sorry my beans … v1 is here 🥲

Rejoice, my beans!

hey! save some of that cake for me.

90-day free trials will start today (or, well, as close to today as possible, given my kids’ practice schedules this weekend).

I offer my humblest beanie apologies that the free ride couldn’t last forever. On the plus side, however, there are so many cool things happening.

Awesome, tell me more!

User feedback is coming in fast and furious, and some of it has either already been released or is actively being worked on, while other ideas are still banging around in my head.

• beautiful (and functional) mobile widgets for both iOS and android
• who owns what - a set of fun cards, inspired by Eve Rodsky’s insanely popular Fair Play system, to assign and implement family responsibilities
• recurring family reminders and to-dos that coincide with family responsibilities and tie everything together
• a magic beans AI feature to automatically read and reconcile bank transactions
• a weather widget for the nook and beanie wall (thanks to an awesome feedback survey request!)

I’m more excited than ever to be building beanies.family, helping more than 100 families (yes, you read that right, people) feel more organized and in control (currently for free), through all of their magic bean-assisted family and finance journeys.

The feedback I’ve received has been incredible, amazing, and invaluable, and the words of encouragement and appreciation have been a constant source of motivation for me (and yes, I’m actually being genuine here. As hard as that is to believe).

That encouragement helped me muster the strength to continue building through the bugs, crashes, weird errors, and other late night sessions with my glorious claude-bot. Running a functioning app through the wringer of security, privacy, and pricing has been an ordeal that I’ll probably write about more at some point, but for now, suffice to say, I’m doing everything I can to ensure your (and my) beans are protected.

So, after more than 9 months in beta, why is beanies.family going live now?

I had set a line in the sand that I wouldn’t start pricing until we met a certain standard for security and functionality. In fact, up until a couple weeks ago, there was not even a single mention of pricing in the codebase. I didn’t want there to be bugs, feature gaps, missing settings, security holes, or any of those pitfalls that I tend to see in lots of software these days (whether vibe-coded or not). I’m proud to offer beanies.family to families everywhere, and it’s an app I can stand behind (and not just because I built it).

I don’t even really like using the term “vibe-coded” for beanies.family, since I feel like we’ve gone past a vibe at this point. We’ve struck a signed privacy agreement with a secure and private AI provider, built and released apps for both app stores, designed and implemented key privacy and security protections, and lots more. But since “vibe coding” is pretty much the accepted term at this point, and I’m nothing if not stoically conformist, I’ll continue playing along with that term.

As I’ve said before, I’ve always promised to keep beanies.family priced reasonably, and to always maintain our guarantee of being local-first, privacy-first, and fully encrypted.

And so, with a somewhat contradictory mix of both excitement and ambivalence, I’m announcing today that beanies.family v1 is here!

beanies.family is a secure, private, and stable (and hey - don’t forget to mention beautiful) end-to-end family organization, travel, finance, and responsibility management platform, that gives you everything you need (and in some cases, more than you need) to manage your crazy family. And not only that, it’ll continue to improve.

And I hope you agree that beanies.family is worth a few bucks every month. I feel like that’s a small price to pay for a platform that has, at times, cost me my sanity.

I’m already a beanies.family user - is anything changing for me?

The biggest difference you may notice once pricing is enabled is that your magic beans allowance (meaning usage of AI features) will be limited to one magic bean per day. These are what cost me money, but you can unlock this allowance in Settings › Your beanies Plan (if it says you’re still on beta, that means I haven’t enabled pricing yet).

As I’ve mentioned, every amazing family who joins us gets every feature in beanies.family for 90 days, completely free, starting today - even those of you who are already here. At the end of your trial period, you can still access your beanies and everything you’ve saved, but it goes read-only until you make a call. If you decide to take your data (which is always yours), that is totally fine, and there will be no hard feelings. But if you decide to stay with us on the beanies.family journey to continue to experience the incredible family organization wonders that are this platform, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

There’s a ton to look forward to, and my glorious claude-bot and I will be here to help, support, and answer any questions. So once you’re all organized and relaxed, hopefully you can start enjoying your “just for me” time (and if you’re curious what that means, check out the who owns what section that may have recently popped into the app).

And for those who do stick around, at some point there will be actual cake.

Stay cool, my beans.

-greg