Order flow doesn't need a desktop install. I put it in a tab

I trade ES and NQ every morning on a prop account and build the rest of the day. For a long stretch those two halves lived on different machines. Trading meant a desktop platform with an installer, a license welded to that box, and a data bundle billed through the vendor instead of direct. Building meant a browser with fifteen tabs. I stopped noticing the friction until I tried to work from a laptop and found half my trading setup didn't come with me.

That's the origin of FlowDeck. Not a market opportunity. A machine I couldn't leave.

Order flow tooling was built for one desk

You install a client. The license lives on the install. Your layouts live in a local config file you learn not to touch. Data comes bundled with the platform, so switching platforms means renegotiating your feed, and the feed is the one thing you can't afford to lose. The shape of the product assumes you sit at the same computer every day and that the vendor owns your relationship with exchange data.

Those assumptions were fair when a browser couldn't paint a live depth heatmap without falling over. Canvas plus typed arrays handles a full depth-of-market heatmap at tick rate now. The reason nobody moved order flow into a tab wasn't technical. The incumbents had no reason to rebuild something that already prints money.

So I built what I wanted to open in the morning: heatmap DOM, footprint charts, volume profile, CVD, reconstructed tape. One URL, layout intact, on whatever machine is in front of me.

Bring your own data

FlowDeck connects through your existing Rithmic or Tradovate account. I don't resell you a feed.

Three reasons. You already pay for that data, and paying twice for the same prints is a bad trade. Reselling data makes this a different company with different incentives, and I'd rather charge for the terminal than take a cut of the pipe. And adopting FlowDeck isn't a migration, it's a login. Nobody unwinds a broker relationship to try it, and nobody's feed goes dark because of something I shipped.

The tradeoff: I inherit whatever the broker API exposes. Depth granularity depends on your feed tier, not my code. A nicer UI doesn't fix that.

I'm the first user every morning

I've shipped around 50 products. The ones that lasted were tools I needed myself, and FlowDeck is the clearest example. The feedback loop runs about four hours. Something annoys me during the session, and Claude Code is my development team, so the fix goes out in the afternoon build block. No ticket, no sprint, no arguing priority with someone who has never watched liquidity pull.

The reconstructed tape exists for that reason. Raw prints don't tell you whether size came from one participant or a stack of small orders landing together, and I kept reading that wrong at the open. So it got built. Features I was certain about got cut after a week of trading with them on screen. Sitting in the seat is how I sort those two piles before shipping instead of after.

What a browser terminal can't do

If your edge lives in milliseconds, this isn't your tool. Click-trading a ladder to get filled inside the spread is a native-platform job, and a browser adds a layer between the click and the exchange that I'm not going to pretend away. Latency-sensitive scalping belongs in your broker's front end. I say that before someone signs up, not after.

FlowDeck is for reading the auction: where resting liquidity sits, when it pulls, whether delta confirms the move or fades it, which prices got rejected. That work happens over minutes, not microseconds, and a tab handles it. That's how I trade, so that's what I built. Claiming more range would produce a worse product and a churned user in month two.

Where it is now

Closed beta with a waitlist at flowdeck.us. The gate isn't scarcity marketing. A small group files bugs I can reproduce against my own feed, and they trade the same instruments I do, so the reports arrive with context instead of a screenshot.

Next is widening the beta once Tradovate has as many live session-hours on it as Rithmic. Nothing about the browser bet has made me want a second look at the desktop version. The install was never the product.