TalaStack LLC · Michigan
Software for the things people do off the clock.
We design and build full-stack web and native mobile applications: the kind that answer a real question for someone with a hobby, a boat, a camera or a reef tank. Everything we ship works without a signal and without an account.
Products
Four apps, one idea underneath.
Each one takes a question somebody actually asks. How much should I dose, will the sun clear that ridge, why do I catch more on some days, what am I still carrying at midnight. Then it answers with the plainest machinery that will do the job.
Now building
ReefChronicles
In developmentiPhone · Reef aquariums
Every reefer eventually asks how much they need to dose per day, and the answer is a regression over their own test history minus the doses they logged. ReefChronicles runs it: a median over three weeks of intervals, scaled by the tank’s real water volume, capped at what corals can absorb in a day. The chemistry is derived from molar mass rather than a brand, and all of it runs on the phone.
Read more
MindStack
In developmentWeb · Built with a partner
A structured shutdown for the end of the day. Rate the mental load, empty out the open loops, then sort each one into Tomorrow, Later or Release, and get the Tomorrow pile handed back in the morning. The point is to stop carrying the list in your head overnight.
In design
TideMark
In designiOS & Android · Fishing
A catch log that freezes the conditions onto every fish at the moment you log it: tide state, barometric trend, moon phase, water temperature. A season later it can tell you, from your own history, which of those actually correlates with your catches.
Ephemera
In designiOS & Android · Photography
A planner for landscape and astro photographers. Other tools give you sunrise for a flat horizon at sea level. This one samples the elevation model along every azimuth and tells you when the sun actually clears the ridge, often forty minutes later.
Both are specified and not yet built. No dates, and nothing on this page is available to buy.
How we work
Four rules we don’t break.
They are the reason the apps behave the same way, and the reason they cost what they cost.
- 01
Offline is the product, not a feature
The mobile apps get used on a boat, on a ridgeline before dawn, in a basement fish room. All of those are places without a signal. Every calculation runs locally and every network call has a working cached path before it ships.
- 02
The math runs on your device
Celestial mechanics, terrain geometry, water chemistry, statistics over your own history: none of it needs a server. That keeps answers instant, keeps your data on your phone, and keeps our marginal cost per user near zero, which is why we can charge a fair price and keep it there.
- 03
Public data over vendor lock-in
NOAA, the National Weather Service, USGS, Copernicus, OpenStreetMap. Free, keyless, public-domain sources with no contract that can be repriced under us. Where a licence asks for attribution, we give it in the app.
- 04
Private by default, and we mean it
No social feeds. No leaderboards. No advertising SDKs, and nothing sold or shared with data brokers. Your fishing spots, your scouting locations, your tank and what you write down at the end of the day are yours. Where an app can work without an account at all, it does.
Contact
Talk to us.
We also take on full-stack web and mobile work for other people. If you have something that needs building, or you use one of our apps and something is wrong, write to us and a person will answer.