Built the desktop app we wanted to exist, then gave it away.

About

Ship Studio is a free, open source desktop app for agentic development. The agent, the live preview, the visual editor, version control, and deployment sit in one window, on your own machine.

Native designed it, built it, and still maintains it. It is also what Native works in every day: every other case study on this site was built in it.

The challenge

For years both of Native's founders sold Webflow. Not reluctantly: they taught it, recommended it to clients, and built businesses on it. It was the right tool for its time.

Then the ground moved. Agentic development arrived, and a ceiling that had always been theoretical became a daily cost. Work an agent could finish in minutes still had to be rebuilt by hand inside a closed platform, because the platform owned the code. The honest conclusion was an uncomfortable one: the tool a lot of people had built careers on was no longer the tool the work needed.

That leaves a specific problem, and it is not really a software problem. Every freelancer and small studio in that position was being asked to jump to a terminal-shaped workflow that throws away the thing they were good at, which is judgment about how something should look and behave. The choice on offer was a closed builder that would not let an agent near the code, or an editor that assumed you never wanted a visual canvas in the first place.

The solution

Native built the third option, and built it as a product rather than as an internal tool.

Ship Studio puts the whole loop in one window: the agent working on the left, the live site in the middle, and an edit panel on the right that changes real CSS in the real files. That last part carries more weight than it sounds like it does. Selecting an element and adjusting it does not call a model and does not spend credits, because nothing about it needs a model. It is a designer touching code directly, which leaves the agent free for the work that actually needs one.

Around that sits the rest of the job: version control, branches, the dev server, and a deploy, without leaving the app or opening a terminal to do any of it.

The architecture is a position, not a feature list. Ship Studio is not a host, a site builder, an agent, or an AI provider. You bring your own agent, your own hosting, and your own GitHub account, and the code sits on your machine and in your repos rather than on anyone's servers. Stop using the app and nothing breaks, because there is nothing to be locked out of. Native sells services, not seats, so it has no reason to build the lock-in a platform company would be obliged to build.

It is free, open source, and has no paid tier planned. Native funds it.

The review loop is the part that surprised people. A comment is pinned to an element on the live page, the way a client would point at it in a call, and the panel behind it turns the pin into instructions for the agent with as much surrounding context as the job needs. The person leaving the note does not have to describe where they mean.

And a project can start from a URL. Point it at a site that already exists, choose the stack you want to own it in, and the rebuild runs as a sequence with the original held alongside as the reference. That is the Webflow exit from the other end: not a promise that migration is easy, but a tool that treats the old site as the spec.

The results

Ship Studio is live at ship.studio, and the clearest evidence that it works is that it is not a demo. Native builds client work in it. The Trase case study next to this one was built in Ship Studio, and the product shot on Ship Studio's own homepage happens to be the Trase site open in the editor.

Over three thousand freelancers and agencies now build on it, and a striking number of them arrived from exactly where the founders did.