My Villages Life
A community dashboard for Villagers — district and CDD info, amenity reservations, local events, a pickleball finder, and what's on tonight at the squares. Live now, with real subscribers.
The Villages, Florida · Independent studio
Building practical tools for real-world problems.
Salt Bay Labs builds focused apps and tools — for product-compliance work and for everyday life here in The Villages. Two apps are in the stores today, and new ideas start in the lab and graduate when they earn it.
Small by design
Apps for Villages life
Tools for compliance work
About Salt Bay Labs
A small lab for useful ideas
I've spent years working around complex data, compliance, retailer programs, operations, and the messy handoffs that come with real work. Salt Bay Labs is where I can experiment with tools and ideas that make those problems a little easier to handle.
Notice the problem. Build something useful. Keep it simple.
That's the lane: practical software, grounded in real experience, built at a human scale.
The Villages base
A home base for the next chapter — work, life, golf carts, house projects, and the kind of everyday problems that spark useful ideas.
Operator instincts
Built by someone who has lived deadlines, exceptions, customer pressure, audits, spreadsheets, and the need to get clean answers quickly.
Human scale
Built and maintained carefully by one person — and in it for the long haul.
Builder mindset
Some ideas may become tools. Some may stay experiments. The common thread is solving problems in a practical way.
The apps
Apps for life in The Villages
Built for the way people actually live, drive, and play here. Both are free to download and try.
MVL CartNav
Golf-cart navigation for The Villages — cart-legal routes to town squares, recreation centers, gates, and tunnels, with CarPlay and Android Auto. Free to download and try.
Available tools
Tools that are already live
These tools are simple by design: paste data, upload a file, get clean output. They solve specific problems without turning the task into a project.
GTIN Lookup
Look up product GTINs one at a time, paste a list, or drop in a file. Results come back as clean Excel output.
NDC Lookup
Search and validate National Drug Codes quickly, with export-ready results for the work that needs to move.
PDF Tools
Compress and process PDFs in the browser. Drop in a file, get a cleaner result, keep rolling.
Seller Classification
Match products to marketplace classifications and reduce manual category hunting.
RxHazard
Pharmaceutical hazmat lookup for human Rx, OTC, and veterinary drugs — waste codes and DOT transportation data in one place.
In the lab
What I'm working on next
Every live app here started as an experiment. These are the ones in the workshop now — described honestly, at the stage they're actually at.
Experimenting
Villages golf scorecard
A simple scorecard and GPS app for Villages courses — front, center, and back distances plus round scoring, without the clutter of a national golf app.
Exploring
AI-Assisted Classification
Experiments around product classification, human review, rules, and AI support — aimed at reducing repetitive work while keeping judgment in the process.
Builder + operator
How I think about building
Salt Bay Labs is a small, independent studio, and it stays deliberately human in scale: useful software, built well, one thing at a time.
Then
Enterprise roots. Years inside enterprise compliance, retailer data, and operations — learning where work gets harder than it needs to be.
Now
Live products. Two apps in the stores — My Villages Life and MVL CartNav — alongside focused utilities for GTINs, NDCs, PDFs, and data cleanup.
Next
More for The Villages. A golf scorecard app is in the workshop, and the compliance utilities keep getting sharper.
Keep it useful
The tool should make the task easier. Clear input, clear output, and as little extra work as possible.
Respect the real workflow
Real work still runs through Excel, CSVs, PDFs, exports, and emails. Good tools meet people where they actually work.
Useful beats fancy
A small utility that saves time is worth building, even if it never becomes a big platform.
Open door
Got a problem worth solving?
If you run into the same kind of practical problem — messy data, a repetitive check, a workflow that takes longer than it should — I'm always interested in hearing about it.
frank@saltbaylabs.com →