I built a Skylight alternative to manage our family hubbub without insane costs
What I tried
I wanted to get the hubbub out of my brain and into one place our whole family could run from. I looked at the big options like Skylight, Hearth, and Greenlight, and the reviews kept saying the same thing: too many upcharges and subscriptions on top of the price. Used those reviews and mentions to shape what I wanted. I wanted to build something low-cost that worked like those, but custom to our family. I needed one place for our family calendar, grocery orders, school communication, chore charts and rewards for the girls, important reminders, and our babysitters’ schedule. Built in Claude, it syncs with my Google and iphone cal (had to write connector for icloud), school emails, aldi and meijer orders (through Instacart), and gives our sitters a simple page with their days, pickups, and our care guide.
What happened
One family hub for 6 calendars, 4 sitters, and 3 kids. No extra subscriptions. The centralization has been nice to put everything all in one location. I can just quickly order groceries, know what homework needs to be turned in when, know who is taking care of my kids that day and if there's any special pickups/dropoffs, suggestions for dinner based off groceries, girls can track chores themselves, and school/work/fun/childcare calendars are all synced so I'm not missing things. Still rough: I'd love to connect to school apps and I want Aldi without using Instacart. I need to do more testing with it. What I learned: It's easy to bring and idea to life and not that hard to create custom connections. Feedback: Would your family use something like this? What would it need before you'd pay for it?
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