About Roost
Roost was founded in 2013 by James Olander, an engineer based in Denver, Colorado, who designed the original stand to solve his own back and neck pain from working hunched over a laptop. He spent roughly six months of nights and weekends developing the first prototype before launching it on Kickstarter, where it raised $190,000 from 2,500 backers against a $9,500 goal — a campaign that drew a TechCrunch feature in its final days. The company is still headquartered in Denver's RiNo District today.
The lineup has stayed deliberately narrow: Roost makes one laptop stand, refined across three generations, rather than expanding into an accessories catalog. The current Roost V3 folds to a 6-ounce, 13-inch strip that fits a laptop sleeve's front pocket, adjusts across seven height settings from 6.5 to 12.5 inches, and is built using the kind of high-precision manufacturing methods — laser cutting, hard anodizing — more common to aerospace and medical hardware than desk accessories. It ships with a 90-day money-back guarantee direct from the manufacturer.
Brand website: therooststand.com
What Roost makes
Roost's range runs wider than the products we review. The lines we know best from our own testing are marked with a star:
Roost V3
the original — 6 oz, folds to 13", 6.5-12.5" height range — featured on DeskRated
Roost V3 Plus - Dune
premium finish variant, light neutral colorway
Roost V3 Plus - Onyx
premium finish variant, dark colorway
Why we recognized Roost
The DeskRated Top Brand recognition isn't paid for and can't be applied for. We award it to the brands whose products consistently stand out in our hands-on category reviews. Roost earned it on the strength of the products below, evaluated the same way every product on this site is: bought, used at a real desk, and judged on merit.
Roost products we rated highly
Roost V3 Laptop Stand
Folds to a 13-inch x 1.4-inch x 1.4-inch profile weighing 6 ounces — the only stand we tested slim enough for a laptop sleeve's front pocket. Its 6.5 to 12.5 inch height range is the widest we tested, and the high-stiffness polymer truss frame resists the metal flex and vibration transfer common to lighter travel stands. PivotGrip arms fit laptops from 12 to 18 inches with no-tools setup in under 30 seconds.
Read the 8 Best Laptop Stands of 2026 guide →What earned Roost the recognition
- The widest height-adjustment range of any stand we tested (6.5 to 12.5 inches), covering seated eye levels that fixed-height stands at 5.9 to 6 inches can't reach.
- Folds to 6 ounces and roughly the size of a pen case — the only stand we tested built specifically around laptop-sleeve portability.
- PivotGrip arms accommodate a 12 to 18 inch laptop range without size-specific configuration or tools.
- Backed by a direct 90-day money-back guarantee from the manufacturer.
- A single, three-generation-refined product line rather than a sprawling catalog — the V3 is the distillation of over a decade building one thing.