Your data is never the product
No advertising networks, no analytics brokers, no data sold or shared with anyone for any purpose. There is no version of this business that involves your family's spending or health details being a product.
About
A one-person studio in Sydney
Minato Studio builds travel apps for the awkward, real version of a family trip, the one with three generations, several currencies and a toddler who naps at two.
Why these apps exist
Every one of these started the same way: a spreadsheet that wasn't coping, on a trip that was already underway.
Working out how much of her own money a nine-year-old had left, when some of it came from one grandparent in Australian dollars and some from another in yen, turned out to be something no expense app was interested in solving. Neither was the question of whether a day that suited the adults would quietly destroy the youngest and oldest people in the group.
These aren't gaps in the market because nobody thought of them. They're gaps because they're small, unglamorous, and belong to families rather than to business travellers.
What the studio is
One developer. No funding, no investors, no growth targets. That shapes the work more than any design philosophy would: there is no budget for a feature that only mostly works, and no team to maintain one.
So the apps stay small and get finished. Each does one thing that was genuinely hard to do before, and stops there.
Commitments
What you can rely on
These are constraints the apps are built inside, not aspirations for later.
Your data leaves whenever you want
Export to CSV, Excel, PDF or JSON depending on the app. Always, from the first release, without a paid tier standing in front of it.
Offline is the default
These get used where there is no signal. Nothing that matters is allowed to depend on a network being there.
No advice we aren't qualified to give
TabiPace shifts medication times between time zones and does nothing else with them. It will never suggest a dose or a change. That's a question for a doctor, and the app says so plainly.
The name
港 · minato
Minato is Japanese for harbour, where a journey starts, and the thing you're relieved to see at the end of one. Tabi (旅), the prefix each app shares, is the journey itself.
It's not a coincidence that all three apps are named for the trip rather than for the feature. The feature is never the point. Getting a family out the door and safely home again is.