Every house runs on facts nobody has written down.
Who is cooking on Thursday. Whether there is still rice. Whose turn it is to do the floors, and whether anybody did them last week. What the children are meant to be practising. These things live in one person's head — usually the same person's — and in a group chat where they have scrolled out of sight by the evening.
That is the problem BenZai was built for. We built it because it was ours.
What a family uses instead
A group chat. Most households already keep the week here, and it is the wrong shape for it. A message is something that happens once and then falls away. By Friday, Tuesday's plan is four hundred messages up.
A shared note. Better, because it holds still — until it goes stale, because a note nobody is responsible for is a note nobody updates.
A calendar. It works, if everyone opens it. Most families do not. A calendar is a thing from work.
One person remembering everything. This is the real system in most houses. It is also the one that quietly wears somebody out, and it is the one BenZai is trying to replace.
What BenZai is
Seven rooms, and nothing in them a family would not recognise.
- Today — one screen that knows what is left of the day.
- Week — the plan, with whose turn it is to cook written on it.
- Chat — where the family talks, next to the things being talked about.
- Kitchen — what is missing from the cupboard, so nobody has to remember to check.
- House — the chores, and who they belong to.
- Us — the habits you are keeping, the money you are putting aside, thirteen games, and a shelf of lessons: French, a skill, ten minutes a day.
- Away — what the house needs to know when somebody is travelling.
It is one app. The point is not that it does seven things; it is that the seven things stop being in seven places.
It works where you actually are
It had to open on a slow connection and on a cheap phone, because that is the connection and the phone most families have.
Many of the people this was built for are in Africa. An app that only behaves itself on fast data is an app for somebody else.
So it opens on a bad network, and it opens on a phone that is three years old. Everything above depends on that one.
It speaks three languages, properly
English, French and Italian — completely, not a half-translated menu with English showing through underneath. A house where the grandmother reads French and the children answer in English is a normal house, and the app should not be the thing that makes that awkward.
How to get it
- Android — on Google Play now: BenZai
- Any browser — benzai.devitify.fr
- iPhone — with Apple, in review. It goes live the day they approve it.
It is free, and it works from the moment the first person joins.
The simplest way to start is the smallest one: put this week's dinners in, and let everybody see whose turn it is. That is usually the argument the house was having anyway.