Drydock is a record of the Shopify App Store, kept daily. Most of what gets said about the app store is anecdote: somebody's app did well, somebody heard a category was hot. This is the same store, written down every day so the claims can be checked.
A crawler reads every live listing on the Shopify App Store once a day and stores what it finds. Nothing is estimated and nothing is bought from anyone. Every figure traces back to a page that was publicly readable on the day it was collected.
A listing page tells you what is true this morning. It cannot tell you that the top app in a category has not shipped an update in nine months, that a category's review pace doubled this quarter, or that nineteen apps quietly disappeared last month. Those are differences between days, and you only have them if somebody wrote down every day. That is the entire product.
Each crawl records the listing as it stood, its rank in every category it appears in, its rating and review count, and whether it is still there at all. Delistings are counted only when a listing has genuinely gone. An app missing from the browse whose own page still answers is unlisted, not dead, and it is not counted as one.
It started as a weekly newsletter: one category picked apart at a time, with the numbers behind it. The newsletter answered one question a week, whichever one seemed most interesting on Sunday night. But the person reading it usually had a different question, about their own category, and no way to ask it.
So the database was opened up instead. Connect it to Claude and ask directly: which niches are under twenty-five apps with rising review volume, what merchants complain about in a category, how long the leader has been coasting. The newsletter still ships, free, monthly: a week turned out to be too little data to judge a niche honestly.
$129 a year, from the people who use it. No advertising, no sponsored placement, and the data is never resold to anyone whose interests run against yours. A data product that also sells access to its own subscribers has two masters, and you can never quite tell which one a number is serving.
hello@drydock.club, corrections especially. If a number here is wrong, it is worth more to me than a compliment.