Families deserve
automation too.
Another subscription. Another app. Another company storing photos of my kids on servers I don't control. There are tools for photos, tools for documents, tools for chat. But nobody is putting them together to actually make family life easier. To remember what matters. To turn the daily chaos into something that works for you instead of against you. So I started building my own stack.
Someone always carries it all
Businesses have document management, automation pipelines, AI assistants, and whole teams dedicated to making operations run smoothly. Families have a drawer full of paper and one person holding everything in their head.
I've been building enterprise software my entire career. Automating things for a living. Yet there I was, plugging a cable into my phone every Saturday to manually copy family photos to a NAS that hadn't seen an update in years. There are no tools for families. Not tools that don't require uploading your family's entire life to yet another subscription service, anyway.
So I built a morning briefing. Every day at breakfast, Kit reads out what's happening: everyone's appointments, garbage collection day, school events, anything that matters today. My wife noticed it first. That was the validation.
I use this every day
FamilyKit runs on a Mac in our house. Photos back up automatically. Documents get scanned, read by AI, tagged, and filed without anyone touching a folder. The morning briefing fires at 6:00. One kid is just learning to read, so we check it on the phone at breakfast. At some point there'll be a tablet in the kitchen. That's the plan.
Next up: asking questions like "does our liability insurance cover this?" and getting an actual answer from the documents already filed. Every feature starts as a real annoyance. That's the only filter it needs to pass.
On privacy
I still use Gmail. Google Maps knows where I go. This isn't a manifesto against Big Tech.
Family photos are different. Fifteen years of kids growing up, on servers I don't control, analyzed by systems I didn't ask for. That felt wrong. A Mac Mini draws less power than a light bulb and costs less per month than a coffee. Once I realized I could run this at home with no meaningful tradeoff, the decision was obvious. I told myself it was also a hobby. That's what you say when the spreadsheet doesn't quite add up but you're doing it anyway.
The AI gets better for free
The models running inside FamilyKit improve every month. Better document recognition, sharper search, more useful briefings. No data leaves the house. Open-source AI is moving fast, and FamilyKit picks up every improvement automatically.
The longer it runs, the more useful it gets. That's the whole point of building on a local AI platform rather than a fixed product.
Where this is going
Document filing and search are live. The morning briefing is live. Photo backup is live. Coming next: a family memory bank. Voice memos transcribed locally, matched to photos from that day, queryable years later. A screen in the living room showing memories from this day three years ago. A year-in-review that writes itself.
The point is an archive that outlasts any cloud service, because it lives in your house, on hardware you own, with no subscription to cancel and no company to go bankrupt. Your kids' childhood, still intact in twenty years. That felt worth building.