We got tired of replanning by hand.

The problem we kept hitting

Both founders have spent years running small teams — agencies, in-house product squads, freelance studios. We've used Asana. We've used Jira. We've used Linear, Notion, ClickUp, Trello, Monday, and the back of three different envelopes. Each one solves part of the problem. None of them solve all of it.

The pattern was always the same. We'd set up a plan on Monday. By Wednesday two cards had moved. By Friday the plan was wrong. We'd spend a chunk of Friday afternoon redoing the dates. By the next Monday we'd stop trusting the plan and start running on memory and Slack. The tool became a place where work was logged, not a place where work was planned.

And clients made it worse. Most tools charge per user, including viewers. So our clients either didn't see the plan at all, or we paid extra so they could read-only it. Neither was good. The clients who couldn't see the plan asked for status updates every Friday. The clients who could see it didn't use it because it was always out of date.

We wanted a tool that did three specific things. The schedule should maintain itself. The time guesses should come from past work, not gut. And clients should be able to see what they need to see without paying. We couldn't find one, so we built one.

Why nautical?

The metaphor came before the name. Tides shift everything in their range, not just what you're looking at — that's the cascade replan we were trying to describe. Currents run beneath the surface and determine speed — that's the critical path. Anchors are points that don't move. Lines tie things together. Once we started using the words, the product got opinionated, and we stopped having to explain abstract concepts in every demo.

People ask if we're trying to be cute. We're not. Vocabulary shapes how people think. The Spotify model gave engineering "squads" and a whole industry changed how it organised itself. Toyota gave manufacturing "kanban" and an idea travelled the world. We're not claiming we'll do that. But we picked words that mean something. "In Tow" tells you a card is being towed by another. "Adrift" tells you a card has stalled. "Open Water" tells you a card is committed but not yet being worked on. The words do work that "To Do, Doing, Done" never could.

For teams who don't want maritime, we ship a minimal column template with the same state machine and standard names. The names are the affordance; the states are the system.

How we're funded

Narcove is built and operated by OYNK Ltd, a UK-based digital studio in Northamptonshire. Self-funded by the founders. No venture capital, no growth-or-die deadlines, no obligation to triple revenue every twelve months whether or not it makes sense. We're a small UK company building software the way people used to build it: fewer features, done well; a price you can predict; a person who answers the email.

That's not a marketing line. It changes what we ship. We don't add features to fill a quarter. We don't introduce arbitrary plan tiers to push upgrades. We don't buy customers with discounts and then put the price up. The price stays where it is. The free tier stays free. The features we add are ones we use ourselves.

Where we are and where your data lives

We're based in the UK with a distributed team. The product is hosted in EU datacentres with a backup in the UK. Customer data stays in the EU and is backed up daily. We follow UK GDPR and ICO guidance. We don't sell data, we don't train AI models on your work, and we don't share with third parties beyond what's needed to keep the service running (Stripe for billing, Anthropic for the AI features themselves, with no retention).

If you're a Team customer needing data residency, SOC 2 reports, or a signed DPA, get in touch. We do these as part of normal sales conversations and don't treat them as expensive add-ons.

What we won't do

We won't bolt on a chatbot for the sake of looking AI-first. The AI we shipped — honest time guesses and Plan-with-AI — does specific work. Each one shows you a diff before changing anything. We won't add a generic AI assistant that types tasks for you in a sidebar. That's theatre.

We won't charge for public viewers. People watching the work shouldn't cost the people doing the work money. This is a hill we'll keep dying on.

We won't sell upgrades by hiding basic features. Bank holiday handling, keyboard navigation, accessibility — these aren't paid features and they never will be. The free tier and the Team tier respect the same UK bank holidays and the same WCAG contrast targets.

We won't move fast and break your data. Migrations are versioned and tested. Schema changes are backwards-compatible until they aren't safe to be. We'd rather be a bit slower and never lose your work.

Say hello

We answer email. Contact us, ask anything, complain about something — we read it. Or start a free project and let the tool make the case for itself. Both work.

If you're building something similar, or considering switching from a tool you've outgrown, we'd like to hear about it. Even if Narcove isn't the answer, the conversation usually helps.