Being built in public

A digital home for everything your family knows.

Every household accumulates a lifetime of important things — documents, medical records, photographs, recipes, the story of where you came from. Today it lives scattered across drives, chat threads, filing cabinets, and people's memories. Family Knowledge Vault brings all of it into one private, searchable place designed to last generations.

Watch it being built View the code

The problem

When you urgently need something, where is it?

A passport before a flight. An insurance policy during a hospital visit. The warranty for an appliance that just failed. Grandma's recipe that nobody wrote down. The information exists — but finding it means searching everywhere at once.

What it holds

Organised around people, not folders.

Family

Every member becomes a living profile — their documents, medical history, milestones, and the memories they're part of, all connected.

Documents

Identity, property, finance, education, legal. Filed by what they mean rather than where you happened to put them.

Medical

Reports, prescriptions, vaccinations, allergies and doctors — ready before you need them, not after.

Memories

Photographs, voice notes and written stories, gathered into albums and set against the year they happened. Video comes later.

Recipes

The dishes that belong to your family, kept in the voice of the person who taught them.

Emergency

Blood groups, contacts, medications and insurance — reachable in one tap, for the moments that matter most.

How it's built

Trust before features.

Progress

Phases 1 to 4 have shipped.

This is not a landing page for something that might get built. Every claim below corresponds to merged code you can read right now — and the gaps are listed just as plainly as the wins.

What works today

  • Create an account and sign in
  • Stay signed in — the session is held in the device keychain
  • Create a family, which owns everything else
  • Invite people with single-use codes that expire, or can be revoked
  • Join a family by entering a code
  • Add relatives who will never sign in — a grandmother, a child
  • Record who is whose parent, spouse or sibling
  • Give people one of four roles, and change it later
  • Remove someone's access, leave a family, or hand it over
  • Delete a family, after typing its name to confirm
  • See what has happened in the family, and who did it
  • File a document — its name, its shelf, whose it is, who can see it, whether AI may read it, and its scans — in one step
  • Sort papers onto six shelves — identity, medical, finance, property, education, legal — and filter by them
  • Attach photographs or PDFs, several to one document, up to 10 MB each
  • Look at an attached photograph without leaving the app
  • Open a PDF in the reader already on your phone
  • Keep a document to yourself, or share it with everyone in the family — and change your mind either way
  • Rename a document, move it to another shelf, or reassign it
  • Archive a document, bring it back, or delete it for good
  • Keep a memory — what happened, the story behind it, where it was, who it is about, and who may see it
  • Say when it happened as precisely as you actually remember — a day, a month, a year, or not at all
  • Browse memories gathered under the year they happened, with the undated ones at the end
  • Name who else was there
  • Attach photographs to a memory, several at once
  • Open a photograph full screen, or send it out of the app
  • Record a voice note straight into a memory, up to five minutes, and play it back
  • Keep a memory to yourself, or share it with everyone in the family — and change your mind either way
  • Archive a memory, bring it back, or delete it for good
  • Gather memories into an album, and browse it — including memories somebody else in the family wrote

What does not work yet

  • No password reset. Forget your password today and you are locked out.
  • Email addresses are not verified. Nothing yet proves you own the address you signed up with.
  • Medical records and recipes are empty. The sections exist; the features are Phases 5 and 6. Documents and memories work — they were Phases 3 and 4.
  • The "let AI read this" switch does nothing yet. It records your answer and nothing reads it. Asking before there is anything to consent to is deliberate — the alternative is asking a family to agree retroactively — but it is a switch with no machine behind it until Phase 9.
  • Memories hold no video. Photographs and voice notes only. A file is capped at 10 MB, which buys about fifteen seconds of video — not a feature, so it waits for Phase 12, where the cap itself is revisited.
  • Voice notes are not written down. You can play one back and nothing can read it, search it, or tell you what is in it. Transcription is Phase 9 at the earliest.
  • You cannot choose an album's cover. It is the first photograph in the album that you are allowed to see, which also means two people can see different covers on the same album. That is deliberate: a stored cover would give away that a private memory exists.
  • Albums cannot be reordered. Memories sit in the order they happened, and there is no way to drag them.
  • Memories do not appear in the activity feed. The feed still only knows about people, roles and relationships.
  • The timeline is still empty. Memories carry the date they happened, but the section that draws a family's life in order is Phase 7 — and it will span every part of the vault, not just memories.
  • You cannot share a document with one person. Sharing is yourself, or the whole family. "Just Mum and Dad" is Phase 10.
  • Nothing is shared between families. A document cannot reach your parents' vault from yours. No mechanism for it has been designed.
  • You cannot search. Six shelves and a filter are the whole of finding something. Search is Phase 8, and reading the text inside a scan is Phase 9.
  • PDFs open in another app. Android's built-in web view cannot draw one, and the usual workaround sends the file to Google to be rendered — which is the opposite of the promise this project makes. So your own reader opens it instead.
  • Deleting a document is permanent. There is no trash, which is why it is offered only after archiving.
  • Guests see no documents at all. Not a filtered list — nothing. The role exists for people who should see the family without its papers.
  • You cannot remove a person from the family. You can take away their access to the app, but a person somebody typed in stays. That is a deliberately separate job, still to come.
  • A deleted family is gone for good. There is no trash and no backup — which is why deleting one makes you type its name first.
  • You can only belong to one family. Nothing lets you switch between your own and your parents'.
  • The family tree does not draw a tree. Relationships are recorded and listed; the picture is Phase 6.
  • End-to-end encryption is designed, not built. Planned for Phase 11, alongside digital legacy.
  1. Shipped 1 · Welcome Home Accounts, families, invitations
  2. Shipped 2 · Meet the Family Profiles, relationships, roles
  3. Shipped 3 · Preserve What Matters Documents
  4. Shipped 4 · Family Memories Memories, photos, voice, albums
  5. Building 5 · Family Health Medical records
  6. Planned6 · Home & LivingRecipes, inventory
  7. Planned7 · Family TimelineEvents, reminders
  8. Planned8 · Find EverythingSearch
  9. Planned9 · Family IntelligenceOCR, assistant
  10. Planned10 · Trust & SecurityEmergency mode, audit
  11. Planned11 · LegacyLetters, encryption
  12. Planned12 · PremiumStorage, production

Read every merged pull request — each one has its objective, the trade-offs, what was tested, and what was deliberately left undone.

Follow along

Built live, one pull request at a time.

The entire product — planning, architecture, code, mistakes and all — is being built in public on stream. Every session ships one complete, working improvement, and every decision is documented in the repository as it happens.

In active development — Phase 5, Family Health

Watch on YouTube Read the source Browse the planning docs