Free because there’s nothing behind a paywall to unlock

There’s no billing code anywhere in FamilyBoard — no upgrade prompt, no locked tab, no feature that checks a subscription status before it works. All twelve screens — Today, Members, Assets, Maintenance, Tasks, Warranties, Subscriptions, Emergency, Documents, Handoff, Display and Settings — are the same app for every user, because the free version isn’t a limited trial of a paid product. It’s the whole thing.

Why a local-first app can afford to be genuinely free

The economics are a direct consequence of the architecture described on the Private Family Organizer page: your household records live in this browser’s IndexedDB database, not in a server-side database the company operates and pays to run for every user. There’s no per-household hosting cost scaling with how many appliances you track or how many years of maintenance history you keep, because none of that data touches a server. That’s a real structural reason a genuinely capable free tier is sustainable, not a promotional claim about generosity.

A real household history, not a limited demo

Because nothing is metered or capped by a paid tier, the product is built to hold years of real history rather than a rolling window. A maintenance task’s card keeps showing its five most recent completions no matter how many total completions exist. Document references, warranty records and repair notes accumulate indefinitely in the local database — the only ceiling is your browser’s storage quota, not a plan limit. That matters for the parts of household life that are only useful in hindsight: when an appliance fails twice, the earlier maintenance and repair notes on that same asset are what tell you whether it’s a pattern or a coincidence.

What the free tier includes, concretely

Every record type is fully usable: assets with purchase details and status tracking, maintenance with completion history and flexible repeat intervals, warranties with computed expiration status, subscriptions with a live annualized-cost total, tasks and calendar events, emergency contacts with sensitivity filtering, document references, printable handoff briefings built from your own data, a family display mode, and both JSON backup (optionally password-encrypted with AES-256-GCM) and a spreadsheet-editable master CSV export/import. None of that list is a teaser for a paid tier — it’s the complete current feature set.

The honest limit: this is a single-household, single-browser-profile app

Being free doesn’t mean being infinite. The app reads only the first household stored in this browser’s database — there’s no multi-household switcher, and no built-in way to combine two separate households’ data. A second home, or a household member’s separate device, means a separate local database unless you deliberately move a JSON backup between them. That’s a genuine architectural boundary of the current version, not a paywall dressed up as a limitation.

What durability actually requires from you

Free and local-first shifts one responsibility onto you that a paid cloud service would otherwise carry: backup. FamilyBoard tracks and displays when your last backup was made, and warns when it’s been seven days or more, or when none has ever been exported — because there’s no automatic server-side copy behind the free tier. Export a JSON backup after adding anything you’d genuinely mind losing.