About Earth Shack Software
Who We Are
The Earth Shack Software LLC is an independent software developer focused on clear, dependable tools for people who value useful information without unnecessary complexity.
We build local-first software designed to be straightforward to run, understandable to use, and respectful of the user's control over their own working environment and data.
Our Mission
We build software for users who value clarity, reliability, awareness, and direct control over the tools they use.
Our products are designed to make important information easier to see, organize, track, and understand — whether monitoring conditions on and above the Earth or maintaining a clear view of a personal investment portfolio.
Our goal is simple: build practical, focused software that provides useful information without requiring a sprawling cloud platform, subscription ecosystem, or complicated installation process.
What We Build
Earth Shack Software products are organized around two primary software families:
- Situational Awareness — tools designed to help users maintain a clear view of changing environmental, orbital, space-weather, propagation, and related conditions.
- Personal Tools — local-first tools designed to help users organize, track, analyze, and understand information that matters in their own daily environment.
Current Earth Shack Software products include Sentinel, Guardian, and Vestrus.
Each application is built around a focused job rather than an attempt to become an all-purpose platform.
Situational Awareness
Our Situational Awareness products are built for users who want important changing conditions visible in a persistent, readable workspace.
Sentinel focuses on Earth and orbital awareness, combining information such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tectonic context, grayline, satellites, weather, and related environmental information.
Guardian focuses on the signal environment, combining space weather, geomagnetic conditions, HF propagation context, satellite tracking, and related station information.
The two products serve different primary missions and may be used independently or together when a broader operational picture is useful.
Personal Tool
Our Personal Tool products are built around practical personal visibility: information that benefits from being organized, understandable, and close at hand without requiring the user to surrender control to a cloud platform.
Vestrus is our local-first portfolio tracker for self-directed investors. It provides portfolio and account records, transactions, charts, gain/loss analysis, reporting, reconciliation, Wealth Outlook, and user-managed backup and restore.
The Personal Tool approach emphasizes direct ownership of the working environment, focused functionality, local data where practical, and tools that work for the user rather than requiring the user to reorganize around the software.
Local-First by Design
A central principle of Earth Shack Software is that useful desktop software should not automatically require a cloud account, recurring subscription, remote database, or traditional installation process.
Current Earth Shack Software applications are delivered as self-contained HTML applications that run in a modern browser. Where an application maintains user-created information, that working data remains local to the user's browser environment unless the user deliberately exports, imports, or otherwise shares it.
Internet connectivity is still used where a product needs live external information such as weather, environmental conditions, orbital data, space weather, market information, or news. Those external sources remain subject to their own availability and terms.
How We Build
Our work is guided by a few practical principles:
- Clarity — information should be easier to understand after it enters the application, not harder.
- Practical usefulness — features should have a reason to exist and support the job the product was built to do.
- Local-first design — where practical, user-created information should remain on the user's computer and under the user's control.
- Reliability — applications should handle unavailable feeds, interrupted connectivity, and incomplete external data gracefully.
- Transparency — important dependencies, third-party information sources, product limitations, and operating boundaries should be disclosed clearly.
- Simplicity — we avoid unnecessary accounts, dependencies, installation layers, and recurring service requirements wherever practical.
Software You Control
Earth Shack Software is built for users who prefer ownership, simplicity, and direct control over their tools.
That means buying focused software with its important capabilities already built in, keeping your working environment close at hand, and using online services only where they provide useful external information.
We believe software should remain useful because it solves a problem well — not because it continually demands another account, service, or subscription.
Responsible Use
Earth Shack Software products are information, recordkeeping, visualization, and awareness tools. They are not substitutes for official agencies, emergency alerts, professional advice, brokerage records, financial advice, legal advice, weather warnings, or safety-critical systems.
Where a product displays weather, hazard, market, orbital, geospatial, space-weather, or other third-party information, that information should be used as context and awareness rather than as the sole basis for a safety-critical, financial, legal, or emergency decision.
Transparency & Attribution
Earth Shack Software uses public, publicly available, and appropriately licensed data sources and software components where applicable. Relevant third-party services, software, and data sources are identified in our product documentation and notices.
→ Third-Party Notices & Data Credits
Contact
Questions about Earth Shack Software, our products, purchasing, or support are welcome.