Your new dev team

We are local, and we seek transformational relationships over transactional relationships

Years of experience: 20+
Projects completed successfully: 100+
Ready: SOC 2 Type 2
Ready: HIPAA / PHIPA

Shopify Plus Partner

We are proud to be officially recognized as a Shopify Plus partner

Our Shopify Plus partner badge reflects the level of experience we bring to theme development, platform migrations, app integrations, and custom commerce builds.

Shopify Plus partners in Toronto, Canada

Our Team

Our small, specialized team works smart and hard supporting our partners in Canada, and the U.S.

Emily
Customer Success Manager
Toronto
Entrepreneur since 2011
Rob
CTO / Technical Architect
Toronto
Coding since 1985
Green Software for Practitioners LFC131
Shopify Verified Skills Badges
Scott
Tech Lead
Toronto
Coding since 2011

Who is typeof?

typeof is a software development agency created by software developers. Our mission is to help elevate businesses and Municipal Governments by using e-commerce, workflow modernization--with and without AI--and custom software, in the most cost effective, and sustainable way possible.

At our core, we care about sustainability, therefore, we make choices that help to reduce the amount of energy our programs, apps, and services use.

Ultimately, by applying green software practices we help your business save money, and we help to reduce the amount of carbon your business produces.

Photo of a Lake in Cowichan Valley at sunrise on a clear morning. The mountains and trees reflect off the calm water of the lake producing an image that looks like a sound waveform.

We are professionals with personalities and are trusted by companies like...

Why does typeof exist?

typeof exists because we wanted to create a company that reflected our values, followed our principles, and applied practices that we respect. typeof is not just a button to press when you need help. Instead, we act with agency and are an engaged extension of your team. We listen, learn, and then guide using our expertise across industries. We care about your business vision so that together we can produce the best possible outcomes. We don't just build you a website, we're your partner in solving business problems with sustainable software. We go further by sharing and teaching knowledge we've gained learning from the most successful companies in the world. Our experience allows us to deliver professional solutions for Fortune 500 companies, SMBs, and municipal governments--we create equal playing fields.

Our Values

Understanding who we are and what we believe in is important to us. We work best with clients who share our ethos.

At typeof, we strive to build a culture of technical excellence, accountability, transparency, trust, empathy, and honesty. We are continuously learning so that we can deliver the most value possible resulting in win-win outcomes.

Let us help you supercharge your business problem solving skills by building sustainable software.

Sustainability.: Build to consume the least energy possible. Not only do greener, low carbon solutions cost less over time, using less carbon benefits businesses in many ways.
Technical excellence.: We believe in software craftsmanship. We foster an amazing engineering culture that is focused on delivering high quality, anti-fragile solutions.
Trust & transparency.: Clear and concise communication is key. All communication is kept in a project management system and project updates are shared in a centralized location. This results in improved collaboration, faster feedback loops, reduced back and forth, and fewer unnecessary meetings.
Business intelligence.: We believe in using data to drive decisions. We will challenge assumptions and ask necessary questions in the absence of empirical data.
Emotional intelligence and empathy: We don't say yes to everything. We listen deeply and challenge ideas in ways that benefit stakeholders and end users alike.
Accountability.: We are accountable for our actions and believe in radical candor. We are not afraid to admit when we make mistakes and we have made many so that you don't have to. If we make mistakes, we make things right.
Continuous learning.: Always be learning. Our insatiable appetite for learning helps us to increase business value for our clients.
Build for accessibility.: Our solutions plan for accessibility from the start. Accessible solutions can make products better for everyone.
Privacy.: Access to your data is taken very seriously. We follow PIPEDA. We do not allow data access to anyone outside of the typeof team without client consent. At all times, typeof understands who on the team has access and can easily revoke access or remove private data as needed.
Security.: We believe in the principle of least privilege. Our team needs the bare minimum access levels to complete our work. We follow SOC2 compliance practices to enhance our security posture.
Work-life harmony.: Our culture supports taking breaks and working on schedules that maximize engagement. This style of work allows us to deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients. You may find we work weekends, but that's by choice, and it doesn't mean that you have to.

Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework

At typeof, we design and build cloud solutions that follow the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework. This framework gives us a consistent set of pillars and principles to evaluate architectures, identify trade-offs, and make decisions that result in systems that are secure, reliable, cost-effective, high-performing, and operationally excellent.

The Five Pillars

Every solution we deliver is evaluated against all five pillars of the framework.

Operational Excellence: Run and monitor systems to deliver business value and continuously improve processes and procedures. We automate operations, respond to events, and define standards to manage daily operations.
Security, Privacy & Compliance: Protect information, systems, and assets. We apply security, and privacy at every layer, enforce least-privilege access, manage vulnerabilities proactively, and ensure workloads meet applicable regulatory requirements.
Reliability: Ensure a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently. We design for redundancy, plan for disruptions, implement disaster recovery strategies, and build self-healing systems.
Cost Optimization: Avoid unnecessary costs and maximize the value of every dollar spent. We right-size resources, leverage managed services, track and allocate cloud spending, and continuously look for opportunities to reduce wasteful compute.
Performance Optimization: Use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and maintain that efficiency as demand changes. We benchmark, monitor, and iterate on compute, storage, and networking choices to keep systems fast and scalable.

Core Principles We Follow

Underpinning each pillar are a set of guiding principles that shape how we approach every engagement.

Design for the cloud.: Embrace cloud-native patterns—managed services, auto-scaling, and serverless—instead of lifting and shifting on-premises thinking into the cloud.
Automate everything.: Infrastructure as code, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines reduce human error, increase repeatability, and free teams to focus on higher-value work.
Security by design.: Security is not an afterthought. We embed it from the very first line of code through threat modelling, data classification, and layered controls.
Make data-driven decisions.: Observability through metrics, logs, and traces gives us the empirical evidence needed to optimize systems and validate architectural choices.
Plan for failure.: Assume components will fail and design accordingly with retries, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and regularly tested recovery procedures.
Continuous improvement.: Architecture is never finished. We run regular Well-Architected reviews to identify gaps, learn from incidents, and incrementally raise the quality of every system we operate.

Find out why typeof is a different typeof agency

We build low carbon, high quality, accessible, compliant, and secure software that is used by Fortune 500s, municipal governments, and everyone in between.

Let's Talk Learn more

Frequently asked questions

: The name is a play on the JavaScript operator typeof. We chose this name because it reflects our identity as a team of developers. Just as the typeof operator helps developers understand the type of a value, we aim to help our clients understand the type of software solutions they need to achieve their business goals.
: If it runs on the web, we can build it. We build custom software solutions for large, medium, and small businesses. This includes Shopify Plus development, ecommerce migrations, workflow modernization with or without AI, fractional CTO services, and custom web applications.
: Two reasons; First, we place sustainability at the core of our software engineering. Second, typeof is founded by developers and is run by developers. When you engage with us, you're speaking to the people working on your project. We are not a sales organization or a front for middle managers who outsource your development overseas. We are a team of engineers who care about delivering business value by building dependable software.
: Yes, we have experience with BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento, and many other smaller and bespoke e-commerce platforms. Often we're migrating merchants from these platforms and upgrading them to Shopify.
: typeof aims to be part of the climate solution. We believe that one of our key differentiators is that we care about Low Carbon (Sustainable, Green) Software. This is why we consider ourselves a different type of agency. The business solutions we deliver take into account energy efficiency and environmental sustainability from the start. For example, we practice carbon efficiency by using low carbon hosting providers. We also minimize the amount of energy used per unit of work--meaning we write code that uses less CPU cycles--translating into less energy used. We run your websites and workloads on hardware that is more efficient too. Software developers can all make an impact by factoring in the environment into our software development practices. Building green is cheaper, more performant, more secure, and more resilient.
: One of our core values is transparency. We use a project management tool that allows us to share project timelines, tasks, and status updates with you in realtime. Weekly or bi-weekly check-ins can be arranged as needed. We focus on tasks based on estimated business value, and we work to surface issues early to avoid unnecessary and costly delays.
: We typically work best with merchants with a GMV between 1 million - 100 million. While we excel with merchants who have a dedicated e-commerce / IT team. We have completed successful projects working directly with business owners on Shopify. That said, we are not the right fit for anyone who cannot dedicate the time required to fully engage in the project.
: typeof consists of a team of senior developers with 30+ years experience in the web design, web development industry. We are based in Toronto, Canada. We do not outsource work to offshore teams. When you work with typeof, you are working directly with the developers working on your projects. Our team is proud to deliver high-quality results without outsourcing any part of our development process.