PreApps review: ‘#1 app marketing agency’. Avoid buying the superlative.

PreApps has a confident website. Number-one app marketing agency, thousands of apps helped, fifteen years of experience, startups to billion-dollar companies. I have no reason to doubt that the founder has been in the industry a long time. What I want you to notice is the distance between the size of those claims and the size of the company making them, because that gap tells you what you are actually buying.

By public reporting, PreApps is a small team, single digits at last count, run from Boston. That is not a flaw. Some of the best ASO work in the world comes from small teams. But a small team marketing itself as a number-one agency is doing something specific: it is using agency language, agency pricing and agency packaging to sell what is, in practice, a consultancy. You get a proposal with tiers, a monthly retainer, a bundle of ASO plus PR plus video plus paid. Underneath it, a handful of people.

Here is why that matters. A genuine agency spreads a client across specialists: a strategist, a designer, a copywriter, a media buyer. A small team offering all of those services cannot. The same two or three people do everything, or the work is subcontracted, or it is templated. Templated ASO is the industry’s dirty secret: a keyword list from a tool, a description rewritten to formula, screenshots with the same layout as the last twenty clients. It ships fast, it looks like work, and it rarely moves installs, because your category is not the last client’s category.

The bundle makes it harder to see. When a proposal includes ASO, press outreach, a viral video and a paid campaign for one monthly fee, none of the lines has to stand on its own. The PR gets a mention somewhere, the video gets made, the ads spend some budget, and the ASO becomes one more line in a report that always has something to show. Ask which change shipped to the listing last month and what it did to search installs. That question cuts through any bundle.

Compare that with hiring one consultant openly, at a consultant’s price, with a consultant’s scope. I do not call myself an agency because I am not one, and I do not sell PR or video because I do not do them. What I do is the listing: the teardown, the rewrite, the creative test, the handover, with dates. You talk to me directly, which is also what you would get at PreApps, but without the agency wrapper and the retainer that goes with it. When it ends, your team owns the system.

To be fair: a small, long-established shop with a founder who knows the stores can be a perfectly good choice for a startup that wants one friendly point of contact across several marketing tasks and does not have the budget for a large agency. Just price it as what it is. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the ASO line costs on its own, and whether the rest of the bundle is worth anything to you.