Show HN: Family Folder – Help your family remember everything, organise anything | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Family Folder – Help your family remember everything, organise anything

familyfolder.com

4 pointstonystaunton6 comments

Hi Show HN,

I’m both nervous and excited to share what I’ve been working on in the early mornings and late evenings over the past few months: Family Folder – a tool to help you and your loved ones stay connected, simplify planning, and never miss a moment.

This is mostly a solo project—though I’ve leaned on ChatGPT and Upwork when I hit the limits of my technical skills. I love learning, and this has been a crash course in programming, DevOps, design, UX, and everything in between.

The idea came directly from my own experience: trying to keep on top of family life, from newborns to supporting my mum’s memory, birthdays, childcare logistics, and where the insurance documents are stored. Existing tools felt too generic, too corporate, or too messy. I wanted something built for families.

Stack: • Ruby on Rails 7 (via Jumpstart Pro) • PostgreSQL • Hosted on Heroku (EU region) • S3 (EU) for file uploads • (Coming soon: iOS app & AI assistant)

Family Folder is private by design—you only see what you’re invited to. It’s meant to be simple enough for parents or siblings to actually use, but structured enough to avoid chaos.

If this sounds useful—or if you’ve ever tried to manage a family using group chats or shared docs—I’d love your feedback. What would make something like this truly work for your family?

Thanks for taking a look!

– Tony

https://www.familyfolder.com

Open articleView on HN

For such a sensitive use case with supposed focus on user control and privacy: Why not open source with self-hosting the backend as an option?

> Family Folder uses industry-standard encryption to protect your data. Your information is private and only accessible to those you invite.

This needs further detailing - Especially since sources are not available. What data is encrypted, where, and how? Who controls keys?

Thanks for taking the time to look at Family Folder.

With regards to open source & self-hosting, while I agree that open source and self-hosting are strong options for trust and control, for the moment I’ve prioritised ease-of-use and low-friction onboarding for non-technical families. Open-sourcing the core functionality and offering a self-hosted version is something I would consider in the future. As the solo person on this project I need to be very careful with my backlog but definitely something to add to it.

For encryption & privacy details I do need to provide more depth and add to the FAQs. Here’s a brief overview of how Family Folder currently works:

- In transit: All traffic is encrypted via HTTPS/TLS. - At rest: Files uploaded to S3 are encrypted using server-side encryption, and the database is encrypted at the volume level via Heroku Postgres. - Access control: Families are isolated by design — a user can only see the folders they’re invited to. Authentication is handled via Devise with session-based login (no tokens stored on client). - Key management: Encryption keys are managed by AWS and Heroku. I don’t currently offer user-controlled keys, but I understand how important that is for full control and again definitely something to consider in the future.

The project is still early stages, so I’m open to input on how to evolve these parts — especially from a privacy perspective.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Tony.

Love the concept, but it's also a crowded space. I'm always on the lookout for good ideas in the space, so keep it up!

A few thoughts:

# Comparison

How are you different from other competitors, such as Cozi, FamilyWall, etc?

# Organization

Family life is busy, but the screenshots show only a few things. What happens when there's multiple events every day, with overlapping timelines for different individuals? Are different people assigned to different colors in the todo or calendar functions?

# Screenshots

The website lists 6 major features of the app, but have only 4 screenshots. What do the other screens look like? I've never thought of creating a FAQ for my family, so what does that look like? Is it just shared notes? (also, isn't "where did I put my wallet" a weird thing to put on a FAQ?

# TOS

Um, no: `When you use our website or its associated services to post, upload, share, or otherwise transmit content covered by intellectual property rights, you grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide licence to use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly display, translate, or otherwise create derivative works of your content in a manner that is consistent with your privacy preferences and our Privacy Policy.`

The privacy doesn't seem to directly address the above point, so I assume that you permit yourself to publicly post my family pictures and WiFi password?

# Header menu

Pricing is listed twice: Once as a page, once as an anchor link. The anchor link breaks if you're on the pricing page.

Edit: formatting.

Wow, thank you for the excellent feedback and taking the time to go through Family Folder with such detail.

# Comparison - I'm currently working on comparisons page and explainer.

# Organization - Great point/question, there is a full calendar within Family Folder so I definitely need to emphasise this more.

# Screenshots - I will definitely add more screenshots. The FAQ is designed to help families remember things or have easy access to info such as WIFI codes. Also a family member can create specific folders for example a summer vacation folder which could contain several FAQs such as flight numbers, hotel details, etc (something I am currently using Family Folder for).

# TOS - agreed will amend this to be give the user total control, rights etc over what they upload. Thanks for pointing this one out. All data is your data.

# Header - will add it to the bug list :)

Again, really great feedback, thank you for taking the time.

Tony.

Not sure if this is just me, but the second section with the dark background, seems to have very dark text.. It's effectively unreadable.

Thanks for letting me know. It's a bug with night mode so I will add that to the backlog :)

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