Family documents — school PDFs, insurance papers and the lease in one place

The insurance paper for Olle's glasses is in Mia's inbox. The lease is in Files on dad's iPad. The school trip permission slip came as a link via the school portal that nobody saved. When you need them, they're never where you look first.

Today we're shipping Family documents in FamilyBoard for web. A single shared folder for the family's most important papers — visible to everyone, stored safely.

What it is

Go to /app/documents. You'll see a list of every document the family has saved. Drag a file in — PDF, image, Word, whatever, up to 25 MB per file — and it's up within a few seconds. Every family member sees it immediately.

You can link a document to an event. The permission slip for May's school trip? Upload it, open the event "School trip — Tycho Brahe museum", tap Attach document. The next time someone in the family opens the event, the slip is one tap away. No searching.

Why we built it

We talked to 30 parents about "where do you keep family papers?". The answer was the same broken list everywhere:

• Email archive, unfindable without the exact subject line
• iCloud Drive, but only on one parent's account
• A Drive folder that nobody updates
• A physical binder in a kitchen drawer
• "I think Mia has it"

The real cost isn't the files — it's the cognitive load. When you're heading to a dentist appointment and trying to remember the insurance number, the searching itself isn't the hard part. The hard part is not knowing whether it's saved anywhere at all.

Family documents is one definite place. When you or your partner upload something it stays there until someone deliberately removes it. You don't have to remember who was meant to save it — it's enough that one of you did.

The security side

We store files in a private Supabase Storage bucket called family-documents. The path layout is <family_id>/<doc_id>.<ext> — always prefixed with the family's UUID. That means the RLS policy on the storage bucket is a straight prefix check: are you a member of this family? Then you can read files that start with its UUID. Otherwise no.

On the metadata table public.documents we mirror the same policy. Both surfaces have to say yes for a file to come back — so if a bug ever sneaks past one side, the other side catches it.

For reads we generate signed URLs with a 5-minute TTL. So even if someone forwards a link, it stops working almost immediately. There are no public links at all.

Trade-offs we made on purpose

25 MB per file in v1. Most family documents are 1–3 MB PDFs. If you've got a 200 MB video of Olle's tenth birthday — it doesn't belong here, it belongs in Photos.

No folder hierarchy yet. A flat list plus search plus labels (school, healthcare, insurance, lease, other) gets you a long way. When families start telling us they can't find things, we'll build folders.

No versioning yet. Upload a new version of the same file and it replaces the old one. We think a single current insurance paper is what you want — not three versions to compare between.

Web first, iOS later. File upload is still a little clunkier on iOS than on a laptop, and we don't want to ship a half-version. The iOS port arrives this summer.

Try it

Sign into familyboard.io and head to Documents in the sidebar. Drag in the first PDF you've grown tired of hunting for. Tag it. Next time it's needed it's one search away — for you and for everyone in the family.

This is an unglamorous feature. We know. But it's the kind of feature that makes you wonder, six months later, how you lived without it.