REPLUG review: paid UA is the engine. Avoid buying ASO from the passenger seat.

REPLUG is a young agency that has done well quickly, and it is worth understanding why. Its founders came out of adtech, the world of attribution, tracking SDKs and media buying, and they built an agency that speaks that language fluently. Measurement, incrementality, MMP setup, paid UA across a dozen channels. For a company drowning in ad spend it cannot attribute, that is exactly the right team. This page is about something else: hiring them for App Store Optimization.

An agency’s DNA decides where its best people go and where its margin comes from. At REPLUG, both point at paid. Media buying scales with budget, attribution work commands consulting rates, and the senior team’s expertise is in exactly those things. ASO, by contrast, is a fixed-fee, slow-moving, craft-heavy service. It does not scale with spend and it does not need an MMP. At an adtech-shaped agency it is a supporting service: useful for winning full-funnel accounts, staffed by whoever is good at it, and rarely where the founders spend their time.

You see this in how the work is framed. ASO is presented as one part of a growth system, with paid, CRM and measurement around it. That framing is true and also convenient. It makes the organic work hard to evaluate on its own, because the report is about the system. Installs went up: was that the metadata change or the new TikTok campaign? The agency that runs both has no reason to separate them, and every reason to keep the retainer covering both.

There is also the age of the shop. Founded in 2020, REPLUG has built its process in the years since. That means the process is modern, which is good, and it means the ASO playbook is a few years old and was built to fit alongside paid, which is less good. The stores have their own logic. A listing rewrite is judged by conversion and search visibility over weeks, not by a dashboard refreshed daily. An agency whose habits were formed in daily-refresh media buying will always find organic work slow, and slow work gets less attention.

Compare that with hiring one consultant whose only habit is the stores. No media, no attribution stack, no growth system to sell you. The teardown, the rewrite, one creative test at a time, the handover. You can see exactly what the organic work did because nothing else is moving in the report. The fee is fixed and small next to a year of agency retainers, and when it ends your team can run the next round without an agency or an SDK.

To be fair to REPLUG: if you need paid UA, measurement and CRM built properly, they are a serious, modern option and the adtech background is a genuine advantage there. If you want your store listing fixed by someone for whom that is the whole job, the DNA works against you. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the ASO line would take on its own, and what it costs as a fixed fee.