving client pain points became almost effortless. Clients would complain about problems, and Aligent would create solutions as they came up. At one point, Jarrod was able to build an incomplete orders viewer in less than an hour — during a meeting.
Even more complex problems became manageable. When Laser Clinics Group needed visibility into their complex AWS Step Function integrations, Aligent brought the AWS integration logs directly into the BigCommerce admin, eliminating the need to give clients AWS console access and keeping everything in one place.
"The reality of agency life is you never have enough time to actually build the foundation to make things easier," Jarrod said. "With Gadget, we don't have to. We instantly get everything we need."
But simplicity isn’t everything, and it wasn’t until Aligent built the Schedule app that they knew Gadget could handle anything. The marketing teams at Laser Clinics Group managed complex promotional calendars where prices changed every few days and products appeared or disappeared based on campaigns. Despite the layers of complexity, the Schedule app automated all of it — price changes, visibility updates, catalog assignments, even temporary name changes for seasonal promotions. Aligent built once with Gadget, and it worked in every store.
The platform's consolidated environment made even complex builds manageable. Having all the infrastructure, documentation, development tools, and an AI assistant trained specifically on Gadget's framework meant Jarrod could quickly iterate and deploy changes without context-switching between multiple tools. So when a user with 500 price lists requested a search function, Jarrod simply told them, "Give us the day."
And just as promised, it was built and deployed within a day.
The results
Gadget fundamentally transformed how Aligent approaches client work. The agency shifted from building one-off custom solutions to developing true products that could be installed in any store worldwide.
The change in focus was dramatic. Previously, expanding Laser Clinics Group to a new market meant cloning and modifying code for each location. Now, when the client asks about adding a Japanese store, the answer is simple: just install the same apps and configure them within the interface.
"It has changed our focus into delivering those as products and thinking about them as reusable or resellable products so much more easily," Jarrod explained. "All that wiring around it that you wouldn't necessarily bother to do otherwise."
This product-based approach opened entirely new revenue streams. Aligent transitioned from being purely an agency partner to becoming a tech partner, registering to distribute public apps on the BigCommerce marketplace. Their price list duplicator alone has been installed on roughly two dozen stores despite zero promotion or marketing.
With Gadget, the team could serve clients in a whole new way. They built four major apps that simply wouldn't have existed without Gadget's infrastructure handling the heavy lifting. The Schedule app has been in production with Laser Clinics Group for more than six months, managing complex promotional calendars across multiple global markets. Marketing teams no longer need to manually change prices at specific times or remember different time zones for each market.
"No more late nights or early mornings," as their app listing promises.
The speed improvements were equally impressive. Projects that might have required extensive custom development now came together in hours or days rather than weeks. When clients reported issues, the debugging tools allowed Jarrod to quickly search logs and identify problems without diving through AWS consoles or multiple systems.
"If an order doesn't go through for any reason, all I have to do is go into Gadget and I can quickly search all the logs for the past day. It just brings everything up straight away," he said.
This rapid development cycle transformed client relationships. Aligent could now demonstrate working functionality on day one rather than asking clients to wait weeks for infrastructure setup.
"The big difference is day one, you can actually start to show them a thing, which is important to be able to show value early on," Jarrod shared. "You're able to get feedback so quickly because people are using it before you finish making it."
The early feedback loop prevented the team from spending weeks architecting themselves into dead ends. Clients saw working apps immediately and could provide direction before too much time was invested in the wrong approach.
Gadget also enabled a new level of polish in their work. When building the Step Function Visualizer, Jarrod added a feature that displays scheduled updates directly on product pages within BigCommerce. This "nice to have" feature wouldn't have been feasible with their old approach.
"What Gadget allows is for us to do those nice-to-haves because the framework is in place," he explained.
The platform even changed how Aligent thought about scope. With Gadget handling the infrastructure, the team became a bit too enthusiastic about new app ideas.
Jarrod joked, "We have to be a little bit disciplined to not just say, oh, I had a vague idea, here's an app!"
For clients like Laser Clinics Group, the shift to Gadget apps was truly a game-changer. Their digital manager, Zoe, can now manage complex global promotions without technical expertise or late-night deployments. The Canadian, UK, and Australian sites all run the same apps, configured independently but built on the same reliable codebase, so there are no surprises when working across stores.
The shift to a product-based model has positioned Aligent for continued growth. They're preparing to launch the Schedule app publicly on the BigCommerce marketplace, making it available to merchants worldwide. With Gadget's auto-scaling infrastructure and built-in maintenance, the team doesn't worry about supporting hundreds or thousands of installations.
"With Gadget, we almost have the opposite problem," Jarrod reflected. "It makes it so easy to ship apps, we have to be specific about what we want to build."
By leveraging Gadget's full-stack platform, Aligent has transformed from an agency building custom solutions into a tech partner shipping reusable products. They've eliminated the tedious infrastructure work that consumed developer time, reduced client costs, and most importantly, changed their entire business model from project-based to product-based development.
The apps they build now work globally, install in minutes, and scale automatically. And for an agency that spent years struggling with maintenance and infrastructure, that transformation has been nothing short of revolutionary.
About the agency
Aligent is a 120-person digital agency with expertise across Shopify, BigCommerce, and Adobe Commerce platforms. They've been named BigCommerce Partner of the Year for Asia Pacific for three consecutive years and maintain close partnerships with major e-commerce platforms. They specialize in complex integrations and custom app development for enterprise clients across multiple markets.
