Made by a studio, for studios

A design studio runs on a stack of tools that were each built for somebody else: a CRM for sales teams, invoicing for accountants, scheduling for everyone, and a spreadsheet to hold it together. Every studio we know has the same workarounds, and they all leak the same way: a proposal that does not match the invoice, a contractor booked at the wrong rate, a Tuesday double-booked.

We built Millstone to run Farside, and then kept building it because the things a studio needs turned out to be specific and few. Retainers that roll. Invoices in the currency you quoted in, numbered for the client. Contractors at their agreed rate, with the agreement signed before the work starts. A client portal you would actually send someone to.

That is also its limit, and we would rather say so here than have you find out. It is built from one studio’s actual practice rather than from a category, which will suit some studios much better than others. It is in early access for that reason: places open a few studios at a time, each one onboarded personally, and if it is not for you we will say so.

The question everyone asks next is whether it will still be here in a year, so: Millstone is one person’s work, not a funded company with a team behind it. What it has instead is a studio that runs on it every working day, and a bill small enough that the studio’s own client work pays for it, so there is no investor who can decide to close it and no runway to reach. That is not a promise, because nobody honest can make one about a year away. What we can promise is the thing that would actually protect you if we were wrong: your records come out as spreadsheets, on your own account, whenever you want them and without asking anyone. Clients, people, projects, deliverables, time, costs, invoices and proposals, in one archive.