Custom Software Boutique
You wouldn't put Home Depot cabinets in your new kitchen. Why would you use off-the-shelf software?
Mass-market software is designed to placate millions of different users, and the only possible result of that kind of design is mediocrity. Creosote Labs designs and builds software for one business at a time: the tools its people use every day and the apps its customers see.
Why custom
The case for custom software
Commercial software is designed to placate as many as possible of its millions of users. Every business that buys it gets the same compromise: menus full of features nobody in the building uses, and a workflow bent around someone else's idea of how the work should go.
Building software used to cost far more than renting it. That has changed. Outside regulated industries and consumer apps that need network effects to succeed, there is no longer much marginal value in buying commercial software for the work a business does every day. What is left for people to add is taste and design.
In this age, slogging through mass-market, builder-grade software is utterly unnecessary.
Take ownership of your work by first taking ownership of your tools.
Custom work
What a project includes
The software
Designed and built for one business, around the way its work already runs: internal tools for the people who do the work, and apps for the customers who see it.
The skills
Every project ships with a suite of Claude Code skills that the business uses to maintain, update and improve its own software: change a price, add a field, rewrite an email.
Maintenance, if you want it
For owners who don't want even that, a maintenance subscription adds ongoing customer service.
Work
Selected work
Trip operations for a river outfitter
Trip menus, shopping lists, packing lists and a trip tracker in one system, replacing four attachments sent with every booking.
Cutroom
A fast, keyboard-first editor for cutting podcasts and interviews into chapters, highlight clips and a tighter episode.
Course builder
Builds a course on any subject for one learner: a placement exam first, then modules written to the level the learner placed at.