About
Zenkoro Labs is a product studio. Design and engineering are one job here, and that is a decision about maintenance rather than about collaboration.
Recognition
What usually happens
A design is approved, and then the build reinterprets it. Not in a decision anyone objected to — in the small ones nobody escalated. What ships is a cousin of what was signed off, and nobody in the room can say where it changed.
Or the prototype is beautiful and the number to build it arrives afterwards, because the people who drew it were never asked what it would cost to make.
Then the work is delivered. You own the files. Changing a sentence on a page still means finding someone who will do it, and waiting.
Insight
Why we are arranged this way
We came to this from engineering, which is where the bill for a design arrives. The cost of software is in the keeping, not the making. A project pays for finishing. Nobody pays for the years afterwards, so nobody designs for them.
A designer who has never maintained anything specifies things that are expensive to keep alive, and never finds out. A studio that only builds has no reason to notice.
Design and engineering being one job here follows from that. It is the only arrangement in which the person who draws a thing has to live with it.
Commitment
What it costs us
We don't design what we can't build. That rules out the most impressive version of most pitches, and it is why the estimate arrives with the drawing rather than afterwards.
A dependency added to save a day is borrowed against every upgrade for as long as the thing runs, at an interest rate nobody quotes. We don't take that trade. Accessibility gets the same answer: a phase at the end is a phase that gets cut, so it isn't one.
And nothing we hand over should need us in order to keep working. That is revenue we are choosing not to have, and it is the only version of ownership that means anything.
Place
Where we are
Zenkoro Labs Inc. is a Canadian company, incorporated in 2025.
The studio takes client work and builds its own products. Parsley is the first of the products: an AI cookbook app, in development.
If you are about to commission something you will have to live with, tell us what it is.