How to find the competitors of an app idea, including the ones you don't see

“I couldn't find any competitors” is the most worrying thing a founder can say. Either nobody has the problem, or the search used the founder's words instead of the customer's. It's almost always the second.

Three circles of competition

Direct competitors do the same thing for the same people. You find them by searching for the feature: “shopify low stock alert app”.

Neighboring tools include your feature in a broader product. This is the circle people forget, and the most dangerous one. For the groomer booking software, deposits and SMS reminders were the pitch, but Teddy already collects deposits in its booking flow, and comparison pages rank Franpos, MoeGo and Gingr on exactly those points: deposits, reminders, no-show protection. A feature bundled into someone else's plan is hard to sell on its own.

The workaround: the spreadsheet, the free template, the paper notebook. For the Shopify low-stock app, merchants share free Google Sheets that compute average daily sales, reorder point and order quantity. That competitor costs nothing, and it's the one to beat first.

Searches that surface competitors

• The feature, as a customer would type it: “low stock alert shopify”.
• The outcome they want: “never run out of stock shopify”.
• “Alternative to” plus the best-known competitor, which brings up unhappy users and comparisons.
• The marketplace itself: the Shopify App Store, the WordPress plugin directory, the Chrome Web Store.
• Recent roundups (“best … apps 2026”), which list in one page what ten searches would find.

Marketplaces give you competitors with their prices

When your product sells through a marketplace, it hands you everything at once: the competitors, their review counts and often their prices. For the Shopify idea, the report found 635 apps in Shopify's inventory optimization category, several of which already combine low-stock alerts with reorder suggestions: Bee Low Stock Alert & Forecast, PL Inventory & Low Stock Alert, Sensible Inventory Forecasting. Published prices ran from $4.99 a month at Stockie to $49 a month at Prediko. The category is crowded (4 out of 10 on room in the market), but you can position yourself without guessing.

Check that each competitor actually exists

AI assistants happily produce plausible competitor lists, and some of those names don't exist. A name with no page behind it isn't a competitor, it's a guess. AppGap applies a simple rule: a competitor appears in the report only if its name is on a page that was actually read, and its price only if the figures are on the cited page. Anything that fails the check is removed, and the report says so. In the groomer report, an entry that lumped three product names together matched no page and was dropped.