Welcome to ConKarma — a household OS for the way modern families actually work

If you only ever read one thing we publish, this one is it. ConKarma is launching, and the easiest way to misread what we built is to slot us into the category of "another family chore app". We aren't. This post is the long answer to what is this thing, and why does it look the way it does.

The problem with "family app"

The shelf is crowded. Cozi is a calendar with a grocery list bolted on. Greenlight is a debit card with a screen-time tab. Habitica turns chores into RPG quests. Family Wall is a private feed. Each is competent at one thing, hits a ceiling around 20–30M users, and never quite covers the lived shape of a modern household.

The reason for the ceiling is the same in every case: the apps assume one household, one calendar, one set of kids, one tier of relationship. That assumption was true in some 1995 American suburb. It's not true now. Today the household-coordination market is shaped by:

Co-parenting and blended families. A kid in two homes with two parents who don't share a calendar. A step-parent who needs scheduling visibility but not full read-access to the other parent's life.
The sandwich generation. Adults coordinating their kids and their aging parents at the same time. Two cells, one orchestrator, different visibility rules.
Grandparents who want to be present without managing another app. Read-only, email-driven, no install.
Couples who also share an intimate-relationship layer. Date nights, fantasies, "things we want to try together" — material that absolutely should not show up in a feed where the kids' chores live.
Singles building rituals for themselves first, who may bring a partner or kids into the same toolset later without losing five years of history.

No single existing app handles even three of those. Most handle one. We built ConKarma to handle all five from day one — and to do it without exposing anyone's private life to a feed, an advertiser, or a stranger.

What we mean by "household OS"

The term is deliberate. An operating system isn't an app — it's the layer the apps sit on. ConKarma's primitives are:

The Cell — a private circle of trusted people. Most households have one Cell. A divorced co-parent has two. A sandwich-generation adult has three (theirs, their parents', their kids'). A Cell is the smallest unit that can have a calendar, a journal, a reward economy, a shared ritual.
Roles inside a Cell — parent, partner, kid (with sub-tiers), grandparent (companion-only), trusted adult. Roles control what's visible and what can change.
A reward currency (DNA) that flows between Cell members for completed chores, mission progress, and acts of kindness.
Cross-Cell trust relationships that unlock shared rituals between two households without merging their data.
Two zones — Serene and Ember — that keep adult and family content on strictly separate rails. More on this below.

Built on top of these primitives: routines and missions, a shared calendar, allowances and savings goals, mood and intent journals, intimate-relationship tools for couples, the grandparent companion, and a small set of platform-native niceties (Apple Watch / Wear OS, Live Activities, Apple Health and Google Fit bridges, Apple Intelligence and Siri / Google Assistant integrations).

The point is the shape, not the feature list. Anyone can ship "missions you can complete for points". Almost nobody ships something where a kid in two cells sees one consolidated mission view, parents see their respective contexts, and the data never crosses between the two homes.

Two zones, one app

This is the part of the product that takes the longest to explain and that we care most about getting right.

ConKarma has two zones: Serene (everything a family member of any age can see — chores, journals, rewards, calendar, kid missions) and Ember (the adult tier — couples' intimate surfaces, fantasies, intimate journals). Most users only ever use Serene. The ones who opt into Ember get strong guarantees about what stays where:

The two zones run on strictly separate rails. Server-side, every entity carries a visibility_scope and the BE refuses cross-zone reads at the SQL level.
Adult routes are biometric-locked on entry, with a 5-minute inactivity / 30-second background timer.
Adult content never goes into shared rituals, the family digest, the calendar, or the grandparent companion.
Adult content is excluded from device backups by default and from your GDPR data export by default, so you can hand your phone to your kid without exposing it.
Adult retention is configurable — three years by default, down to 90 days or up to 10 years.
Two-eye admin access: nobody at XTZ Group can read adult content unilaterally; admin overrides require a second admin's signed approval, recorded in an immutable audit log.

We documented all 14 of these guarantees, end-to-end, on a public page: /security/zone-isolation. It's there for reviewers, auditors, partners, and anyone who wants to verify the claim before installing.

If you don't want the adult zone, you literally never have to think about it — it's off by default per device. If you do, the privacy posture is the strongest of any app in this space we know of.

The Cell is the unit, not the household

The single design decision that makes the rest of ConKarma work the way it does is multi-cell support.

A divorced parent can be in their own Cell and join their ex's Cell as a peer. The kids belong to both. Each parent sees their own context — their journal, their reward catalog, their settings — and the kids' missions span both homes by design, with custody-aware calendar overlays.

A sandwich-generation adult can be in their household Cell, their parents' Cell (where they manage doctor reminders, medication tracking, the grandparents' calendar) and any other Cell their kids invite them to.

Grandparents get a companion role instead of a full Cell. They get a weekly read-only digest by email — no install, no app to update, no notifications to mute. Once a week the grandkids ask them a question ("Grandpa, what was your eighth birthday like?") and they record an audio answer right from the email link, in the browser, no app needed. The audio goes into the kids' archive, unlocked at the right age.

That last one is one of our favourite features. It's also the one we're surest will be copied. Multi-decade payoff for a grandparent who never has to learn an app.

What's available today on the website

The mobile app launches in the next few weeks across the App Store, Google Play, and the Microsoft Store; the web version is live now for everything that isn't intimate-zone (those features are mobile-only, intentionally — the device gate is part of the privacy posture).

Until install day, the website itself is a tour:

/features — the full feature surface, organized by audience (families / couples / for-self / kids / co-parents / grandparents) and by theme (family stories / cell network / smart tools / platform-native).
/pricing — Free tier with no compromises (real ConKarma works free), Premium for individuals, Family for up to six members in one Cell. Region-priced via the stores.
The persona pages — /for-families, /for-couples, /for-self, /for-kids, /for-co-parents, /for-grandparents — each tailored to the shape of household it's written for.
/security — eight sections covering authentication, data residency, encryption, the zone-isolation invariants, and the kid safeguards.
/help — 21 articles covering the product end-to-end, including the trickier parts (Trusted Cells, sibling chore-trade, the Sunday family reveal window, two-way calendar sync).
/roadmap — every feature we're working on, every feature we accepted from the community, every feature we shipped in the last quarter, every feature we said no to (with the reason). Public, voteable, BE-driven.
/changelog — both the App Store release notes and a parallel "web ship log" that tracks what changes on the marketing/web side.

If something on this list feels missing, it's probably on /roadmap waiting for a vote.

What's coming

The mobile app is the immediate next thing. After that the public roadmap is the source of truth, but the rough shape of the next two quarters: deeper multi-cell tooling (cross-cell reward sharing, shared ritual unlocks), the Pillar work (the sandwich-generation surfaces around aging-parent care, expanded grandparent companion, family-narrative writers that turn weeks of journals into a season story), and language coverage (we ship in 14 locales today; the next round adds Arabic / Hebrew / Hindi / Bengali polish and starts on Korean / Japanese / Vietnamese).

What we are not going to do, ever:

A feed. We've been clear about this since the first post on the blog. No public feed, no leaderboards with strangers, no "people you may know".
Ad-personalisation tracking pixels. No Meta Pixel, no TikTok Pixel, no LinkedIn Insight Tag. Even pre-installed-and-inert pixels undermine the privacy claim; we don't ship them.
Algorithmic suggestions of other users' content to your kids. Not at any age, for any reason.
Selling user data. Not aggregated, not anonymised, not "for research", not ever.

If those constraints make a future feature impossible, the feature doesn't ship.

Privacy posture, made boring

The marketing language for privacy is exhausted — "your data is safe with us" doesn't mean anything. So here's the boring version:

Closed by design. No public profiles. No discovery. You can't find another user from inside the app.
No ads. Free tier doesn't show ads either; it's funded by Premium and Family upgrades and the rewards-catalog affiliate margin (disclosed at /legal/affiliate-disclosure).
Cookie consent gated. Nothing analytics-related fires until you accept; declining leaves zero requests to google-analytics.com.
PII scrubbed before any analytics sink. Every URL we send to analytics has email, code, token, password, and magic stripped first.
CSP per-request nonce. Every page response carries a fresh nonce, no unsafe-inline, strict-dynamic script-src. CSP violation reports go to our own endpoint, not a vendor.
14 locales. English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Hindi, Bengali, Indonesian, Chinese (Simplified), Arabic, Hebrew. RTL where applicable. Per-locale legal addenda for California, EEA-UK, Brazil, Quebec, and Australia.

If that paragraph reads as defensive, it's because the privacy claims in this space are usually defensive. We'd rather be specific.

Get in touch

Press: press@conkarma.app. Media kit and brand assets at /press.
Help: /help for self-serve, /support for one-on-one.
Bug report: /bug-report — goes straight into the engineering queue.
Roadmap input: /roadmap for vote-on-features-that-exist; /support with a feature request to suggest new ones.

Thank you for reading this far. If you came here because you wanted a chore app for your kid, ConKarma will work — but you'll get to use a lot more of it than you expected. If you came here because the existing options didn't fit your household's shape, we hope this is the one that finally does.

— The ConKarma team