I Built This App Because Nothing Else Worked for Our Family

Our son was born in mid-2025. Like every new parent, we were immediately drowning in questions: When was the last feed? How long did she sleep? Is that nappy colour normal?

We downloaded a baby tracker. Then another one. Then a third.

None of them worked for us. Here's why — and how that frustration became BabyLog.

The cross-platform problem

My partner uses an iPhone. I use Android. That's it — that's the whole problem.

You'd think in 2025 this wouldn't matter. But most baby trackers either work great on one platform and poorly on the other, or charge for cross-platform sync as a premium feature. Some require both parents to be on the same platform for real-time updates.

When you're handing the baby to your partner at 3am and asking "when was the last feed?", you need the answer immediately. Not after a sync delay. Not behind a paywall. Immediately.

We tried Feed Baby, Baby Daybook, BabyConnect, PiyoLog, Taili baby, Baby tracker and a few others. Each had something good, Feed Baby has been around for years and covers everything. But none of them nailed the basics: fast, free, cross-platform sync between caregivers.

What my partner saw that I didn't

My partner is a childcare educator. She works with babies and toddlers professionally. When she looked at the tracking apps we tried, she noticed things I completely missed.

"Why can't I see nappy colour options that actually match what I'm looking at?"

"Why does the sleep timer make me confirm three times before it starts?"

"Where do I log that she tried avocado for the first time and loved it?"

Her professional experience shaped what BabyLog tracks and how. The nappy colour options — tar, mustard, gold, orange, brown, frothy, green, olive, red, chalk, black — came from what she sees in real life, not from a medical textbook. The solids tracking with reaction logging (loved, liked, disliked, allergic) was her idea. The one-handed mode that shifts buttons to your thumb's natural reach? That came from watching me try to log a feed while holding a wriggling baby.

Having someone who works with babies every day as a co-designer meant we didn't build what we thought parents needed. We built what she already knew they needed.

Your data belongs to you

One thing that frustrated us about other apps was how they treated our baby's data.

Some apps won't let you export without a paid subscription. Some don't offer export at all. Some keep your data even after you delete your account. And most won't let you share your data with an AI assistant for personalised advice — because they'd rather sell you their own "insights" feature.

We decided early on that BabyLog would do things differently:

Export any time. Full CSV download for any baby, any time. No paywall. Every field included.
Import from other apps. If you're switching from another tracker, bring your data with you. Paste or upload a CSV and BabyLog maps it.
Share with any AI. One tap copies your baby's structured data to your clipboard and opens ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok. No API needed — just a clipboard.
Delete means delete. When you delete your account, everything goes. Your credentials, your baby profiles, all the logs. Gone.

Your baby's feeding and sleeping data is intimate. It shouldn't be a product someone else monetises.

Built in Australia

BabyLog is built in Australia, by an Australian family, for Australian parents (and anyone else who finds it useful).

That means the app uses Australian English by default — nappies, not diapers. Mum, not mom. Colour, not color. It's a small thing, but it matters when you're reading health-related information at 4am and you want it to feel familiar.

It also means we understand the local health system. When our docs reference resources, they point to RaisingChildren.net.au and the Australian Breastfeeding Association, not American paediatrics sites.

The multicultural family problem

Go to any mothers' group in Melbourne and count the families where a grandparent speaks Mandarin, Vietnamese, or Cantonese at home. It's a lot. When nai nai comes over to watch the baby, she's not just providing care — she's also the one who needs to log the 2pm feed and note that the nappy looked a bit off. But if the whole app is in English, she either can't use it or won't.

We built locale-aware invite links to solve this. When you invite a caregiver, you pick their language first — the link itself carries the locale. They click it, sign up, and BabyLog runs entirely in Chinese (or whichever language) from their first session. No settings to find, no language switcher to explain over the phone. The English-speaking parent keeps BabyLog in English; the Chinese-speaking grandma sees it in Chinese. Same baby, same data, each person's own language.

What we actually track

We use BabyLog every day. Here's what a typical day looks like for us:

Feeds: breast and bottle. Duration per side for breast, volume for bottle. The app estimates the next feed based on recent patterns — useful when you're trying to plan an outing.
Sleep: timer-based mostly, sometimes manual entry for naps we forgot to start the timer on. Seeing sleep patterns over time helped us spot the 4-month regression before we knew what it was.
Nappies: quick one-tap log with type and colour. Our child health nurse asked about nappy frequency at the last check-up — we pulled up the logs on the spot.
Solids: once we started introducing food, tracking reactions became essential. Knowing which foods went well and which didn't saved us from re-introducing things she clearly didn't enjoy.

My partner and I are both logged in. She adds a feed, I see it instantly. I log a nap, she knows the baby is sleeping. No texts, no sticky notes on the fridge.

This isn't a pitch

We built BabyLog because we needed it. Other families might find the same frustrations we did — cross-platform sync, data ownership, one-handed logging at 3am. If BabyLog helps with that, great.

If another app works better for your family, use that one. The important thing is that you're tracking, not which app you use. Parenting is hard enough without fighting your tools.

BabyLog is free to start, works on any device, and we're actively building it. All tracking and sharing is free — a Pro upgrade adds deeper insights for parents who want to dig into patterns. If you want to try it, it takes two minutes to set up. If you have feedback, we genuinely want to hear it — we're a family building this for families.