01
The name
The studio is named for Sand Point, in Huron County, on the Saginaw Bay side of Michigan's thumb. It is a quiet point on a big lake, which is roughly how we think of the work.
About the studio
Built to keep.
Careful by habit.
Sand Point Studios is an independent software company in Michigan. We design, write and run our own products, from grading tools used in college courses to a euchre game for the kitchen table, and we build alongside other companies when the fit is right.
02
Who we are
The studio started as one person building tools for their own work and teaching. Our founder spent ten years in IT, then twelve in public accounting advising businesses on technology and risk, and has spent the last seven teaching in a nationally ranked business school while building this company. It is now a bench of engineers, analysts and operators, and the people who design a product are the people who answer its email.
They did not all arrive from software. Between them they have closed books in public accounting, taught and run programs in higher education, shipped systems in industry, worked a trade, and sold in more than one country and more than one language. We are not all wired the same way either: a cluttered screen or a setting buried three menus down costs some of us real time, and part of this group's working life has been spent inside organizations built around employing people with documented disabilities. It is why accessibility here is tested rather than asserted, and why an estimating tool reviewed by an estimator asks better questions than one reviewed by developers alone.
Most of our first products were written because we needed them ourselves: a grading tool for a course being taught that term, a ledger for our own books. That is still how we design — starting from the way the work is actually done, rather than the way software usually does it.
Sand Point Studios LLC is a Michigan limited liability company. A division may trade under its own name; it is the same company either way, so you deal with one contract and one inbox.
03
How we work
- We pick the AI for the job.
- We are not tied to one AI provider. New models are tried on our own machines first, then measured against the hosted ones, and each part of a product uses whichever came out best for that job. The products themselves run in the cloud, where you would expect them to be.
- Software proposes. People decide.
- Where AI is involved in a judgement, like a grade, a ledger entry or a ticket reply, a person reviews it before it counts.
- We say what state things are in.
- Every product page says whether a thing is available, in beta, in a pilot or still being built. We would rather lose a sale than be caught describing something that does not exist.
- We use most of what we make.
- Our books, our hours, our support desk and our course material all run on software we wrote. If it annoys us, it gets fixed. Much of what we build is designed and tested by the people who do the work — instructors, estimators, bookkeepers — not only by engineers. AI is what makes that practical: a specialist can ask for a change and see it working the same day.
- We do not rebuild what already works.
- A product should be interesting where it is useful and dull everywhere else. We reach for the ordinary, well-understood way of doing a thing first, and spend the invention on the part a customer actually notices.
04
Four divisions
Everything we make is built for one of four kinds of people.
- Education Grading, advising and tutoring software for college courses. 5 products →
- Consumer Apps for the kitchen, the calendar, the workshop and the living room. 5 products →
- Commercial Software for running a business: estimates, books, hours, rentals and the road. 5 products →
- Entertainment Games for the table, with friends in the room or across the country. 2 products →
05
Who we build alongside
Some products belong to joint ventures with people who know an industry better than we do. They own the business; we are the development partner.
- OneCut Studios LLC OneCut Shop: Forty-five shop tools for woodworkers, and it works without WiFi.
- FinishOps LLC FinishOps: Estimates, bids and schedules for painting and finishing contractors.
06
Working with us
We take on custom work when it fits: a department that wants a tool built around how it actually teaches, or a business whose process lives in spreadsheets and phone calls.
We also make films and explainers about how AI works, on our YouTube channel. Generated media and animation grew out of that work — title sequences, product films and animated course material — and we take it on as commissioned work.