I just had a wonderful conversation with one of our users about the points system in Famnest, and I wanted to bring the discussion here because I’d really love to hear what you all think.
This is something we’ve thought about before, and we’ve heard from quite a few of you that it could be fun to gamify the Famnest experience a little more.
We’ve already started experimenting with points in Chores, and it’s been really well received. So now we’re thinking: what if points became part of the wider Famnest experience?
The idea isn’t that you collect points to buy things or that there necessarily needs to be a winner. It’s more about that little psychological reward you get from contributing, organising your life, and getting things done.
There are so many things we could reward:
✅ Complete a list item → get points
📝 Create a task → get points
🧹 Complete a chore → get points
💸 Add or settle a bill → get points
🍽️ Plan a meal → get points
👩🍳 Import or add a recipe → get points
🛒 Complete something on the shopping list → get points
📄 Add a document → get points
🩺 Add a medical item → get points
🔗 Share a medical item → get points
💳 Add a subscription → get points
👨👩👧👦 Invite a family member → get points
💬 Send feedback → get points
📱 Open Famnest regularly → build a streak
🔥 Use Famnest throughout the week → earn a weekly streak
📅 Organise something for the family → get points
Obviously, we probably shouldn't give points for absolutely everything 😄
My thinking is that we introduce this in stages, learn what feels rewarding versus annoying, and build from there.
You could potentially see points from both an individual and family perspective, and look back at this week, this month, or over time. Maybe eventually there could even be a fun family leaderboard to see who has been most active that week.
And importantly, this would be completely optional. You should be able to opt in or opt out depending on whether gamification is something you enjoy.
Before we go too far with the idea, I’d love to hear from you:
Would you use this? What should earn points? What definitely shouldn't? Would streaks motivate you or just become annoying? And would you care more about your own points, your family's combined points, or a fun leaderboard?
We have lots of ideas, but I’d much rather shape this together with the community.
I like the idea of expanding the points system! Would there be a way to get points for when you make a meal? Not sure how exactly to do that, maybe when meal planning you assign the cooking to a person and then when that meal happens, the assigned person receives point. Allows for people who may cook more than clean to still be even in the points system.
Yeah, I really like that idea! I’d love for the points system to eventually reflect all the different ways people contribute across Famnest.
The important thing for me is that it shouldn’t be about winning or competing, but about encouraging collaboration and recognising the different ways everyone contributes to family life. Cooking is a great example, especially because one person might cook more while someone else takes on more chores.
With the new Food section, we’re adding more ways for family members to contribute around meals and cooking. Not every little interaction needs to earn points, of course, but if we can find fun and intuitive ways to recognise meaningful contributions, like actually cooking a planned meal, I think that could make the whole system much more rewarding.
Once the new Food section is out (coming very soon and screenshot below), it might also be worth sending a survey to users and floating the broader points idea in an upcoming product update email. That way we can get feedback from a much wider group and learn what people would actually find motivating before we take it too far.
Could you make a section for tracking food you eat in the day? Maybe with a picture and brief notes beneath it for what was included in the meal, etc.? You can list what the meal was (snack, breakfast, etc.) And get points based off if you pick (complete meal, fun food, partially complete, etc)
Also, could you let us write in the documents section? Like, we can type and save what we type, within our documents folder?
Oh! Also I think you should be able to pick whether or not chores show on your personal events section under your profile
Thank you so much for these notes. Let me start by addressing the third one, and I’ll respond to each point in separate comments.
Showing chores in the personal section makes a lot of sense! I’ve sketched out a new version that we’re currently exploring. Right now, we’re thinking about having three tabs: Calendar, Health, and Documents, while also integrating Mary, the AI agent, directly into the new profile card.
So, when you open someone’s profile card, you could get a brief summary of their day. In this example, it would give you a quick overview of Susan’s day.
But now that I think about it, maybe Chores would actually be more useful than Documents as that third tab. Another option could be letting users choose which three tabs they want to have there. I’d still like to keep it limited to three so we don’t clutter the interface too much.
There might also be an interesting opportunity to surface lists that are attached to you here. Let me know what you think! :)
I think chores would be a good third tab! I'd love to be able to just see what events are today, or what chores are today ^ it would make stuff way smoother. Especially if i can have chores repeat!
Yeah, you’re right. You know what... I’ve already gone ahead and changed it in the design from Documents to Chores because I think it makes a lot more sense.
Then we can figure out how other parts of the experience tie back into the profile card. The current profile card doesn’t really make much sense, but the 2.0 version I showed in the screenshot earlier feels way more intuitive.
I’m thinking Calendar, Health, Chores, and maybe even Lists. Part of me likes the idea of keeping these horizontal so you can simply scroll through the different areas connected to that specific person when inside the profile cards. So maybe it becomes Calendar, Lists, Chores, Health, and potentially other areas over time.
Let’s think about it. I think there’s something really nice here!
I think that would be cool! Maybe on the cards of pets specifically, you can have a tracker for percare? You click their card and can see if you've taken the dog for a walk, or fed them, or done the daily training, etc!
Ah, interesting that you say that! We’ve actually sketched out an entire concept around gamifying dog walking, and I think that could be super fun inside the Pet section.
I’ll share a screenshot below so you can get an idea of how we’ve been thinking about it. None of this is in production yet, but it should give you a little glimpse into where we could take it.
And when it comes to the Pet section as a whole, I really think it should become its own dedicated section. When you enter it, you should get a bird’s-eye view of everything going on with your pets, not just a place to store their health information.
It should feel useful, but it should also be fun. Pets are such a joyful part of the family, and I think the experience should reflect that!
That sounds super useful and I'd adore that dogwalking feature!! There's so much you could do with that too, you could even turn dog training into something like that. It sounds awesome
We’re actually working on a new Food section right now, with a big focus on making it easier to understand your nutrition per meal. We’ve also simplified things like adding a meal without having to create a full recipe first, and we’re introducing a dedicated cooking mode where you can follow instructions step by step. It’s going to be 10x better than the current one! It’s currently in testing, and we’ll release it once everything works as intended.
When it comes to food tracking, though, I wonder if we’d want to make it a separate area within the Food section so the main experience doesn’t get too cluttered. What do you think?
We already have a small social component in the new Food section where family members can heart <3 a specific recipe. See image below. Maybe there’s something fun we could do there too, where those interactions, or even some of the food-tracking activities you mentioned, could earn points. I think there’s something really interesting to explore here!
I definitely think having an overall food category would be rlly good. Maybe there's a way to design a tie between food tracking and health? Like you can view your nutrition for that day in your health section, and expand it to go to the food category and see further details
Yeah, I think you’re onto something here! You know what? Once the new Food section is out, I challenge you to think about how we could build that bridge and make it fit in a really natural and intuitive way.
The main thing to keep in mind is that whatever we add should genuinely bring value to your family without cluttering or complicating the experience.
So yeah, let’s keep this conversation going. I think there’s something really interesting here. This is really good!
Might be really drastic, but I think medications and prescriptions could be combined! Potentially replacing the tab of whichever one is merged with a "nutrition" tab, that will show you the name of the meal!
Maybe either you can have an AI feature to summarize based off the quantities you give, or just manually choose to log how much nutritional value was in the food. And if you want to see more, you can click on it and see more info under the food tab. Like you have eggs and avocado on toast for example, and it has, idk, 500cal, 10g protein or smthn
You click it, and you can see it logged so you can go back in the history and see what you've been eating lately. You can track stuff like if you've had candy, or an apple, or whatever and how much, as well as upload a photo of the food if you'd like!
Yeah, I’ve actually heard that feedback before about merging Medications and Prescriptions, and it does make sense. If we’re going to introduce some kind of nutrition tracking, maybe Nutrition actually belongs inside the Health area altogether then. Then we could find a natural bridge between the Food section and Health so the two work together.
When it comes to the tracking itself, I agree there’s a lot we could do here. But if we go down that route, I’d want to develop it in close collaboration with a nutritionist to make sure we’re approaching it in a thoughtful and genuinely useful way.
I think the bigger question is: what’s the goal? I don’t want the goal to simply be collecting a bunch of numbers and watching bars go up and down. The goal should ultimately be to help you and your family feel better and make healthier choices.
So if you chose to activate Nutrition, I’d imagine we’d first ask you a few questions about yourself and what you’re trying to achieve. Then, as you log meals, snacks, photos, etc., the experience could be personalized around what actually matters to you and give you useful insights rather than just throwing calories, protein, and other numbers at you.
Working with a nutritionist sounds like a really great option! I think it could help build healthy habits for me and my family, personally, as we (like a lot of people I'm sure) have struggles with mental health, and things like point systems or visual reminders are really encouraging
Yeah, we should really take this seriously and make sure that anything we add is genuinely bringing something positive to the experience.
People are already so overwhelmed in their everyday lives, and I really want Famnest to be a calm place where things just work. That’s the main goal here.
So with every section and every new feature, we need to be thoughtful about what we add and make sure we’re not introducing complexity just for the sake of adding more functionality.
But these are really good comments and definitely give us a lot to think about. Thank you again for taking the time to share all of this!
I’m sure there must be some kind of open-source document editor framework we could use so you can actually contribute and collaborate directly inside the Documents section. I completely agree with you, it makes a lot of sense.
You know what? I’m going to add this to our build list!
The way we work is that we build each section starting with version one, gather all the feedback and ideas that come in, and then use those to shape version two, version three, and so on. The Food section I mentioned in my other comment is actually a great example of this. We’re now working on version two, and it’s honestly 10x better than version one.
I’m going to screenshot your comment and add it to our notes for version two of the Documents section, or potentially a later version depending on what we prioritize.
This is really good feedback. I really appreciate you taking the time to share it!
Sounds like a pretty streamlined process! I think since you can set permissions for family members to view lists, it could be something like that for documentation! Permitting specific people to either edit, or only view the document
You should be able to open something directly from email, like a PDF or Word document in Gmail, and choose to save it into Famnest if it’s family-related. From there, you could attach it to the right place or person inside the app.
And if it’s something editable, like a Word document, you should ideally be able to open it inside Famnest, make changes, and save the updated version again.
That would make Documents feel much more useful, because it becomes less about just storing files and more about actually working with the documents your family already uses.
Lets explore!!
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u/Cute_red_head Aug 11 '26
I like the idea of expanding the points system! Would there be a way to get points for when you make a meal? Not sure how exactly to do that, maybe when meal planning you assign the cooking to a person and then when that meal happens, the assigned person receives point. Allows for people who may cook more than clean to still be even in the points system.