How Glowtify Moved Up-Market and Grew Deal Sizes 10x with CE.SDK
Glowtify is a Montreal-based SaaS company building what it describes as the one-stop shop for marketing. Merchants, primarily Shopify store owners, connect their data sources, and Glowtify’s AI agent analyzes their brand, identifies marketable moments, and recommends the next actions to take. From there, users can create content, schedule it, and publish it across every channel, all without leaving the platform.
We sat down with Olivier Fradette-Roy, CTO at Glowtify, to discuss how the team brought professional image and video editing into their AI-powered marketing platform, and why embedding that capability directly in the product became essential to moving up-market.
The Challenge: Users Were Leaving the App to Design
Glowtify started by serving the long tail of the Shopify marketplace: small merchants just getting started. Over time, the company moved up-market to work with larger, more established businesses. That shift required a significantly more capable product, and image editing was a key piece of the puzzle.
In its early days, Glowtify assumed merchants would create their visuals elsewhere, in Adobe, Canva, or similar tools, and then upload the finished assets. In practice, this workflow was a significant blocker. Using session recording tools, the team watched users struggle with basic tasks like resizing images and uploading low-quality assets. Internally, the pain was just as clear. A Glowtify operator managing content on behalf of clients reported that she could not do her job without a design tool inside the app, and was constantly switching to Adobe.
Stop doing things outside of Glowtify. List what you’re doing outside of the app. And image editing was number one.
Some competitors had tried integrating Canva, either embedding it or redirecting users to the Canva website. But that approach meant losing control of the experience and sending users to another tab. When Canva deprecated its embedded option, that path closed entirely. Glowtify needed a solution that was fully embedded, customizable, and built for developers to extend.
Why Glowtify Chose CE.SDK
Olivier’s evaluation process was deliberate, filtering candidates on a handful of key criteria: company longevity, documentation quality, and UI/UX fit. Glowtify’s designer reviewed the demo before the team went any deeper. Video support and reasonable pricing further narrowed the field.
I looked at the developer support and the documentation, and you came out on top.
More recently, Olivier has added a new criterion: AI readiness, meaning whether coding assistants can work effectively with a vendor’s SDK. CE.SDK’s documentation is well-indexed enough that agentic tools can generate working implementations quickly. With IMG.LY’s Agentic Skill, developers can go even further, scaffolding complete projects and building features through simple slash commands, no external services required.
How Glowtify Implemented CE.SDK
CE.SDK sits at the heart of Glowtify’s content creation workflow. What started as a straightforward editor integration has grown into a core part of the product architecture.
The first step was templates. Glowtify built a custom template library on top of CE.SDK, tagged by channel and size, and connected it to their workspace media library. When a user creates a campaign and picks their channels, the right formats are generated automatically, with AI swapping in the correct text, images, and colors while the templates keep everything on-brand. Users who want more control can open the editor and fine-tune from there.
It’s been very easy to interact with the SDK and add value on top. Very early, we were able to play with templates using AI, branding them, resizing based on channels.
From that foundation, the team kept finding new ways to build on the SDK. When customers asked why they couldn’t create social media carousels inside the editor, Glowtify deprecated their in-house carousel tool and rebuilt it on CE.SDK in a single week. Most recently, the team made the architectural decision to standardize CE.SDK’s scene file format across the entire platform. Because scene files are lightweight and cloud-connected, they solve a fundamental bandwidth limitation. Olivier expects this change alone to double or triple the number of exports flowing through the system.
The editor now serves two distinct user segments. Smaller merchants tend to accept Glowtify’s AI-generated designs with minor adjustments. More advanced customers build their own templates from scratch, leveraging layers, filters, and custom photo shoots. CE.SDK supports both ends of the spectrum.
The Results
The impact of integrating CE.SDK has been felt across Glowtify’s business. The team achieved an almost 10x increase in average deal value. By adding a professional-grade design experience, Glowtify moved from serving $49/month long-tail merchants to closing deals with established businesses at $499/month and above.
While CE.SDK was not the sole driver, Olivier identifies it as a core enabler of this shift. The sophistication it brought to the product opened the door to larger customers with higher expectations. Before CE.SDK, every time a user left Glowtify to design in another tool, the perceived value of the platform went down. The embedded editor eliminated that friction entirely, keeping users inside the app for the full workflow.
The design piece was missing, and CE.SDK solved that.
Rather than building and maintaining a proprietary editor, Glowtify’s engineering team stays focused on core differentiation. CE.SDK delivered a feature set that would have been, in Olivier’s words, “almost impossible” to build in-house. With the decision to standardize on scene files, CE.SDK is becoming more central to Glowtify’s architecture, and the platform keeps finding new ways to leverage the SDK beyond its original scope.
Working with IMG.LY
A strong SDK is only part of the equation. The relationship behind it matters just as much, and Olivier pointed to several aspects of working with IMG.LY that reinforced Glowtify’s confidence in the partnership.
On the support side, the team has been consistently responsive. When Glowtify’s developers needed guidance, answers came quickly and often included insights that improved how the team approached implementation. On the commercial side, IMG.LY demonstrated flexibility when it counted. After Glowtify experienced unexpected usage spikes due to a rendering bug on their end, IMG.LY allowed time for the issue to be resolved before addressing billing, and when the adjustment came, it was handled transparently and fairly.
When I don’t sleep well, it’s never because of CE.SDK.
For Olivier, the overall experience has been clear enough to recommend without hesitation. He summed up what CE.SDK means to his team in three words: embeddable, rich, and flexible. Richness and flexibility, he noted, rarely come together in a single SDK, and that combination is exactly what allowed Glowtify to build something that feels entirely their own.
I would say a big, big yes. I’ve never stumbled on a competitor that matches your offer.
