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Kaydo

Your family's own corner of the internet, at your own address, encrypted before it ever leaves the device.

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  • Privacy
  • Encryption
  • Web App
  • Side Project

Screenshots

The memory feed, with Daily Moments across the top for quick everyday snapshots.
The scrapbook is a freeform canvas — drag photos, stickers and text, then export the book as a PDF.
Recipes are versioned and can be forked, so a grandmother's original and a grandchild's variation both survive.
Journals and letters, dated and written for the child to read years from now.
The Vault keeps full-resolution originals and time-locked capsules that stay sealed until a chosen date.
Our Year is a review ritual for two — deliberately built for a phone on a sofa.

Every family photo I have ever uploaded somewhere ended up as training data, ad inventory, or a subscription I would lose access to. Kaydo is the alternative I wanted to exist: a private space a family actually owns, at its own address — yourname.kaydo.app — with no ads, no AI training, and nothing sold on.

Share

The heart of it is a memory feed of rich cards: photos, videos, voice memos, stories and quotes. Daily Moments are story circles for the small everyday things that never justify a full post. A smart timeline groups memories by season and surfaces “on this day” lookbacks.

Preserve

The Vault holds high-fidelity originals of the documents and photos that matter most, including time-locked capsules that stay sealed until a date you pick. Letters and kids’ journals are dated entries written for the future. And everything can be exported as a ZIP of plain, readable files plus structured JSON — NAS-friendly, no lock-in. A memory platform you cannot leave is not a memory platform, it is a hostage situation.

Create and evolve

The recipe tree treats family recipes like code: version history, forks and photo logs across generations, so a grandmother’s original and a grandchild’s variation both survive. The digital scrapbook is a freeform drag-and-drop canvas with polaroid frames, stickers and text, exportable as a PDF. Each family can even design its own login page — from starter templates up to a custom photo welcome screen.

Just the two of you

Our Year is a recurring review ritual for a couple, on whatever day they choose. Each chapter holds a shared look back — both partners answer the same five questions independently, and the answers unlock only once both have handed in — a couple’s quiz rewritten every chapter, a letter to their future selves, and four keepsakes: one photo, one song, one sentence, one moment. Nothing here assumes marriage, children, or twelve-month cycles.

Encryption, honestly

Photos, videos, voice memos, journal entries, recipes, scrapbooks and Vault content are encrypted client-side with AES-256-GCM via the Web Crypto API before upload. Media is stored as raw ciphertext, so the server never receives a renderable image. The only deliberate exception is the public login-page artwork, which has to render before anyone is authenticated.

Our Year goes further than the rest of the app: instead of trusting the UI, Firestore security rules decide who may read what. A partner’s answers are unreadable until both have submitted, a sealed letter is unreadable until its open date, and a closed chapter can no longer be edited — all covered by emulator tests.

One honest limitation, which I keep stated in the README as well: the per-family encryption key currently lives in the family’s Firestore document, so Kaydo is not zero-knowledge yet. Moving to client-side key derivation is the intended path before I make any such claim.

How it is built

React and Vite, with vite-react-ssg pre-rendering the landing page to static HTML. Firebase provides Auth, Firestore and Cloud Functions; Cloudinary stores the encrypted media through signed uploads. It is an installable PWA with Workbox precaching and push notifications, fully bilingual in English and German via i18next, and covered by a Vitest suite plus Firestore rules tests.