I built it for myself
I have two daughters, and every year something like ten thousand new photos pile up. So taking enough was never the problem. The problem was that a whole year would go by without my ever looking back at them.
On April 5, 2026, we went clam digging as a family. That day it hit me that I wasn’t keeping any of this — days like that one, or the way the kids were changing from one day to the next — in a form I’d ever actually look back at. It worried me, and that same night I started building a web version. That’s what eventually became the iPhone app.
our365 is what I built to fix that problem. I wrote about how it ended up as “one photo a day” in Why one photo a day. Here I want to write, as the person building it, about what came first and what I left for later.
Making it work for one person first
The first version of our365 works entirely on a single iPhone and your own iCloud. Your photos are never sent to our servers.
Sharing with family would need something in the middle that holds the photos and delivers them from one device to another. And it can’t just hold them for the moment they pass through — it has to keep storing them, for family members who join later. That’s a different design from the our365 of today.
When I started, what I felt had to come first was making the daily habit of choosing and saving one photo something you’d actually stick with. Choose, keep, look back. If those three don’t run smoothly for one person, adding sharing on top won’t give anyone more to share.
If I add sharing, I want the photos to reach your family without anyone outside it ever being able to see them. Building that properly takes time, so I decided to leave it out of the first version and come back to it later.
Not dropped — just later
I know people want to keep these memories together as a couple, and I want that too. On days when work runs late, my wife takes the photo on her own iPhone, sends it to me, and I post it.
But as I mentioned earlier, sharing means holding people’s photos. Holding photos means ongoing storage costs, so that part would most likely need a monthly fee.
Even then, I won’t turn anything you have today into a subscription later. Keeping one photo a day on your own stays a one-time purchase. Sharing would be added on top of that.
I didn’t drop sharing. It’s a question of order: I built the part you use on your own first. The our365 you can use today is that first step.
One payment, and you’re done
If all you want is to keep one photo a day of your first child, our365 is free. The only things we charge for are adding siblings and posting back to the day they were born. I drew the line at the features you come to want once the habit has taken hold.
Family PRO is a one-time purchase — you pay once, and that’s it. Because we don’t hold your photos, our running costs don’t pile up as more people use it. Why that makes a one-time price possible is covered in Tired of monthly photo apps? Pay once instead, and the pricing section on the home page has the current price for your region.
Every change to our365 still gets used in my own home first. I build what I’d want for my own family, try it at home first, and only then pass it on. That’s the order I plan to keep working in.
