Every family that ends up caring for an ageing parent builds a system, and it is remarkable how identical those systems are. First a group chat, because the phone is already in everyone's hand. Then, when the chat proves unsearchable, a shared document — and within a few months that document has nineteen tabs and four versions of the same medication list, none of them dated, none of them agreed.
Neither is a record. Both are conversations about one. And the difference matters at exactly the moment it is hardest to fix: standing in front of a new consultant who has asked, quite reasonably, when the confusion started.
The failure is in the gaps, not the care
Nobody forgets the cardiology appointment. What is lost is everything around it. Who drove. What was said in the last four minutes, when the useful sentence usually arrives. That the dose changed. That the prescription went to the pharmacy near the house, not the one near the hospital.
Each of those lives in one person's head, and by month six that person is holding a parent's entire practical and medical life without ever having agreed to. The sibling twelve hundred miles away is not being callous. They genuinely do not know, because none of it was ever written where they could read it.
Four things, held once
A timeline — every appointment, fall, refill, call and visit in one chronological feed, entered in seconds by the one who was there, each with a tag: doctor, meds, fall, call, visit, other. History and insights — the months grouped and charted, so "when did this start" has an answer. And CSV export — the whole record, ready to hand to a consultant or a sibling whenever you choose.
That is the whole program. It is deliberately smaller than the systems families try to build for themselves, because the elaborate ones do not survive contact with a bad Tuesday.
It is free, and this is why
Free to try for 7 days, then $0.99 a month or $7.99 a year. The trial becomes the subscription when it ends, it auto-renews until you cancel, and cancelling is one switch in App Store settings. The record is never held hostage: CSV export is part of the program, not a tier.
No advertising and no data sale funding it — those are the two usual ways a free product pays for itself, and both would mean this record earning its keep out of what it knows about somebody's mother, who never chose to be a user of anything. The house's contribution, not a funnel. Ardenholt sells other programs; this is the one it puts in. There is nothing here to buy, so nothing in it is designed to move you toward buying.
The record lives on the family's own phones and syncs between them through your own iCloud. There is no database of ours holding it, which is the only durable version of that promise. Kin is not a medical chart and not a HIPAA-covered service, and it files nothing on your behalf.
The register is open, and households are let in a few at a time — join it here, or start with the family guide.