Merle is a small studio in Denton, Texas. We design, build, and operate four products for people doing real work: IT teams, families, field crews, and concrete subcontractors.
| Product | For | Running since | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sally | IT teams that need a paper trail | Dec 2025 | Live, invite-only |
| HeyLudy | Families with a box of old photos | Jul 2026 | Live |
| Thang | Field crews and the office behind them | Apr 2026 | Live, by invitation |
| Barker | Concrete subcontractors pricing a pour | Mar 2026 | Live |
Software asset management for IT teams. Requests move through multi-stage approvals, every license and seat is tracked, CVE alerts land on the software you actually own, and the invoices sit next to the record.
For IT departments that have to answer “who approved this, and when?” Access is by invitation; the site has a waitlist.
Open sally.sh
Give a favorite photo a moment of life. HeyLudy adds gentle movement to a still picture: a smile, a blink, a breath. Watch one come alive on the site, no sign-up needed.
For families, and for anyone who keeps a shoebox of prints they never look at.
Open heyludy.io
Capture, tag, and search jobsite photos. Crews shoot on iOS or Android, the inbox suggests which project each photo belongs to, and the office searches by tag or by what is in the picture, runs coverage reports, and builds shot lists for the next visit.
For field crews and the managers who need the photo of that one wall, fast. Web and mobile, by invitation.
Open thang.merle.io
Takeoff and estimating for concrete subcontractors. Upload the plans, click to detect room boundaries, build assembly-based estimates from your own unit costs, and export a bid, all in the browser.
For estimators who are tired of doing it in a spreadsheet.
Open barker.merle.io
Simple by default. The fewest moving parts the problem allows. Complexity has to earn its place on the screen, and most of it doesn’t.
Written for tired people. Labels that read clearly on a bad day. Errors that say what to do next. Defaults that do the obvious thing so nobody has to think about them at 6 a.m.
Secure and ours to run. We operate what we ship. Private data stays private, and when something breaks, the pager rings at our house, not a vendor’s.
Email reaches the person who writes the code. No forms, no ticket queue, no autoresponder.