GaleFranco Labs · Venture
Early accessGather
Gather your pieces, we’ll sort them out.
Where everything your family does (and everything you say about it) stays together.
The scattered family
Your family’s life is spread across seven apps that don’t talk to each other.
The calendar is in one place. The grocery list is in another. The chore assignments are in a group text that scrolled past two days ago. The conversation about whether to switch the kids’ school is in a thread your partner can’t find. The photos from last weekend are in iCloud, but the story about why everyone was laughing is gone. It was in a text message that nobody will ever scroll back to.
None of these tools are broken individually. They’re broken as a system. Each one holds a piece of your family’s life, and none of them hold the connections between the pieces.
The result is a quiet, slow loss. Not a crisis — just a steady erosion of shared context. The meal plan exists, but the conversation about why you chose it doesn’t. The family goal exists, but the history of how you worked toward it is scattered across platforms. The decision got made, but the reasoning is already gone.
It’s the same forgetting problem that plagues enterprise procurement and systems design, except this time the system is your family. And the stakes, honestly, are higher.
One table for everything
Gather is a family management platform that puts everything at one table, and keeps the conversations attached to the things they’re about. Inside the house, things are named by where they are.
On the calendar.
One calendar, finally. Paste a calendar link from Google, iCloud, or Outlook and Gather pulls everyone’s week into one place: practices, appointments, camps, the lot. It reads your calendars rather than replacing them, so nothing has to move. The invite on the fridge gets on too: snap a photo or paste its words, and the event lands with who’s going and the follow-ups.
In the kitchen.
Tonight, this week, and what’s on the table. Meal ideas start up in the air, the family votes on what sounds good, and the winners land on the menu with the grocery list already started.
On the board.
Jobs kids can take on with one tap. A job done is a small ceremony, and the points are real.
In the jar.
Points become allowance, split across Give, Save, and Spend jars the kids manage themselves. Families choose G Coins, which are real dollars, or G Points, which never touch cash. Parents can match a savings goal if they like.
At the table.
The Table is the room where pieces wait to be sorted: what’s waiting on you, what anyone can pick up, oldest first, each with its own verb right there. Notes and @mentions stay attached to the thing they’re about, so the discussion that shaped a decision is still there when you open it.
On the wall.
The family calendar as an ambient display for any screen in the house: the tablet on the counter, the TV in the living room, the laptop in the drawer. Pinch to dive from the month to the day to the hour. Shared and hand-me-down devices are a first-class idea: switch personas at the door, with a PIN for the grown-up parts.
Tomorrow, at a glance.
Every evening, each family member gets a brief: tomorrow’s schedule, what’s for dinner, and what’s theirs to do. The day starts sorted before it starts.
A look inside
One calendar, finally: Google, iCloud, and Outlook links merged into the family’s week.
The evening brief, as it arrives by email.
In the jar: Give, Save, and Spend, managed by the kid who earned it.
The same brief, in the app. Real markup, not a screenshot.
The house lexicon
Gather names things by where they are in the house, not by what the software is doing. Kids get the same words, just fewer of them.
- up in the air
- a meal idea nobody has decided on yet
- on the table
- an idea the family is weighing
- on the menu
- decided; it’s dinner this week
- on the board
- a job waiting for someone to take it
- in the jar
- allowance, earned and sorted
- on the wall
- the calendar, shown big for the whole house
- at the table
- the pieces waiting to be sorted, and the family conversation about them
How it’s supposed to feel
Most family apps feel like productivity tools that someone reskinned with rounded corners and pastel colors. Gather is designed differently, on purpose.
Using Gather should feel warm: the kind of warmth you associate with a well-set dinner table, not a corporate wellness app. It should feel sturdy: the steady, quiet competence of a tool that’s going to be there next year, and the year after that. It should feel modern: a high-quality artifact, not a hand-me-down from 2015.
We want families to feel comfort, ease, and hope when they use Gather. We want planning to feel like an act of care, not a chore. We want shared memories to feel celebrated, not archived.
The design language is elegant minimalist: generous whitespace, considered typography, no visual noise. The interactions are responsive and tactile. The gamification is playful without being childish. The assistant is helpful without being intrusive.
And above all, Gather is built to meet families where they already are. It integrates with iCloud, Google Calendar, and the platforms your family already uses. We don’t ask you to move your digital life — we ask you to bring it to one table.
Simple, honest pricing
Start free. Upgrade when your family outgrows it.
Free
$0forever
- Up to 4 family members
- Calendar, tasks & chores
- Meal planning & grocery lists
- Email support
Gather Plus
$9.99per month, or $79/yr
- Unlimited family members
- Family Bank & allowance
- Evening brief for everyone
- Unlimited assistant & insights
Plus includes an AI assistant that works quietly in the background and stays out of the way. 14-day trial, cancel anytime.
Where we are
Gather is live and in early access at gather.guru, with real families setting their tables every evening. It runs on any screen in the house with a browser, the phone in your pocket or the TV in the living room, no app store required, and the free tier covers up to four family members. Gather Plus opens up unlimited members, the Family Bank, and the evening brief for everyone, with a 14-day trial.
October brought more of the house: the List and the Pantry, Gather it for the invite on the fridge, who’s going on every event, a search box that knows where everything is sitting, and the Table, where pieces wait to be sorted. Next is the lunchbox, and the founding families who open early access. Underneath all of it, the steady work of turning a capable early product into one families rely on without thinking about it.
If you’re setting up your family’s table, or you’re building in the family-tech space and want to compare notes, I’d welcome a conversation.
Start free → gather.guruSee the live demobrian@galefranco.com
Gather exists because the most important context any of us carry is the context of our own family life. If a family’s decisions get detached from the reasons they were made, you don’t just lose data. You lose the quiet accumulation of shared sense-making that tells a family’s story.