Nestbound

Why we made it this way

Why we made it this way

Most families keep the important things in three places: a drawer, somebody’s head, and an email account nobody else can get into.

That works perfectly well, right up until the afternoon somebody else needs it. Nestbound is built for that afternoon. Everything below is a decision that came out of it, and what each one costs you.

  1. Nobody should have to go hunting

    The binder opens on a short list of what needs doing in the first two weeks and who to call about each of it. Everything after that says where things are, in plain sentences: which drawer the deed is in, which bank, who next door has the spare key, what the dog eats and who has agreed to take him.

    The catch You write it down once, in your own words. Nothing fills itself in, and the app won’t pretend it knows anything about your family that you haven’t told it.

  2. Nothing you write goes anywhere

    Not to us, and not to anybody else. Nestbound has no way to send anything at all, and your Mac is what makes sure of that. There’s no account to make, no sign-in, and nothing of yours sitting on a computer belonging to us.

    The catch There’s no copy of your file anywhere except the ones you make. Keep it somewhere you already back up, the way you’d with your photographs.

  3. It will never ask you for a password or a PIN

    There’s no box to type them into, and there never will be. Account and policy numbers it does keep, because a number saves your family an afternoon telling one account from another, and only the last four characters of one are ever printed.

    The catch The safe combination stays wherever you keep it now. This is a book that will sit on a shelf, and nothing that opens a lock belongs in it.

  4. You won’t still be paying for this in ten years

    You buy it once. Nothing renews, nothing lapses, and nothing quietly stops working because a card expired three years from now. Print the binder again every year for as long as you own the app, one section or the whole thing, and it costs nothing further.

    The catch There’s no free trial, because we would rather not take your card at all. Instead the entire example binder is on this site, every page of it, free to read before you decide anything.

  5. You end up with paper

    Not an app your family has to find and install, and not a website they have to sign in to during the worst week of their year. A printed book with tabbed sections, your family’s name on the cover, and photographs of your own papers reproduced at the back.

    The catch Paper does go out of date. When something changes you reprint the pages that changed and swap them in, which takes a few minutes once a year.

  6. If we disappear, your binder does not

    Everything lives in one ordinary file on your own Mac. We have published a full description of how that file is put together, so somebody who has never heard of us can still open it years from now. Companies that hold people’s plans do close, and the plans usually close with them. There’s nothing here to close.

    The catch The printed binder needs nothing from anyone. It’s paper on a shelf, and it will still be paper on a shelf whatever happens to us.

One thing we can’t do for you

You can put a passphrase on your file if you want to, and most people won’t need one. If you do, and you later forget it, that’s the end of it. There’s no reset and nobody here who can help, because a way in for us would be a way in for anybody. The app says so plainly before it will let you turn it on.

There are shorter answers to more questions, including how to make the writing bigger, on the questions page.

If you’d rather see the workings, there’s a longer version with the checkable details in it.