Under the bonnetHow "built" is decided on this page, which is stricter than it sounds
Nothing is marked built because the code exists. It is marked built when there is a test that fails if it stops working, and the test runs on a throwaway database or a throwaway network namespace rather than against a live household.
That rule has demoted things. A Tor blocklist that fetched perfectly every day and was never applied to the firewall looked finished for months, and the health check agreed with it, because the check was reading the age of a file rather than asking the firewall what it held. It now asks the firewall. If a row here says half built, it is because somebody went and looked.
Every one of these things is currently sold to you as a subscription, and every one of them could just be running in your house.
Somebody is charging you a monthly fee to look at your own camera. Somebody else owns the video. A third party decides whether the app still works next year. None of that is a technical necessity. It is a business model that got there first, at a time when running the alternative genuinely was too hard for a normal household.
That window has closed. A spare computer, an AI agent to set it up, and a weekend of curiosity now get you further than any of those subscriptions do. Screen time was simply the first thing worth taking back.
Take back your network
You decide what your household connects to, what is allowed to talk to the internet, and what stays firmly indoors. Not an app vendor, and not a router's default settings.
Take back how your kids grow up
Boundaries you chose, effort that earns something real, and an honest conversation with your children about all of it. Not an algorithm optimising for how long they stare.
Take back your own digital life
Your footage, your files, your home, your keys. Held in your house, reachable when you are away, and not conditional on anybody's continued goodwill.
Where things actually stand.
Nothing on this page is marked as done unless you can run it today. Everything else is honestly labelled as being built or as a plan.
The family gateway Working today
Filtering by age, screen time metered by category, learn to earn, household roles including guests, live traffic you can watch, and a real firewall underneath all of it. This is the part that exists, is tested, and is running in a real house with three kids in it.
A curriculum worth earning from Working today
This was a handful of banks a few months ago and it is now the strongest part of the product.
- 42 quiz banks and 2,081 questions, covering New Zealand Years 1 to 3, 4 to 6, 7 and 8, 9 and 10 and NCEA, plus banks for the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, plus subjects that are nobody's syllabus.
- An explanation on every single question, written for the child who got it wrong. The checker refuses a bank that is missing one.
- Read up: a study page per bank showing every question, its answer and why, so a bad score leads somewhere.
- A reading list of 41 reference sites that stays reachable through a total cut, so a child can genuinely learn rather than only recall.
It is not a validated curriculum and nobody has marked it against a syllabus document. Coverage is uneven, because it grew from what real children in one house were actually studying. The detail is here.
Badges, and a board that is not a leaderboard Working today
Ten badges, each measured against a child's own history, so a five year old and their sixteen year old sibling can both hold all ten. No streaks, no ranks, nothing scarce.
The one place siblings are compared is a house board of four categories, each chosen so that being oldest or having the most spare time is not a win condition: most improved, widest range of subjects, best comebacks, keenest reader. It never ranks and it has no second place. It is off by default, because a household should not wake up with a sibling comparison it never asked for. Why it was built this way.
Quizzes a parent writes, and earn rates they set Working today
A parent can type a bank straight into the dashboard: this week's spelling list, the times tables one child keeps stumbling on. It lives in your household's own database rather than the repository, so an update can never delete it, and it goes live once it holds one full round.
The price of a pass, the perfect-round bonus, the rest between goes and the daily cap all stopped being constants in the code. They are settings, per household and optionally per child, each explained in plain language on the screen. A household that never opens that screen behaves exactly as it always did.
Knowing whose device is whose Working today, off by default
An unclaimed device used to get full, unfiltered, unmetered internet, which is the quiet flaw in every household network. Now, when you switch claiming on, a device nobody has named gets address lookups, the portal, and the safety net, and nothing else. The child taps their name and it inherits their filter and their clock.
There is an observe setting that counts what would have been restricted and blocks nothing, because the first thing a parent wants to know is how many devices this would catch. It is claiming rather than authenticating, and the honesty matters: it does not prove identity, it makes declaring yourself the path of least resistance. The full reasoning.
Watching the health of the box itself Working today
Genkan is the single point of failure for the family's internet and there was nowhere to see whether the machine was full, hot or thrashing. The System page shows processor, memory, disk, load, uptime, temperature and network throughput over time. Every reading is taken straight from the kernel rather than by spawning programs on a timer, because a family gateway can be a Raspberry Pi and a health page should not slow down the thing it is measuring.
Paying properly for learning, not just for recall Being worked on
The honest hole in learn to earn. A child who already knew the answers earns exactly the same as a child who spent forty minutes reading first, because time spent reading is not measured. The reading list and the study pages made that gap wider, not narrower.
The obvious fixes are to pay more for the first pass of a bank than the tenth, pay more for a bank a child has been reading about, pay more for questions they previously got wrong, and price a harder round above an easier one. None of them is built. Every one of them turns learning into an optimisation problem that a clever child will optimise, so none of them is being rushed.
A tutor that notices each kid Half built
There is a command that gathers what one child passes, avoids, gets wrong and has been reading about, and prints it with a prompt on the end. There is a runbook telling your agent what to do with that. What there is not: anything that runs on a schedule, anything that measures whether a suggestion worked, or any way to paste a whole generated bank into the dashboard in one go. The model call and the recurrence are your own agent's job, and the briefing only leaves the house when a human pastes it. That is a design position rather than a missing feature.
Smart home control, without the subscription Being built
Your gateway already sees every device in the house, and already keeps the smart-home ones fenced off from everything else. The next step is letting you drive them from the same dashboard:
- Lights off downstairs, from your phone, without a cloud account
- Electric blankets on an hour before bed, off at midnight
- Heating, plugs and switches on household schedules
- The same one-word controls that already pause the house
The point is not novelty. It is that none of this should require a monthly fee or an internet connection to a company that may not exist in three years.
Cameras you actually own Being built
This is the one parents ask about first, and it is the clearest example of the whole idea. The fencing part is done: a camera is already isolated so nothing outside your walls can reach it. What is being built is the watching and the keeping.
- Nobody outside your walls can see it. The camera is fenced into its own segment and cannot be reached from the internet, no matter what its manufacturer would prefer. This part works today
- You can still watch it from anywhere. Through your own private network link, not through somebody else's viewing service.
- The footage survives the camera. If a camera is stolen or smashed, what it recorded is already off the premises.
- No monthly fee to look at your own house.
Put a camera in a baby's room and know exactly who can see it, because the answer is you.
Free off-site backup for that footage Being built
Cloud object storage has quietly become close to free at household scale, and Cloudflare R2 in particular charges nothing to get your own data back out, which is the fee that usually bites. A household's camera footage fits comfortably in a free allowance.
The plan is to make this a checkbox: connect your own storage account, and the gateway handles the uploading, the retention and the pruning. Your account, your data, your bill, and your bill is likely zero.
A voice that answers to your house Designed, not built
An assistant on the kitchen bench that answers to your family rather than to a corporation: a wake word, speech to text on the box, a guess at who spoke, and a small set of phrases that map onto the same controls the phone already uses. No audio leaves the house, because there is no cloud endpoint in the design at all.
To be clear about the status: this is a written design and a container layout, and no code exists yet. The interesting parts are already decided and written down, including the trust model. A guess at who spoke is not authentication, a recording of a parent played back at the microphone would fool it, and the real control is that every voice-granted action is written to an audit log and pushed to a parent's phone within seconds, where one tap reverses it. The household bug bounty invites the kids to try beating it.
A list of hardware that cannot betray you Planned
The hardest part of any of this is not the software. It is standing in a shop trying to work out which camera is safe to bring into your house, when every box makes the same claims.
So the plan is a curated list of kit that has been tested behind a Genkan gateway and shown to work properly when it is denied the ability to phone home: cameras, sensors, plugs, switches, network adapters, and whole spare machines. Tested, written up honestly, including the ones that fail.
Genkan itself stays free and open source. No feature will ever sit behind a purchase. A recommendation you can ignore is the most this will ever be.
Guides, community and tutorials Planned
Written guides, walkthroughs, and eventually sessions where people set this up together. Being the only person in your street running your own network should not mean being alone with it.
Why say all this out loud before it exists? Because it changes what you are deciding today. Setting up a screen-time gateway is a small decision. Putting a machine in your house that gradually takes back your network, your cameras, your files and your family's attention is a rather larger one, and it is the one actually on offer.