LumaHouse — a household app two people run their lives on

LumaHouse is the smallest project here and the one with the most demanding users. The brief was a household that wanted to see the same up-to-date finances, the same grocery list, and the same calendar, without either person maintaining it.

Why not Notion

The first version was a shared Notion page. It worked, and it was ugly in exactly the ways that matter at 7am: too many clicks, the wrong things prominent, no control over how the finance page read. Building our own meant the grocery list is one tap, the finance page is laid out the way the household thinks about money, and nothing is there that does not earn its place.

The assistants do the maintenance

The interesting engineering is the API gateway. Each person has an AI assistant with its own key. Bank activity reaches LumaHouse only through the assistant, never directly. The assistants write the morning debrief, flag leave-time for meetings, build the monthly expense report from scanned receipts, and keep the “to talk through” list current so the two humans only have to read, not update.

What it shows

That a custom app for a very small number of users, built right, is now cheap enough to be the sensible choice. The same stack, the same approach, is what we use for a contractor’s client portal or field tool. The user count changes; the discipline does not.