What is Betts Board?

Betts Board is a family organizer that runs on your own server. One Docker container, one data volume. The calendar, chores, recipes, photos, and everything else live on hardware you control, and there are no subscriptions and no accounts with anyone else.

It is built for three screens at once: the tablet on the kitchen wall, the TV in the living room, and the phone in everyone's pocket. The same board, scaled to whatever is looking at it.

What it replaces#

• Shared cloud calendars, for the household's own events
• Chore and allowance apps, including the points and the leaderboard
• Recipe boxes and meal-planning services
• Shopping-list apps
• A digital photo frame
• Birthday and holiday wish lists scattered across other people's stores

What it does#

• Family calendar — month, week, day, and agenda views, color-coded per person, with recurring events (daily through yearly, plus custom rules) and proper "edit this / this and future / all" handling.
• Chores — assigned to family members, on recurring schedules, with points, streaks, and a leaderboard. View the week by day or by person.
• Rewards store — kids spend earned stars on rewards a parent defines. Balances and history are tracked for you.
• Recipes — paste a link and the recipe is parsed and saved locally, with ingredients, steps, and a photo. Rate it and note tweaks for next time.
• Meal planning — plan the week from your recipe box, assign who is cooking, and a prep block lands on their calendar ending at mealtime.
• Shopping lists — generated from the meal plan with quantity merging and aisle grouping, or cherry-picked from any planned meal.
• Pantry — track what you already have, scanning barcodes with a phone camera. Shopping generation skips what is in the pantry.
• Wish lists — per person, with links, rough prices, and a countdown.
• Photo slideshow — idle wall displays become a photo frame with the clock, the weather, and today's agenda.
• Calendar feeds — subscribe to school and sports iCal feeds, and subscribe your phone's calendar app to the family board.
• Weather — from Open-Meteo, no API key needed.
• Push notifications — event reminders and chore nudges. Needs HTTPS; see HTTPS.
• TV mode — a big-type dashboard and slideshow for any TV browser, scaled to the resolution the set reports, switching between light and dark at sunrise and sunset.
• Appearance and language — household-wide fonts and accent colors, set separately for light and dark mode. The board speaks English, Spanish, or French. Fonts and translations are served from your own server, so nothing is fetched from Google or a translation service and it all works offline.
• Money — accounts, transactions, budgets, bills, savings goals, and a cash-flow forecast, behind its own PIN and deliberately never shown on the dashboard, the wall display, or the shared calendar.
• Public API — a token-authenticated REST API for Home Assistant and scripts, with keys managed in Settings.

What it deliberately does not do#

• No hosted tier. There is nothing to sign up for. You run it or you don't.
• No accounts with anyone else. One shared household password, and a profile per family member. Profiles are not logins with passwords — switching profiles is a tap, which is right for a kitchen tablet and is why Money has a separate PIN.
• No telemetry. The app makes no outbound requests at page load. The only network calls it ever makes are ones you ask for: the weather forecast, recipe imports, calendar-feed refreshes, barcode lookups, and a one-time font download.
• No multi-tenancy. One installation serves one household.

What you need to run it#

Any machine that runs Docker and Docker Compose: a Linux box, a NAS, an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5. Inside the container it is one Node server and one SQLite database, so the requirements are modest and there is nothing else to provision — no separate database service, no cache, no queue.

You will also want to think about HTTPS before long. The board works fine over plain HTTP on your LAN, but push notifications, installing to a phone's home screen, and the camera barcode scanner all require a secure context.

Where to go next#

Install it — Install has the quick start, the setup wizard, and what first boot does.