About the studio

A small studio, thirty-five apps.

Lumen Labs is a small independent iOS studio. We build apps for specific, underserved people — NRI families, women going through perimenopause, households clawing out of debt, parents at 3am. We don't chase mass-market categories because we don't need to: a quiet niche served well is a better business than a loud one served generically.

How a tiny team covers this much surface

An AI-assisted pipeline, a ruthless niche focus, and shared infrastructure.

A small team shouldn't be able to ship thirty-five apps. We do it because the repetitive parts — boilerplate scaffolding, HealthKit permission prompts, RevenueCat wiring, release notes, App Store metadata, first-pass mockups — happen in an AI-assisted pipeline we've been tuning for a year.

What the humans do: pick the niche, design the core interaction, code-review everything, write the copy, answer every support email. What the pipeline does: the rest.

The apps share a design system, a privacy posture, a payment stack, and a voice. We're not assembling a portfolio of unrelated bets — we're running one studio that ships often.

Who we build for

The people big studios treat as rounding errors.

NRI families · 8 apps
The diaspora needs more than Google Translate and a WhatsApp group.
Fasting schedules that fit 9pm Indian dinners. Remittance ledgers for CPAs. A care-coordination app so you can check on your parents in Pune from Seattle.
Perimenopause & women's health · 1 apps
Built from hot flashes and HRT — not a 28-day cycle wheel.
Period apps retrofit menopause as an afterthought. We started where the 10-year arc actually begins: symptoms, sleep, and a doctor-ready report.
Debt-stressed households · 3 apps
The most anti-subscription cohort on the App Store.
You shouldn't have to rent a debt payoff tracker for $15/month. Pay once, get out, delete the app.
New parents at 3am · 4 apps
Dark mode, one-handed, honestly priced.
Huckleberry is $99/yr to sleep-deprived parents. We think $29.99 gets the job done — plus a read-only free tier you can actually use.
Quiet-faith practitioners · 3 apps
A companion, not a platform.
For people whose practice is daily and quiet — prayer, scripture, pranayama, sit with a verse. No feeds, no streaks gaming your guilt.
Pet households · 5 apps
Records, training, and the occasional bit of silliness.
A private vet vault. Training programs that don't upsell. And yes, an app that translates barks — we're not entirely serious about everything.

How we price

One-time where it fits. Subscriptions only when they're earned.

A hydration tracker is a one-time purchase. So is a debt payoff app. So is a pet health vault. Charging $5/month for software that gets feature-complete in version 1.2 is a design problem wearing a pricing costume.

We use subscriptions when the product has genuine ongoing value — new content, server costs, meaningful updates. Where we use them, we also offer a lifetime price, because some customers want to pay once and be done. We let them.

We under-price our direct competitors on purpose. Not as a growth hack — because we think most App Store pricing is a quiet insult to the customer.

The six things

Fundamentals we're not going to argue about.

One-time pricing, wherever it fits.

Subscriptions are for software you keep updating every week. A debt payoff tracker, a hydration log, a journal — pay once, use forever. We only use subscriptions when the product genuinely earns them.

Privacy-first, by architecture.

HealthKit stays on-device. No analytics pixels. No accounts unless the product literally can't work without them. We can't leak a database we never built.

Apple-native, not cross-platform shortcuts.

SwiftUI, HealthKit, WidgetKit, App Intents. Our apps should feel like they belong on the phone they run on — not like a web app in a wrapper.

Finish small, then ship.

We'd rather nail one niche completely than chase a mass-market half-thing. Every app here starts with a specific person we know, then widens.

No VC, no growth hacks.

We charge a fair price for real value. No referral ladders, no streak-shaming, no dark patterns to goose retention. If the app stops being useful, please delete it.

AI-assisted pipeline lets a small team do a large team's work.

Mockups, scaffolding, copy drafts, release notes — AI handles the repetitive parts so the human hours go to design, code review, and the details that matter.

What we won't do

A short list, held firmly.

No third-party tracking. No pixels, no user-level analytics, no data brokers. We'd rather measure success in App Store reviews than in cohort charts.
No ads inside the app. You pay (or don't — our free tiers are honest), and you get the app. We don't sell your attention to a second party.
No subscription for features that should be one-time. Hydration log, debt tracker, pet vault, hydration reminders — these aren't SaaS. Pay once.
No dark patterns. Cancel in one tap. No "are you sure?" × 6. No streak-shaming to goose DAU. Delete the app without guilt.
No AI-training on your data. What lives on your device stays there. Where we use AI features on-server, we say so — clearly, on the purchase screen.

Contact

Come say hello.

Questions, feedback, or a quiet tip about a niche we should look at — we read every message.

[email protected]

The studio, legally

Operated by NOVA-LUMEN LABS LLP, registered in Karnataka, India.

Legal entity: NOVA-LUMEN LABS LLP (trading as Lumen Labs)
LLPIN: ACW-8836
Registered office: Plot No 10/A, Rail Nagar, Belgaum, Karnataka 590001, India
Correspondence: [email protected]

The dispatch

A dispatch from the studio.

One short letter every few weeks. What we launched, what we cut, what we learned. No tracking pixels. Unsubscribe in one click.

We collect your email address only to send you this dispatch. We never sell it, and you can unsubscribe anytime. See our Privacy Policy.