Northbound

We makesoftware thatstays out of your way.

See the work

Selected work

Six things we shipped and still use every day.

Desktop · macOS

Driftwood

A second screen that does nothing urgent. Tide charts, a slow clock, and the weather three days out — all the things worth glancing at and nothing worth reacting to.

  • Swift
  • Ambient
  • Menu bar
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Web · Productivity

Halfpipe

Email that closes. It sorts the morning into three piles — reply, read, ignore — and then it gets out of the way until tomorrow.

  • TypeScript
  • Local-first
  • Sync
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Developer tools

Kiln

Licensing for people who would rather be writing software. One binary, one config file, no dashboard to log into on a Sunday.

  • Go
  • Self-hosted
  • CLI
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Mobile · iOS

Lantern

A transit app for a city that keeps changing its mind. Offline timetables, honest delay estimates, and a widget that tells you when to leave.

  • SwiftUI
  • Offline
  • Widgets
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Web · Writing

Margins

A journal with no streaks, no badges, and no notifications. It opens to a blank page and remembers where you stopped.

  • Encrypted
  • Markdown
  • PWA
View project

Consulting

Northbound Labs

Two senior engineers, embedded with your team, for a quarter at a time. No account managers, no bench, no slide decks.

  • Advisory
  • Embedded
  • Quarterly
Work with us

Approach

Four things we believe, stated plainly.

  1. 01

    Less, deliberately

    Every feature we leave out is one you never have to learn, configure, or work around. Restraint is the product decision we make most often.

  2. 02

    No engineered urgency

    No streaks, no badges, no red dots invented to pull you back. If our software is worth opening, it can wait until you want to open it.

  3. 03

    You own what you buy

    One price, yours to keep, working offline and after we stop shipping updates. Your data exports in a format that outlives us.

  4. 04

    Built from use, not research

    We only make things we need ourselves. Every product here started as a problem one of us had on an ordinary weekday.

Have something worth building?

We take on a small number of projects each year. Tell us what you are working on and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.

hello@example.com