Case study 04
Shellby
A free, open-source Windows app we built ourselves: a pixel hermit crab that runs Claude Code on your own plan. Then we designed and built its website from a blank file — the real app on the first screen, well over a hundred features made readable, and perfect 100s for accessibility, best practices and SEO.
- Sector
- Developer tools, desktop software
- Starting point
- A blank file
- Shipped
- 2026
- Scope
- Design & build, from scratch
The starting point
A whole dev tool inside a desktop pet
We built Shellby, a free, open-source Windows app: a pixel hermit crab that runs the real Claude Code on the user's own Pro or Max plan, with parallel helper crabs, undo for any turn, and routines that start the moment a usage limit resets. It needed a home on the web that could explain all of that.
It also had two very different visitors to answer. One already lives in Claude Code and wants to know, in a line, whether anything about their setup changes — it doesn't; it is the real claude CLI and nothing has to be migrated. The other has never opened a terminal and sees a crab. The site had to win the first without losing the second to jargon.
And the product is big: ten areas and well over a hundred features. The obvious page was a feature list nobody finishes. The brief was the opposite — show the actual app on the first screen, let the depth open up as the visitor scrolls, and do it in the app's own pixel world rather than a software template.
Where it landed → see the live site
The first screen: the real panel, a trophy just unlocked, and the crab on the beach beneath it
Found on a phone, installed on a PC
Nobody installs a Windows app from a phone. Plenty find one there
A link in a chat, a post, a README opened on the train. So the phone gets the whole pitch in one column: the headline, the download, the three facts a Claude Code user checks first, then the real panel at a size a thumb can read, ready to install when they are back at a desk.
The whole thing, end to end
Every section, earned
Scroll the homepage top to bottom: how it works in three steps, why nothing has to be migrated, ten areas of features in a tabbed tour, the bug jar, the wardrobe, what it can do to your repo without asking, and the privacy promise.
What we measured
Real numbers, not adjectives
The live homepage, measured October 2026. These are genuine readings — no invented stats, ever.
- 94Performance
Google Lighthouse score, /100
Performance
Google's overall grade for how fast the page feels to load.
94 of 100 on mobile, in Google's green band — on a page that leads with a live, animated app panel.
- 100Accessibility
Google Lighthouse score, /100
Accessibility
How well the page works with a keyboard and a screen reader.
A perfect 100 — a pixel-art site that still reads cleanly without a mouse or a screen.
- 100Best Practices
Google Lighthouse score, /100
Best Practices
Google's check for security, correctness and modern web standards.
A perfect 100 — no console errors and no insecure requests, behind a strict content security policy.
- 100SEO
Google Lighthouse score, /100
SEO
How cleanly the page is structured for search engines to read.
A perfect 100 — findable from launch, with metadata and structure built in.
Measured with Google Lighthouse, mobile, median of five runs, October 2026. Run it yourself against the live site.
Shellby is our own product, not a client commission — we wrote the app, then built its website, and nobody paid for either. We show it because the site is live on its own domain and every figure on this page can be re-run against it.
What shipped
Everything every Harbor Tree build includes
- The real app on the first screen — the panel, a trophy unlocking and the crab on the beach — in the product's own pixel world
- A three-step “how it works” and a “nothing to migrate” block that answers a Claude Code user's first question in one line
- Ten feature areas in a tabbed tour, so well over a hundred features read as a walk-through rather than a list
- Plain answers to the questions a developer asks before installing anything: what it can do to a repo without asking, and what leaves the PC
- A strict content security policy: the page runs only its own scripts, styles and fonts, and cannot be framed by another site
- Perfect 100s for accessibility, best practices and SEO on mobile, with a 94 performance score
Start a project
Ready for a site that wins the job?
Tell us what you're working with. You'll get a plain-language reply — and if we're not the right fit, we'll say so and point you somewhere good.
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