Independent software studio · Texas
Software that keeps working when you’re not watching.
Stillwork Labs builds its own applications — designed, engineered, shipped and operated in one place. Not a demo, not a prototype: things that run every day on someone’s phone, and have to be right at 6 a.m. whether anyone is looking or not.
The name
Still water is the only water that reflects anything.
Most software shouts. It buzzes, it badges, it asks for your attention and calls that engagement.
We are interested in the other kind — the quiet work that sits underneath and simply holds. A thing that remembered what you said last Tuesday. A job that ran at 4 a.m. and nobody had to check. Software you notice mostly by the absence of a problem. That is the work we want to be doing, so we put it in the name.
What we’re building
We make our own products, and we run them ourselves.
Everything below is ours end to end — the idea, the app, the backend, the infrastructure it runs on and the support inbox. That means nowhere to pass the blame, which we consider a feature.
Softkeel
A voice-first accountability companion.
You talk to Softkeel like a person. It learns what matters to you, brings things up on its own, and holds you to what you said you’d do — with as much or as little push as you ask for. What it learns about you stays encrypted on your own device; we don’t keep a copy.
- Native Android app, offline-first, encrypted on-device store
- Python API and a scheduling service on Azure Container Apps
- Conversational AI, speech recognition and neural speech
Also on the bench
Two more are being built. Neither is finished and neither is for sale yet, so they are listed here as what they are — working code, not announcements.
VoltEstimate
Estimating for electrical contractors.
Photograph a blueprint and get the take-off done for you — a priced bill of materials and a labour estimate out the other end, standing on the job site rather than back at a desk. A person reviews every number before anything can be priced: the software can be confidently wrong, and a contractor’s bid is the last place to discover that.
- Android, Kotlin and Compose, offline-first
- AI vision for the take-off, human review mandatory
Reservoir automation
Hydroponic growing, unattended.
A controller and a companion app that run a vertical garden’s watering cycle, watch the water level and flow, and notice a fault days before the plants would show it. No cloud, no subscription and no account: it keeps its schedule with the internet down, the app closed and the phone in another room.
- ESP32 firmware plus an Android companion app
- Local-network control only — nothing leaves the house
What that takes
One studio, the whole stack.
A product that talks to you at breakfast touches nearly every layer there is. These are the ones we work in.
Mobile applications
Native Android in Kotlin — background work that survives the battery optimiser, alarms that actually fire, and a UI that stays honest about state.
Backends & APIs
Python services and PostgreSQL behind them. Scheduled and event-driven work that has to run correctly at a fixed hour, every day, unattended.
Cloud infrastructure
Containerised services on Microsoft Azure, private networking, and a build pipeline where every release is traceable to the commit that produced it.
Voice & applied AI
Large language models put to work on a real job, with speech recognition and neural speech either side. Conversation as the interface, not a chat box.
Privacy-first architecture
Systems designed so the sensitive data never reaches us in the first place. Encrypted at rest on the user’s own device, under a key we cannot hold.
Shipping and operating
The part most projects skip: releases, monitoring, logs you can read at 2 a.m., and a bug report that turns into a fix instead of a ticket.
How we work
Four things we’ve stopped arguing about.
Not a manifesto. Each of these is here because we learned it the expensive way.
Verified, or it isn’t done.
“It builds” is not evidence. A deployment once reported success at every step and shipped nothing at all — so now every release has to prove itself from the outside before anyone calls it done.
Privacy is architecture, not policy.
A promise about your data can be quietly reversed the day it becomes inconvenient. Where the data physically lives cannot. We would rather design a system that can’t betray you than write a page saying we won’t.
Guardrails, not good intentions.
If a rule genuinely must hold, it gets enforced in code and measured — not written down and hoped for. Anything important enough to say out loud is important enough to test.
Small and finished beats large and pending.
We are deliberately small, and we would rather do one thing properly than announce five. Nothing here is a mockup waiting for funding.
The company
A small studio, doing this properly.
Stillwork Labs LLC is an independent, self-funded software company based in Texas, United States.
We are not chasing a round or a headcount. The plan is unglamorous and deliberate: build things that are genuinely useful, keep them running, support the people using them, and grow at the speed that lets us keep doing all three.
- Legal entity Stillwork Labs LLC
- Formed 2026
- Jurisdiction Texas, USA
- Structure Independent, self-funded
- Shipped Softkeel
- In development Two further projects
- Contact support@stillworklabs.com
Say hello.
Questions about what we’re building, press, partnerships, or support for one of our products — it all reaches a real person at the same address.