Throttle — The Commerce Platform We Build On
Throttle
Our Own Commerce Platform
Cart, checkout, customers, orders and subscriptions —
built and run by us, so the checkout is never the thing
that tells you no.
Every agency that builds headless storefronts eventually hits the same wall: the client needs the checkout to do something, and the platform won’t. What follows is a workaround, a third-party app that half fits, or a conversation where you explain that the thing they need isn’t possible.
We got tired of that conversation, so we built the backend ourselves.
Throttle is a commerce platform — cart, checkout, payments, customers, orders, subscriptions, quotes, invoices and discounts — with a documented API and an extension system. It runs the headless storefronts we build. It is not something we are trying to sell you a seat on.
What this means if you’re a client
You do not need to care about Throttle as a product. You should care about three consequences of it.
The checkout is not a fixed constraint
On a hosted platform, checkout is the least flexible part of the system and the most important part of your funnel. When a requirement doesn’t fit — an unusual fulfillment rule, a field you need captured, a B2B approval step — you work around it.
When we build on Throttle, that becomes a change to code we maintain. The distinction only matters if you are going to hit a limit. Merchants with straightforward retail checkouts never will, and we will tell you so.
B2B works without a plugin stack
Customer-specific pricing, quantity breaks, quote-to-order, net terms, invoices: these are first-class, not reconstructed from apps. This is the single most common reason our clients end up here rather than on a hosted plan.
No per-transaction surprise
Platform economics change. Ours don’t move because a vendor repriced.
What Throttle does
- Cart and checkout — server-computed pricing, embedded payment component so card data never touches your storefront, real-time cart sync across devices.
- Customers — accounts, saved addresses, saved payment methods, order history.
- Orders and fulfillment — order lifecycle, returns, fulfillment hooks.
- Subscriptions — recurring billing and subscription management.
- Quotes and invoices — quote-to-order flows and invoicing for B2B.
- Discounts — codes, automatic promotions, and the rules around them.
- Webhooks — signed with HMAC-SHA256 and verified against the raw request body, so downstream systems can trust what they receive.
- Extensions — a real extension platform, which is how integrations get built.
Public documentation lives at docs.usethrottle.dev.
Extensions we’ve built
The extension system is not theoretical. Two we’ve shipped:
Klaviyo. Connects a merchant’s Throttle workspace to Klaviyo over OAuth with PKCE, then turns commerce events into Klaviyo events and profile updates through a durable queue — deduplicated by event, with exponential retry, so a Klaviyo outage doesn’t silently drop a month of purchase data. It also provisions seven starter email templates and six flows on connect, so a newly connected account has working automations instead of an empty dashboard.
ShipStation. Order and fulfillment sync, built on the same extension foundation.
Both run as Cloudflare Workers with credentials encrypted at rest and strict tenant isolation. This is the same machinery available for a custom integration against whatever system you already run — an ERP, a 3PL, a pricing service.
Where Throttle fits against BigCommerce and Shopify
We build on all three and recommend the hosted platforms often. Roughly how we choose:
BigCommerce — strong for large catalogs and B2B on a hosted plan, with a genuinely good API. Often the right answer when you want platform-managed infrastructure and your requirements fit inside it. Our BigCommerce work.
Shopify — the strongest app ecosystem and the smoothest operational experience, especially for DTC brands and multi-channel selling. Our Shopify work.
Throttle — when the checkout or the commerce logic is the constraint, when B2B rules are central rather than an add-on, or when the storefront is genuinely a product.
The decision is usually made in one conversation, and it is frequently not Throttle.
The obvious question
If the agency and the platform are the same company, what happens if the agency goes away?
Your storefront lives in your repository, on your hosting account. The APIs are publicly documented. Commerce data is exportable. The storefront talks to Throttle through a thin SDK layer rather than being fused to it — a deliberate choice that makes replacing the commerce backend a scoped project rather than a rewrite.
We would rather answer that question directly than have you not ask it.