A studio for vision-driven web products.
Ikena (ee-KEH-nah) is Hawaiian for vision. A design-led software studio building AI-native web apps for commercial operators, industrial teams, the trades, and real estate — the people who keep everything moving. Affiliated with BlueWave Projects.
A web product is not a deliverable. It is a slow accumulation of intention — of features that know what they are for, of code that ages with grace, of interfaces that land the way they should.
Ikena begins every engagement the way it ends: with care, restraint, and an insistence that the work be worthy of the people who use it. Laulima — many hands, one build. We are a small studio by choice. Two engagements at a time. One standard.
Three deliberate phases. Nothing hurried.
A paid engagement.
Discovery is not a courtesy consultation. It is a billable professional service, earned from the first sketch. $5,000 — $15,000 depending on scope, credited toward the build.
Read more →Native code. AI-fluent. Owned.
Next.js, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Claude. Built in-house by hand, not stitched from no-code tools. Deployed to infrastructure you can keep, audit, or migrate. One point of accountability.
Six to twelve weeks. Done well.
Most engagements ship to production in six to twelve weeks. We commit to two active builds at a time — so yours gets the attention it was quoted.
Software, native — not stitched.
A few of the products we’ve shipped.
SaaS for general contractors.
Multi-tenant project management, AI scope generation, client portal, e-sign, invoicing — one platform replaces eight. Built for Hawaii GCs first, opening nationally.
The maritime compliance stack.
Crew credentials and USCG verification for operators running two to two hundred vessels — plus a dispatch board for marine pilot associations, harbor management, USCG exam prep, and an ARPA radar simulator. Five products, one spine.
Every parcel + building + address.
384,262 statewide TMK parcels, 239,458 Honolulu building footprints with real heights, 204,775 address points — encoded as TypeScript, served as a 3D map.
Who's building what, where.
403,747 Honolulu DPP building permits indexed by contractor, trade, and neighborhood across roughly 12,900 pages, refreshed nightly. A $79/month per-trade lead feed sits on top.
Find DPP's correction list before DPP does.
Upload a plan set, get every probable ROH §16, IBC, and Honolulu LUO violation back in 30 minutes — citation-anchored, with verbatim quoted code sections. $199 per pre-check at the founding rate, $499 per variance package, $599/mo firm seat.
LiDAR scans, native.
iOS measuring app on Apple's RoomPlan + Object Capture. Scan a room and it becomes material takeoffs, square footage, blueprints, and a quote. No Polycam wrapper. No subscription tax.
Hawaiʻi STR compliance, all four counties.
TVR / STRH / NUC / STVR permits, GE Tax, TAT and county TAT in one calendar per property, with reminders at 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 day. An AI document classifier reads the dates off your permit PDF.
Know the risk before your broker does.
A one-page brief for any Hawaii address: lava zone, FEMA flood, tsunami evacuation, hurricane wind, wildfire risk, base flood elevation, roof age, carrier availability. Three fields free, full brief $19.
Prevailing wage, decoded and done.
Paste a public-works solicitation and get the governing regime — Davis-Bacon or Hawaiʻi Chapter 104 — the classifications, the base-and-fringe split, and the overtime traps. Then the weekly WH-347 or Chapter 104 payroll.
Weekly briefs for Hawaii homeowners.
A subscription that keeps an eye on your parcel and your neighborhood: permits, sales, listings, market shifts. Curated weekly, sent every Wednesday morning. $15/mo.
Off-market signals for Hawaii real estate.
Founding-member tiers for investors and brokers who want the early read: distressed parcels, off-market opportunities, permit anomalies, ownership changes. Built on hawaii-as-code.
Hawaii land stewardship, TMK-anchored.
Property intelligence meets cultural context — parcel detail, land history, and a 3D geospatial layer on the same GIS stack as hawaii-as-code. Native iOS with Sign in with Apple.
Field notes, in long form.
Backfilling a 1,927-listing directory from other people's metadata
We filled in images, logos, and descriptions across an entire Hawaii business directory by reading each business's own published og: tags. Site-wide the image coverage went from 175 listings to 689 and 432 listings crossed the quality gate. Here are the numbers, the pipeline, and the four traps that cost the most time.
Davis-Bacon vs. Hawaiʻi Chapter 104: the overtime math that creates back-wage findings
Hawaiʻi's prevailing wage law and the federal Davis-Bacon Act compute overtime differently — different triggers, and a different base. A sub who learned one and applies it to the other either underpays or overbids. Here is the actual math, worked on real wage-determination numbers, plus how to tell which regime governs your job.
Five products, one maritime spine
Binnacle started as crew credential tracking and turned into five products — fleet compliance, a pilot association dispatch board, harbor management, USCG exam prep, and an ARPA radar simulator. Why they share a data model, and why the regulated middle of an industry is a better place to build than the consumer edge.
Currently accepting design engagements for Q4 2026 – Q1 2027 builds.
If you are building a web product of consequence, we invite you to introduce yourself.
Begin a design engagement →