Why it exists

In November 2024 we were running several client engagements at once. Each one arrived with its own channels and its own trackers: Slack here, Discord there, Jira on one project, Trello on the next, Notion and Confluence for whatever was left. No single tool was the problem. The switching was.

So we built a new tab page that put the working day in one place. It was an internal tool for about two months.

What we built

UniDeck replaces the browser new tab and also runs as a web app. You connect the tools you already pay for, then compose widgets that read across them: Jira, GitHub, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Trello, Linear, GitLab, Stripe, Toggl, and a long tail of others, now past a hundred.

Three pieces carry the product:

  • Integrations. A first-party connector per vendor, each with its own auth, rate limits, and failure modes.
  • Widgets. Composable views over one or more sources, wired up by someone who does not write code.
  • Workspaces. Shared boards with roles, so a team reads the same dashboard and an admin decides who sees what.

Launch, and the list we had not planned for

We launched on Product Hunt on 2 January 2025 and finished the day at #2 Product of the Day. A launch buys attention, not a product. What arrived with the attention was a list of requirements we had never built, because as our own only users we had never needed them.

Teams wanted their own internal endpoints sitting next to the vendor data, which became the API Hub. They wanted shared boards with roles, so collaboration and workspaces followed. Some wanted UniDeck inside their own product rather than beside it, which became a frontend SDK. And before any of it could be switched on at a company running Google Workspace, we had to pass CASA Tier 2, Google’s security assessment for applications that touch Workspace data. Most of that shipped in the beta on 2 July 2025.

The engineering constraint

A new tab page has an unusually short budget. It renders in the moment between the keyboard shortcut and the user starting to type, and every widget on it wants a network call. Nothing on the page can afford to wait for the slowest vendor.

Past a hundred integrations, the interesting failures are not ours. They are expired refresh tokens, rate limits that differ by plan, schemas that change without notice, and vendors having a bad afternoon. Every source is isolated so that one of them degrading cannot take the board with it. Nobody experiences a rate-limited API. They experience a dashboard that is quietly wrong, which is worse than one that is visibly down.

Where it stands

unideck.app runs in production as Chrome and Firefox extensions and as a web app. More than 10,000 teams use it, and it holds Google’s CASA Tier 2 certification. UniDeck is our own product rather than client work: client engagements pay for it, and it is where we make the architectural calls ourselves and then live with them.

What we learned

Building for yourself gets you a working first version fast, because you are the specification. It also hides everything a company will ask for. Roles, an API for internal data, an embeddable SDK, and a passed security review were all invisible from the inside, and all four decided whether UniDeck could be adopted rather than just liked.