A small studio with a long list

Two shelves, one habit of mind.

The iPhone apps are for things people already keep track of, usually badly, in a notebook or a camera roll or their head. A sourdough starter. A print farm. A reading year. Tides at the one spot you fish. A service dog's alerts against real glucose data. Sterilization cycles a health inspector will ask to see. Each one is built to be opened for thirty seconds and put away.

The web tools are for the moment somebody needs one specific document to be right. A deed the county recorder will accept. A WH-347 that holds up on a prevailing-wage job. An affidavit that settles a small estate without probate. Form 2553 for an S-corp election, filed on time. These ask plain questions, apply the rules for your state, and hand back the paperwork with instructions for what to do with it.

The obvious question about a list this long is whether any of it gets finished. The answer is that small scope is the point, not a side effect.

A quilter needs binding math and a stash she can shop from. A 3D printing hobbyist needs filament grams and maintenance scheduled by print hours. Those are not the same app with a different colour, and building them as one would mean a settings screen full of things neither person cares about. So they are separate, each narrow enough to actually be done.

Underneath, a lot is shared. The compliance apps run on one engine with about ninety-five percent of the code in common. The service dog logs come off a single white-label core. The web tools share a deployment shape and a way of modelling state law. The surface is deliberately narrow; the plumbing is reused.

This works differently on the two shelves, and it would be dishonest to give one blanket answer.

On iPhone. Records live on your device and sync, when they sync at all, through your own private iCloud account using Apple CloudKit. There is no account to create and no server of ours in the middle. Where an app reads HealthKit, that data stays on the phone. You can export everything at any time.

On the web. These are real web applications, so they do keep data on a server: a Postgres database with row-level security, and Stripe for payments. We hold what the tool needs to produce your document and nothing more. Several of them take no account at all and identify your order by a token instead. The tax and deed tools never send a Social Security number to the server; that stays in your browser. Generated documents are purged on a schedule, and each site states its own retention period.

Both shelves share the same floor: no ads, no third-party trackers, no selling or licensing your data, no cross-app profile. Each product's own privacy policy is the authoritative version, and it is linked from that product's site.

Pricing follows the shape of the thing. Most iPhone apps have a free tier that does the core job forever, a subscription if you want the extras, and a one-time lifetime purchase for people who would rather pay once and stop thinking about it.

The document tools are one-time payments, because you need a deed once, not every month. The business software that earns its keep continuously, like certified payroll and catering documents, is subscription. Apple handles every purchase in the apps; Stripe handles the web.

Handler Labs LLC is independent and self-funded. No investors, no growth targets handed down from anyone, no reason to squeeze users. The studio makes its living from software sales, which keeps the incentive pointed at building something worth keeping.

The name came from the first apps, which were training logs for service dog handlers. Those are still here. The list grew.

Questions, bug reports, and feature requests all reach a real person at [email protected]. Every email gets read.