It started as a spreadsheet

Why this exists

For years I kept our kids' best lines in a spreadsheet. It worked, barely. My wife couldn't add to it without a whole production, and half the good stuff evaporated before I got to a laptop.

The surprise came when I read the old ones out loud. The kids didn't just want to hear them. They wanted to guess who said what! A spreadsheet had accidentally become a game.

So I built the thing the spreadsheet was pretending to be: a place to write a quote down in ten seconds, find it years later, and know who actually said it.

Google Sheets titled Family Quote Board listing family quotes with dates, such as “Don't start until I go poo!” and “Only fancy people ask for spicy sauce.”
Founder of Family Quote Board in safety goggles with a dust mask around his neck, holding a drill amid DIY tools

Built by a dad who loves being a dad

Who made this?

Family Quote Board is made by Flat & Square. It started with one dad, four kids, and an endless supply of material in Colorado Springs. No growth team, no investors. Just a family app that turned out to be worth sharing.

Free forever

How is it free?

Because it costs very little to run. Quotes are text, so your family's entire archive is smaller than a single photo on your phone. There's no office, no team, no salaries, and no investors waiting on a return. And I built this for my own family first, so it exists whether or not anyone else ever installs it.

That leaves a small server bill, and a handful of optional paid extras cover it. A fraction of people choosing those is enough to keep the lights on for everyone else. Adding quotes, searching, sharing, and guessing stay free either way, because charging for the core of it was never the point.

No ads, ever

Why no ads?

This is a private archive of your children's funniest and sweetest moments. Selling space next to it felt gross. Ads would also mean tracking, and tracking would mean your family becoming somebody's product. Hard pass. You're not the product here. You're just a person with a hilarious kid.

Your quotes belong to you

What about my data?

  • Private to your family. Only the accounts you invite can see them.
  • Download everything you've written, anytime, in a format you can keep.
  • Delete your account whenever you want, and it's actually deleted.
  • Never sold, never shared with advertisers, never used to train anything.

I might get tired of building this

What if it shuts down someday?

Maybe I will. Most side projects die of boredom eventually, and pretending otherwise would be silly. But here's what makes this one different for me: my own family's quotes are in it, and four kids are still generating more. Walking away means abandoning my own archive, and I'm not planning on doing that.

If it ever did come to that, you'd get plenty of warning and a final chance to take every quote with you. Nobody wakes up to an empty app.

Family Quote Board logo: a family tree made of speech balloons

A family tree that won't stop talking

About the logo

It's a family tree, except the branches are speech balloons. One trunk, a lot of voices growing off it, each in a different color, the same colors the app uses to tell your family members apart.

Which is the whole idea in one mark: a family is a group of people who never stop talking, and the talking is worth keeping.

Say hello

Questions?

Most answers live on the FAQ. Still stuck? Email hello@familyquoteboard.com and I read every message. Usually while being interrupted by a child saying something worth writing down.