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Wheelhouz

About Wheelhouz

A small software company that owns what it operates.

Story

Wheelhouz is the operating name of Merkato LLC, formed in 2018. The Wheelhouz name was registered in 2023, when the company's focus settled on building and running its own software products.

Our products come from first-hand experience in the markets they serve. BHQ, an operations system for building service contractors, has been built in-house since 2025 around the day-to-day work of running accounts and locations, work orders, service logs, crews, and supply requests. Discount Hunt, a promotions app for Shopify merchants, joined Wheelhouz in December 2024 and has been operated by us since.

We keep the company small on purpose. Every product is run by the people who build it, and the same team answers support, ships releases, and keeps the infrastructure up.

People

We are a small team with more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry, including engineering and product roles at major technology firms. That background shapes how we work: durable systems over quick demos, and operations treated as part of the product rather than an afterthought.

Open source

Tools that are useful outside our products are released under the Wheelhouz name on GitHub.

  • Open Brain (MIT). A self-hosted personal knowledge base. Drop in a note, link, or snippet; Open Brain embeds it, extracts metadata with an LLM, and stores it in PostgreSQL with pgvector for semantic search, topic browsing, and chat over your own notes. Ships an MCP server.