Two families, one calendar — how Bonus Family works in FamilyBoard

Roughly a third of kids in Sweden live in two homes. That means a Wednesday soccer practice often needs to land in four adults' calendars — mom, dad, plus any new partners. The Friday-night question isn't "how was your week?" but "who's picking up Olle on Sunday?".

Today we're shipping Bonus Family in FamilyBoard. You can link your family with another family's calendar and share events one at a time — without giving up control of your own week.

What it solves

Before Bonus Family there were two bad paths for blended families:

1. Share the whole calendar via iCloud or Google. Everything lands in one place, zero privacy, and a private work shift or surprise birthday party leaks across.
2. Send screenshots in the group chat. Works for two weeks, then someone forgets to update.

Bonus Family is a third path: two separate FamilyBoard families get linked, and events you've flagged as shared show up in both calendars. Everything else stays private.

How it works

1. Family A's admin opens Settings → Bonus Family → "Create invite". You get a link that's valid for 7 days.
2. Send the link to the other family's admin via SMS, iMessage or email.
3. Family B's admin clicks the link, signs into their FamilyBoard account and accepts. Done — you're linked.
4. When you create an event you'll now see a checkbox: "Visible to bonus family". It's off by default — you decide per event what to share.

Write rights are never shared. The bonus family can read your flagged events but not edit or delete them. Whoever owns the calendar still owns it.

What to share — and what not to share

We've seen three patterns work well:

Anything child-related → share. Pickups, soccer, dentist, parent-teacher meetings, sick visits. The other home needs to know to plan around it.

Family trips and holidays → share. Summer cabin in week 28, grandma's birthday, Christmas break. Otherwise the kid gets double-booked.

Adult life and new partners' schedules → don't share. Your Saturday date, your partner's night shift, your own gym session. That isn't the bonus family's business.

The security side

Bonus Family is built on Postgres Row Level Security. When Family B reads an event from Family A's calendar, the query goes through an explicit policy that verifies:

1. The families are linked and the link is accepted
2. The event has is_visible_to_linked = true
3. The user is an active member of one of the families

If any step fails, Family B gets nothing — not even a notification that the event exists. Combined with the fact that the SECURITY DEFINER RPCs linked_families_create_invite and linked_families_accept_token are the only ways to change link state, you get a surface that's hard to leak.

Try it

Bonus Family is in the latest iOS app (update via TestFlight) and on familyboard.io. Hit Settings → Bonus Family and you're up in 30 seconds.

This is our most important release of the year. We've been listening to co-parenting families for six months before building this — and we think it's the first genuinely smart solution to the "shared custody" calendar.