Family admin — it's a Doddle. Let Doddle carry your mental load.

Yes, one: the Doddle app. You get a welcome email with a setup link, and the app walks you through setting up in a chat with Doddle. On Android you install it from the link in the welcome email; on iPhone you add it from Safari to your home screen. Your partner gets their own invite link. WhatsApp is on the roadmap.

Because a family plan needs one place everyone can see, and a chat that only Doddle is part of. The app gives you today, the week, the month and your tasks, plus a chat with Doddle, and it works the same for both of you. If your family already uses Telegram, you can connect it from inside the app as another way to talk to Doddle, but it is never needed to get started.

No, and by design — WhatsApp doesn't let a service like Doddle join a group. You forward what matters from the group and only that reaches Doddle; it never sees the rest.

It reads what your school, nursery and clubs send, and turns it into dates, deadlines and jobs with a name against each. It writes those into a shared calendar you both already see, sends an evening message with what tomorrow needs, and a Sunday note on the week's childcare. And when a day has nobody down for it, it asks the group — and keeps asking until somebody answers.

It won't email your school, book a holiday club, pay for anything, or put something in your calendar without a yes from one of you. It isn't a to-do app you have to feed, and it isn't a safety net — please don't rely on it for the appointment that really matters without a glance. It handles the noticing and the asking. The doing is still yours.

You get your own address, something like yourname@doddlefamily.com, and you forward school mail to it, or set up forwarding once and forget it. There's no Doddle inbox: the message is passed straight through into your family's own database and nowhere else, so nobody's sitting on a mailbox full of everyone's school emails. Doddle never touches the rest of your inbox, only what you send it.

Everyone you invite to your household in the app, and that's the point — but it does mean the household is yours to look after. Anyone you add can see everything Doddle knows about your household and can tell it what to do, so it's worth a thought before adding a grandparent, a nanny, or an ex. You can remove someone from the household in the app's settings.

Yes, and we'd rather say so up front than let you find out later. Doddle is made by a family, not a company with a support desk — the person who runs it administers the servers your database sits on, so they can read it. They look when something's broken or you've asked for help, and not otherwise, but that's a promise rather than a lock on a door. It's all in our privacy notice, section 9, and it's the section we'd most like you to read.

Your household gets its own separate database — not a row in a big shared table, a different database — so no other family's Doddle can reach yours, by design rather than by policy. Children never use Doddle and it never messages them; everything it knows about yours came from you or your school. None of it is used to train any AI, ever, and one message deletes the lot.

Doddle uses AI language-model services from Anthropic and OpenAI to read and understand your messages, chosen on quality and cost; the current list is in the table in our privacy notice. Under their business terms your family's data is never used to train their models, and they keep what they've seen for at most 30 days. Nothing about your family becomes anyone's training data — not theirs, not ours.

In a Postgres database that belongs to your household, on Railway, our hosting provider, with nightly backups. Some of our providers are US companies, so some of it is handled outside the UK under the standard legal safeguards for that — the full list of who does what, and where, is a table in our privacy notice. We'd rather show you the table than say "securely stored" and hope you don't ask.

It will, sometimes — it's early, and school newsletters are not always models of clarity. Doddle proposes rather than acts, so a wrong date is a "no, Wednesday" in the chat, not a wrong entry in your calendar. Tell it once, like "swimming's off until half term", and it remembers. And when it isn't sure, it asks instead of guessing — which is why it occasionally asks you something obvious.

Use it for your actual family admin, tell us in the chat when it gets something wrong, and give us fifteen minutes of honest feedback at some point — a call or a voice note, whenever suits. That's the whole deal. Beta families are first in line for the early-bird price.

Nothing during the beta. No card, no trial that quietly becomes a subscription — when the beta ends we'll tell you, and you'd have to actively say yes. After that it's £5.99 a month for the first 50 families, then £9.99 a month for a household of two adults or £14.99 a month for three or more, with two months free if you pay for the year (£99 or £149). Every adult in the household is included, and you can cancel any time.

Any time, no notice, no reason needed. Say "delete everything" in the chat and we'll confirm it with the group first — we won't wipe a family's plan on one person's message — then delete your database and the calendar Doddle made, within 30 days. What's already in your own calendars and your own chat stays yours; that bit's in your hands, not ours.