Storkie
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Supabase
- React Native
- Installable web app
Storkie started as an app for my wife and I. We had a newborn, we were barely sleeping, and every baby tracker we tried was noisy, full of ads, and a little too interested in our son’s data. So I built our own: one calm place for sleep, feeds, diapers, growth, and photos, shared instantly between us.
Using it daily while building it shaped everything. The features come straight from the trenches: voice logging for when you have one free thumb at 3am, an “Up Next” forecast that reads the day’s rhythm and suggests the next nap, and Ask Storkie for the “is this normal?” questions you’d otherwise google at midnight.
It’s built for the web and installable, so nothing stands between a tired parent and the log. No app store, no download, no account wall for the grandparents. Native apps are in progress.
And the rule that shaped all of it: your kid’s data is yours. Exportable, deletable, never mined, never sold. I’m user number one, and I wouldn’t accept less.
What I decided
- Hosted Postgres, hosted auth
- Supabase because I wanted a hosted Postgres I could get running with almost no setup, back when this was just an app for my wife and I. Clerk because its React components were the fastest way to get auth working. I’d weigh both differently starting fresh today, but migrating either one is expensive when you’re the only developer, and that cost is real even when something newer looks better. Billing is the exception: I was going to use Clerk for it, and I’m going with Stripe instead.
- I built for the web first, and it cost me notifications
- A progressive web app was the fastest path for me. I know React better than React Native, I’d shipped PWAs at work, and it keeps the app store out from between a tired parent and the log. The price was real: I wanted feed and nap reminders and the web couldn’t do them the way native can. The Expo app came later, mostly so it can be findable in both stores.
- Ask Storkie only sees your kid’s data if you turn it on
- Personalized answers are off by default. Leave them off and you get general information, the same as any chatbot. Turn them on and it answers through tools that read your own logged activities, stats, and growth entries, so it’s telling you about your kid instead of about babies in general. You can switch it back off whenever you want. Either way it won’t interpret anything medically, it points you at your pediatrician instead, and it can’t claim it checked your logs unless it actually did. I’d rather it tell you it doesn’t know than guess about your kid.
- The privacy rule is enforced, not just promised
- Every table holding family data sits behind row-level security, and CI fails the build if one of them is missing a policy, so it can’t quietly stop being true. Export is real: your whole account as JSON and CSV in a zip. Delete is soft for thirty days so a wrong tap is recoverable, then a daily job deletes the rows and the photo bytes for good.
- What I put off: encryption even I can’t read through
- I wanted your kid’s data encrypted so that I couldn’t read it either, even with the database in front of me. I decided it’s more machinery than this app needs right now, so it’s on the side for later. I’d rather say that than imply a guarantee I don’t actually offer yet.