Our own products
Consumer web apps designed, built and maintained in-house. They are how we test ideas about interface and how much architecture a product actually needs.
Arbalest AppsBrooklyn, New York5 apps live
Arbalest Apps is a studio in Brooklyn. We ship our own consumer apps, build tools for clients, and take over codebases that grew faster than anyone designed for.
What we do
Most of it starts the same way — something is harder to use than it needs to be, and the fix is a real design decision rather than another feature.
Consumer web apps designed, built and maintained in-house. They are how we test ideas about interface and how much architecture a product actually needs.
Portals, dashboards and internal tools — usually where an off-the-shelf product almost fits and never quite does. Built to be handed over and lived with.
Inherited codebases, prototypes that outgrew their architecture, products that shipped before anybody designed them. We take them over, make them legible, and keep them shipping.
Our own products
Each one takes a specific frustration and does one thing about it. They share a stack and a way of working, and deliberately look nothing like each other.

a way into the Internet Archive
live · arkibber.appThe Archive kept almost everything — silent film, shortwave recordings, shareware, out-of-print books — and put it behind a search box that only rewards people who already know the title they want.
arkibber reads the same collections and gives them a front door: browse by era, medium and mood, follow a thread sideways when something catches, and let the discover feed hand you things you would never have thought to query.
Internet Archive
Open arkibber.appreference for people who draw
live · musist.appArtists looking for reference now wade through generated images with six-fingered hands and invented anatomy. The three biggest open museum collections have the real thing, and each one hides it behind a separate catalogue interface built for curators.
musist pulls all three into one surface and keeps it strictly human-made — no generated images, anywhere. Gather pulls a working set for the piece you're on. Wander drops you somewhere you weren't headed.
The Met · Rijksmuseum · Smithsonian
Open musist.appa discovery engine for Wikipedia
live · whisk.fyiEveryone has fallen down a Wikipedia hole and nobody can start one on purpose. Random Article is noise, and search only works when you can already name the thing.
whisk makes the hole a feature. It reads the link graph and the categories underneath, then serves the interesting neighbours instead of the alphabetical ones — so the third click is better than the first.
Wikipedia
Open whisk.fyisettles what everyone is watching
live · flikpik.appFour people, four streaming services, forty minutes of scrolling, and dinner goes cold. The catalogue was never the problem — agreeing was.
flikpik turns the argument into a round of swiping. One person opens a session and sends the link, everyone swipes on the same set from their own phone, and the app returns what the room actually agrees on. No accounts until someone wants to keep the result.
TMDB
Open flikpik.appan early read on what to stock next
live · shopperpulse.orgBy the time a product turns up in your sales numbers the shelf is already crowded. The demand was visible weeks earlier, in what people were typing into the search box.
Shopper Pulse watches products, categories and consumer interests as they start to move, scores what is actually gaining, and surfaces the openings early — while there is still room to stock them.
Retail search & demand signals
Open shopperpulse.orgMethod
The apps look nothing like each other on purpose. The process behind them doesn’t change, and it runs in this order.
The brief is never “build an app.” It is that one specific thing is harder than it should be. We find that thing first and write it down in a sentence.
Type, colour, hierarchy and the shape of the main screen get settled before the first route exists. Products that skip this step become somebody’s rescue work later.
The look comes out of the subject rather than a component library. Archive stock for arkibber, gallery wall for musist, ticket stub for flikpik. Never a template dropped on top.
The smallest architecture that holds. One framework, one database, one host, and no service you will have to explain to yourself in six months.
Work with us
Send the short version — what it does, who it’s for, and what is currently going wrong. A sentence is enough to start. We reply to everything.
Say hello
hello@arbalest.app