Arbalest AppsBrooklyn, New York5 apps live

Web products,designed firstand built small.

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

Three kinds of work,
one way of working.

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.

4 live

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.

From scratch

Client builds

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.

Takeover

Rescue work

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

Five apps, live
and maintained.

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.

arkibber

a way into the Internet Archive

live · arkibber.app

The 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.

  • Discover feed
  • Era and format browsing
  • Writing on what's in there
Built on~99M items

Internet Archive

Open arkibber.app

reference for people who draw

live · musist.app

Artists 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.

  • Gather
  • Wander
  • Sketchbook
Built on~5M objects

The Met · Rijksmuseum · Smithsonian

Open musist.app

a discovery engine for Wikipedia

live · whisk.fyi

Everyone 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.

  • Threaded browsing
  • Category drift
  • Save a trail
Built on~7M articles

Wikipedia

Open whisk.fyi

settles what everyone is watching

live · flikpik.app

Four 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.

  • Shared sessions
  • Swipe consensus
  • Weekly trending packs
Built on~1M titles

TMDB

Open flikpik.app

an early read on what to stock next

live · shopperpulse.org

By 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.

  • Product search
  • Trend Score
  • Save & monitor
Built on

Retail search & demand signals

Open shopperpulse.org

Method

Same four moves,
every time.

The apps look nothing like each other on purpose. The process behind them doesn’t change, and it runs in this order.

01

Start from the friction

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.

02

Design before scaffold

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.

03

Borrow the vernacular

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.

04

Ship it small

The smallest architecture that holds. One framework, one database, one host, and no service you will have to explain to yourself in six months.

  • Next.js
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Hono
  • Neon Postgres
  • SQLite
  • Vercel
  • Anthropic API

Work with us

Building something,
or repairing one?

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