Faimily

It reads
the fridge.

Forward the school email. It pulls out the dates, asks you once whether it got them right, and puts the day on the fridge.

Ben's karate and Ana's dance
are both at six.
Dana was down to drive both.

You used to find that out
at six. Now you find it out
on Sunday.

Elmwood P.S. — Fall Newsletter Dance club starts Thursday Sept 10, 6.30pm in the gym. Ana is registered. Please send indoor shoes.

Picture day is Tuesday the 15th, arrive by 8:45am.

As always, Nan is welcome to do the Tuesday pickups.
me and ben
Thursday, 6:04 pm Fraser
THEN  7:00 pm Cubs · 7:30 pm Parent-teacher interviews
e-ink 7.5″ · redraws when the day changes

Forward it. That is the whole setup.

Nothing gets on the wall
until a person says yes.

The queue below is the product. Every guess shows the email it came from, what it concluded, and waits.

01 — IT ARRIVES
TO faimily+fraser99@faimily.ca
Apologies for the short notice — the Thursday 6.30pm dance class is moving to Fridays at the same time, effective Sept 18. Karate on Thursdays is unaffected.
A photo of a permission slip works the same way.
02 — IT SHOWS ITS WORKING
6:30 pm Dance repeats Fridays
replaces Dance at 6:30 pm Thursdays — that one stops
Added. The Thursday class stops on the 17th.
03 — IT LANDS
Friday 18 Septemberthe week after
Nothing yet
dance is still on Thursdays
WAITING  on somebody to read the card next to this one

The bit nobody else catches

Two kids can't clash.
One parent can.

Nothing is wrong with Ben at karate and Ana at dance. Both at six, in different places, is a perfectly ordinary Thursday — until you notice Dana is down to drive to both. No other calendar sees it, because none of them store who drives.

Neither child is double-booked. Nothing looks wrong.
The driver is. And it stays invisible until somebody is standing in the driveway at six.
And when nobody is down to drive at all, it says so before the week starts — never who drove most. A tally is an accusation; a gap is a problem anyone can fix.
Nobody down to drive
Fri 4:00 pm Choir — Ana needs a lift Tue 5:30 pm Swim club — Ana needs a lift

not a scoreboard —
just the gaps.

Hi Ana
How did today go?
Karate
6:00 pm
Good
OK
Too much
Only you see these. Nobody gets told about one tap.

The person being scheduled

Kids get a say.
Quietly.

Every other family app takes input from the adult doing the coordinating. The child is data in somebody else's calendar. How an eight-year-old feels about Thursdays is not in any inbox — no model can infer it, because it does not exist until she says so.

Three buttons, no typing. Nothing a child writes ever reaches a model.
One tap tells nobody. Three the same, and a parent hears “Ana has flagged Thursdays three times.”
Never a score. No streaks, no percentages, no “62% of tasks”. A report card teaches a child to lie to it.

What it learned, and how to correct it

You can read its mind.
And change it.

It writes down how the household actually runs. Plain sentences, in a list, with a button on every one.

0.9 Nan does the Tuesday pickup
logistics · seen 6× · last 1 Sept
0.7 Ana cannot handle two activities back to back
constraint · seen 3× · last 20 Aug
0.6 Thursdays are the tight evening
routine · seen 4× · last 27 Aug

Everyone else's assistant learns silently. Ours hands you the list.

Where it lives

It starts on the phone
you already have.

We sell no hardware. Everything past the phone is optional — a tablet out of the drawer, a proper panel later, or never.

9:41
FAIMILYnow
Karate · 6:00 pm
Starts in 15 min. You are driving Ben. Take gi and belt.
Dana · Fraser
THURSDAY 10 SEPTEMBER
7:30 am
🏊 Swim squad
Ben ↻ Dana
bring cap and goggles
8:45 am
📷 Picture day
Ana ↻ Sam
bring clean jumper
4:00 pm
🎤 Choir
Ana · nobody down to drive
4:00 pm
🎒 Tutoring
Ben ↻ Nan
5:00 pm
🏊 Swimming
Ana ↻ Nan
6:00 pm
🥋 Karate
Ben ↻ Dana
bring gi and belt
CLASH
6:00 pm
🩰 Dance
Ana ↻ Dana
CLASH
6:30 pm
⛪ Cubs
Ben · nobody down to drive
7:30 pm
🎒 Parent-teacher
Dana

Where the work actually happens.

This is where the work happens: confirming what the school email said, adding the thing you were told at the door, saying who is driving. It is also the only screen that can reach you when you are not in the kitchen.

The notification carries nothing. It is an empty tap on the shoulder — your phone wakes and asks our server what it was about. Google and Apple never see a child's afternoon.

Everything after this is optional. A screen on the wall is the same day, shared with the people who do not have a phone yet.

ScreenCostWhy
Your phone$0 Where the confirming and the adding actually happen
A dead tablet$0 Retired, not broken. It is plugged in, so the flat battery does not matter
E-ink, 7.5″est. CA$196 Three months on a charge. No glow. Cannot become a tablet, which is the point
E-ink, 10.3″est. CA$322 The fridge board. The week, not just the day

Panel prices are TRMNL's, shown as their Canadian store showed them on 5 September 2026 — US$139 and US$229 before conversion. Shipping and any duty are on top. We do not sell the hardware and we do not set the price, so treat every figure here as an estimate and check theirs before you buy.

Thursday 10 SeptFraser
7:30 am
Swim squad
Ben · Dana drives
bring cap and goggles
8:45 am
Picture day
Ana · Sam drives
bring clean jumper
6:00 pm
Karate
Ben · Dana drives
DANA
6:00 pm
Dance
Ana · Dana drives
DANA
THEN  4:00 pm Choir · 4:00 pm Tutoring · 5:00 pm Swimming · 6:30 pm Cubs · +1 more
800 × 480 · one bit
7.5″ · four rows · est. CA$196
Week of 7 SeptemberFraser
Mon7Tue8Wed9Thu10Fri11Sat12Sun13
Ana
4:00 pm Choir
8:45 am Picture day
4:00 pm Choir
5:00 pm Swimming
6:00 pm Karate
6:00 pm Dance
10:00 am Swim meet
Ben
6:30 pm Cubs
4:00 pm Tutoring
7:30 am Swim squad
4:00 pm Tutoring
5:00 pm Football
6:30 pm Cubs
9:30 am Football
driving↻ Dana↻ Nan↻ Nan↻ Dana↻ Nan↻ Sam↻ Sam
1872 × 1404 · sixteen greys
10.3″ · the week · est. CA$322

They are not the same picture at two sizes. The 7.5″ is widescreen and one bit — black or white, nothing between, so a clash is an inverted block rather than red, which reads harder across a kitchen anyway. The 10.3″ is nearly square, has sixteen greys to spend, and draws the whole week — a row per child, a column per day, and who is driving underneath. That is the shape the paper calendar on the fridge always had. Same wall, two different drawings.

A wall calendar assumes you can read.

Which leaves out the person in the house who most needs to know what today is. Every activity carries a symbol, so a four-year-old can look up at the fridge and know there is swimming.

Drawn flat, not emoji — an e-ink panel has one colour to spend, and a coloured picture turns to mud on it.

swim
karate
dance
choir
football
dentist
school
scouts

ben knows the wavy one
means swimming.

Where the data sits

Canadian.
Properly.

Every serious competitor is American, and so is their storage. Your children's weekly routine sits in a US cloud, reachable under the CLOUD Act. That is not a slogan for us — it is an architecture.

Hosted in Canada, backups included — a Canadian primary with a US replica is not residency.
The model call counts too. That is the part everyone gets wrong.
Never sold. Never trained on. Export and delete are buttons, not support tickets.
Or run the whole thing on a box in your own house. The code is open.

We forward a school
newsletter to a server
in Kelowna.

Not to Virginia.

What it costs

Three ways in.

The software is free either way. What you are paying for is not having to run mail, a server, and backups for the rest of your life.

Tinkerer
$5 /mo
  • Your own screens and server
  • Full API, self-host, data export
  • Community support
  • Or run it free — the code is open
Most families
$10 /mo
  • Set up for you, calendars connected
  • A forwarding address that works day one
  • Household memory and clash alerts
  • A person answers your email
Two homes
$20 /mo
  • One child, two households
  • Grandparents and carers, scoped access
  • Access that expires on a date
  • A handover log

A grandparent gets Tuesdays until December, and then stops. Not an account with your whole life in it.