Everyone who loves them,
in one place
A family in BabySteps holds up to six people — your partner, the grandparents, the childminder. They all read the same one timeline; how far into it each of them reads, what they're allowed to change, and what you call them are three separate answers you give separately.
Every moment sits in exactly one chapter. A chapter says where a memory belongs, never who may read it.
Name the parts of your life
A chapter is the part of family life a memory is filed under — “Everyday”, “Daycare”, “Grandma & Grandpa”. Every family starts with one, named in your own language, so there's always somewhere for the first photo to go, and admins add and rename the rest from the family screen. Every moment has exactly one, so the chapter chips cover the whole timeline with nothing falling into a gap between them.
What a chapter does not do is decide who reads. Filing something under Daycare changes where it sits and nothing else — that's the whole point of the word. Who can see a memory is a separate question with its own answer, below, and keeping the two apart is what stops a grandmother's photo from being invisible to the child's own mother.
- Exactly one chapter per moment, chosen in the composer and changeable afterwards
- A brand-new family already has “Everyday”, so nothing has to be set up before the first photo
- Admins add and rename them; everyone reads every chapter, so there's no per-chapter access to manage
- A chapter can be renamed but never deleted — deleting one would leave its memories with nowhere to be
- Two chapters can’t share a name, so you never end up with a confusing duplicate
The parts of family life this family files moments under.
Filing something under Daycare changes where it sits, never who can read it.
Two rings, and they nest
Everyone in the family sits in a ring: close or wide. A close reader sees everything. A wide reader sees only what was shared with everyone. You pick which one on the invite, and an admin can move someone inward later, which is how a grandparent is brought closer as trust grows.
The rings nest, and that is the whole design. Because wide sits inside close, there is never a memory a grandparent can see that the child's own mother cannot. Separate per-audience containers can't promise that — two of them are simply two disjoint sets, and one of them will always leave somebody out who should have been in.
Each moment then says who it's for: “Just us”, which is the default, or the whole family. One switch in the composer moves it, and opening a “Just us” moment shows a small badge saying so. Firsts and the things they said are the exception — those widen to everyone automatically, because “when did she first walk” has to have one answer for the whole family, and the composer says so rather than quietly overriding you.
- Nobody in the wide ring ever sees something the close ring can’t
- A new moment starts as “Just us” — the narrow default, because widening later is one tap and un-widening isn’t
- Marking a first or a kid-ism widens that moment to everyone, and tells you it has
- Admins move a member between rings from the family screen, no re-invite needed
- Reading depth is separate from what someone may do: a wide member still posts, a close viewer never does
Ruth · Grandma
A code you can read down the phone
Before you invite anyone, you decide three things: who they are to the kids — Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt, Nanny / Caregiver — how far in they read, and what they're allowed to do. Then BabySteps mints a code: eight characters with no 0 or O, no 1, I or L, spaced out on screen so you can read it aloud without spelling anything twice.
Sharing it is up to you. Copy the code, push it through your phone's own share sheet already written out, or fill in an email address and have BabySteps send it. It works exactly once and expires after a week, so a code that's been sitting in a chat thread since March isn't a way into your family.
- A partner close in, a carer wide out — one code each
- Outstanding invites count toward the six, so nobody is turned away at the door
- Admins see every unused code, labelled with the relationship, the role and the ring, with revoke a tap away
- An expired code says so plainly instead of just failing
- The person who created the family is its owner, and can never be removed
Works once. Expires in 7 days.
Told the same evening, not next visit
When someone adds a moment, the rest of the family gets a warm, specific push — who added it, and for which child — and tapping it opens that memory. A developmental first gets its own, louder wording. Notifications only ever reach the people who could already see the moment.
They're also gentle about it. Ten photos added to one memory send one notification, not ten: anything landing within half an hour collapses together. Photos added to a moment that's already there arrive as their own quiet “new photos” nudge rather than announcing the same memory twice. And each push is written in the reader's own language, so a German-speaking grandma gets German even when the moment came from an English-speaking parent.
- A bell in the header opens a durable list of everything ever sent you
- Phones drop pushes; the inbox doesn’t — every one is still there, newest first
- Pull to refresh, older ones as you scroll, and “Just now”, “3 hours ago”, “Yesterday”
- “Mark all read” appears only when you actually have something unread
- A push and its inbox row land on exactly the same screen, even from a cold start
Switching one off quiets your phone. The inbox still keeps it.
Six people who love her. Not an audience.
There are no likes in BabySteps. No comments, no reactions, no little counters under a photo of your daughter asleep in the car. Family sharing here means shared access — the people you brought close see everything, the people further out see what you addressed to everyone, and the ones you gave a role to can add. Nobody is performing, and nobody is being scored.
The photos themselves are kept out of public reach. They go straight from your phone into private storage, they're served back through addresses that stop working within the hour, and nothing in the app is publicly linkable. A family of six, and no way in from outside it.
Made for a family, not a workspace
The details that keep six people, a few chapters and a couple of children from ever feeling like admin.
Two steps, or one code
Name your family, add your first child, and two little dots show you how short it is. If your partner got there first, you tap “Enter an invite code” instead and join theirs — whoever started, you both end up in the same place.
The code is handed to you
The moment your family exists you get “The Smiths is ready 🎉” with the co-parent code already on screen. Copy flips to a checkmark and “Copied!”; Share opens your phone's share sheet with the invitation written out. Skip it and it's waiting in Settings → Family.
It puts you back where you were
The Kids tab remembers whose record you were last reading and opens there. The Timeline needs no memory — it starts on the whole family, with filters cleared, every single time. And signing in as someone else clears all of it, so nobody glimpses the previous account.
Siblings, one tap apart
The Kids tab is about exactly one child at a time — a merged growth chart isn't a thing anyone reads — so its header carries a switcher with each child's photo and name, oldest first. With only one child the tab simply names itself after them.
Mom, Grandpa, Nanny
Everyone carries a warm human label for who they are to the kids, kept separate from what they're allowed to do — so the family screen reads like your family rather than a permissions table. Anyone can set their own, and an unlabelled member gets a gentle nudge to.
Nothing irreversible is one tap away
Removing someone spells out that anything they added stays — the timeline belongs to the family, not to an account. Removing a child asks first and says exactly what goes. An admin can't remove themselves by accident, and the owner can't be removed at all.
Explore more of BabySteps
Their first years only
happen once
BabySteps is nearly ready. Leave your email and we'll tell you the day it lands — nothing else, ever.
Prefer to write to us yourself? hello@ourbabysteps.com