I built a shared planner because our house needed one

It started with a house, two people, and too many lists

The honest origin story is that my partner and I could not keep track of our own life. A house that always wanted something doing. Pets with their own appointments and their own food. A garden that quietly accumulates jobs while you are not looking. Meals to decide on, a shop to do, and a running background hum of bills, dates and things somebody was definitely going to remember.

None of it was hard on its own. All of it together lived in one person's head at a time, and whoever was holding it that week was the only one who knew what was coming. That is a miserable way to run a household, and it has almost nothing to do with how organised either of you is.

So I went looking for the app. There were plenty that did one slice beautifully. A calendar that knew nothing about the shopping. A list app with no idea a date existed. Something for splitting money that had never heard of a garden. We ended up with four apps, three of which somebody had stopped opening, which is the same as having none.

So I built the one I wanted

Cria Planner starts from the plan rather than the task, because that is the shape our life actually had. A plan is a thing you can hand to someone: the house, the pets, the garden, next week's food, a trip. It carries its own events, tasks, notes, shopping list and costs, and everyone in it sees the same picture at the same time.

Every feature in the app can be traced back to something that annoyed us first. Reminders that fire on the other person's phone, because a shared event only one of you gets nudged about is just a diary. Shopping that comes out of the meal plan, because typing the list twice is how meal planning dies. Costs logged against the plan they belong to, because "who paid for the vet" should not be a conversation. Guests without accounts, because there is always one person who will not install anything.

Which means it has to actually work

This is the part I would want to know as a reader. I am not building this for a market I have read about. If sync is slow, I feel it on a Tuesday. If a reminder does not fire, we miss the thing. If the app is annoying to open, it stops getting opened here first, and then it stops being a planner and starts being another app somebody quit.

It is a small household, so it is not a substitute for real testing, and plenty of bugs have reached you before they reached me. But it does mean nothing ships that I would not put our own week into, and it means the boring things, launch speed, offline behaviour, whether the list is still there when the signal is not, get the attention they deserve rather than the attention they photograph well.

What it will not do

It will not track anyone's location. It will not gamify your chores or score how fairly you are splitting them. It will not send a push notification to tell you it misses you. There are no streaks to break. A planner that makes you feel watched is a planner you will delete in March.

Analytics are opt-in and never include what is inside your plans. Locked notes are encrypted behind your fingerprint or face and never sync to the web at all. The privacy policy spells out every single thing that leaves your device and why, in plain sentences rather than in the usual fog.

How the guides get written

The guides are not filler. When one of them makes a factual claim, it links the study it came from, and the link goes to the paper rather than to somebody's summary of the paper. That rule exists because the productivity internet is full of confident numbers with no parents. If you have ever read that habits take twenty-one days to form, you have met one.

Where I have an opinion rather than evidence, the guide says so. Where the honest answer is that a different app is better for your situation, it says that too. I would rather lose the download than write the other kind of page.

Who Alpaca Media is

Alpaca Media is the trading name behind Cria Planner. A cria, since it comes up, is a baby alpaca. The app is named after one because that is how it arrived: small, aimed at one household, growing up alongside it rather than turning up fully formed and demanding everyone reorganise around it. It is bigger now, and the rule has not changed.

Support goes to a real inbox, read by the person who wrote the code that annoyed you: support@criaplanner.com. Replies usually take a day or two, occasionally longer if something is on fire.